In an informal 1981 off-the-record interview, Republican strategist Lee Atwater laid out his view of “the Southern Strategy” as he implemented it in the presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan. He said the way for Republicans to win votes in the traditionally Democratic South was to appeal to racist sentiments without being overtly racist—by talking about economics and national defense. He said that voters, through “a fairly slow but very steady process, will go Republican.”
That Southern Strategy, often spoken of in relation to the 1968 election of Richard Nixon, was in fact a long, calculated effort to totally transform American politics. In their new book, The Long Southern Strategy, scholars Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields present a deeply researched, critical analysis of that strategy.
They note that the Southern Strategy was undertaken on multiple fronts—from race to religion to women’s rights. They write that “Absent an understanding of the role of Southern white sexism in this realignment, racism and religiosity read as two chapters of separate books. They were and are an ensemble cast in the same story.”
For Maxwell and Shields, the story actually begins in the 1940s, when the Democratic Party began to move away from support for Jim Crow. In 1948, South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond broke from the Democratic Party and ran as a segregationist third-party “Dixiecrat” candidate for President, famously proclaiming, “There’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation.” (Thurmond became a Republican in 1964 and served in the U.S. Senate until 2003, the year of his death at age 100.)
In her 1949 book, Killers of the Dream, Southern writer and activist Lillian Smith described a “grand bargain” that, as Maxwell and Shields explain, sustained “white supremacy, buttressed by paternalism and evangelicalism, whereby the Southern white masses relinquished political power to the few in exchange for maintaining their social status as better than the black man.”
It was this grand bargain that Republicans would exploit to gain power in a South that had been the exclusive purview of the Democrats since Reconstruction. “When that power was threatened by the civil rights revolutions,” Maxwell and Shields say, Southern politicians “struck another grand bargain—this time with the Grand Old Party—the terms of which have yet to expire.”
Maxwell and Shields stress that the GOP’s success was not only due to its positions on issues like civil rights and the Equal Rights Amendment: “It was also the way they did it, selling those positions with a Southern accent, so to speak.”
In a series of chapters filled with data and charts, the authors painstakingly present the roles of racism, sexism, and religious fundamentalism as levers that were exploited to shift the power base, from Barry Goldwater’s 1964 “Operation Dixie,” to Phyllis Schlafly’s anti-ERA “Pro-Family Rally” in 1977, to the rise of the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority, ultimately sowing the seeds for the election of Donald Trump.
Importantly, the proponents of the Long Southern Strategy “needed to politicize not just the hearts and minds or even pocket books of white Southerners, but also their souls.” This involved creating a series of myths that obscure our ability to see the larger context and implications of this shift.
Over time, the Republican Party became the party of the South, “not in terms of place, but in its vision, in its demands, in its rhetoric, and in its spirit. And that has changed American politics.” This book provides an important way to understand that change.