The Sunbelt Synthesis: New Histories of the American Conservative Ascendancy

January/February 2008 · Historically Speaking 35 The Sunbelt Synthesis: New Histories of the American Conservative Ascendancy Alex Lichtenstein Forty years ago, in the midst of his work as a special assistant to Richard Nixon's presidential campaign, Kevin Phillips collected data on regional voting patterns in order to document what he dubbed "the emerging Republican majority." In addition to coining the clever neologism "Sunbelt," Phillips has ever since been lauded for his extraordinary powers of prognostication. Published shortiy after Nixon's electoral triumph, Phillips's The Emerging RepublicanMajority accurately predicted a massive political shift that would bring the rapidly growing states of the southwest into Republican alignment with both the former bastions of the "Solid South" in the old plantation belt and disillusioned ethnic stalwarts of the Democratic Party in the nation's declining urban areas. A potent synergy of continental demography, suburbanization, and racial reaction , Phillips foresaw, would write the epitaph for the New Deal coalition that had dominated the nation's politics for the previous three decades. The Emerging Republican Majority remains widely regarded as the bible of the Republican Party's "southern strategy," designed to capitalize on reaction against the civil rights gains of the 1960s. At the time, however, Phillips took care to insist that the book reflected his own diagnosis of changing political patterns, radier than any coherent strategy on the part of Nixon or the GOP. Indeed, judging from a slew of recent new books that document the rise of a new kind of conservative political coalition after the 1960s, Phillips should not be hailed as some kind of Nostradamus. To the contrary , as the best of these new books suggest, many of the social and political upheavals that drove this process forward were in place long before the fateful year of 1968. While Phillips certainly advanced a multivariate analysis, it is hard to deny that white racial anxieties lay at the center of the dynamic he described. The "sons and daughters of northern immigrants," he claimed, were reacting to "Negro political influence" that had advanced "social legislation and programs" they considered "anathema." Middle-class whites relocating to the suburbs, whether in Detroit or Atlanta , sought to escape the growing racial polarization of the inner city. And without question, Deep South realignment closely tracked the enfranchisement of African Americans. George Wallace's campaign in particular served as a "waystation" for southern white Democrats who, Phillips predicted, would shordy make their way into Republican ranks. Indeed, twice in the pages of TheEmergingRepublican Majority, Phillips abandoned dispassionate analysis in favor of strategic assessment with this arresting assertion : "Maintenance of Negro voting rights in Dixie, far from being contrary to GOP interests, is essential if southern conservatives are to be pressured into switching to the Republican Party."' Latching on to this line of thought, historians charting the development of modern conservatism have emphasized—and usually decried—the infamous race-baiting "southern strategy" supposedly deployed by Nixon, Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and the Bushes to capture white voters defecting from the Democratic Party. Dan T. Carter's pathography of George Wallace, The Politics of Rage, remains the most powerful exposition of this school of thought. Railing against busing, welfare, crime, and affirmative action allowed Wallace to abandon outright the language of white supremacywhile continuing to appeal to its erstwhile supporters, North and South alike. "For the old age southern cry of 'Nigger, Nigger ,'" Carter argued, Wallace "substituted . . . the rights to private property, community control, neighborhood schools, union seniority." Nevertheless, Carter insisted, racial animosity remained the dross converted to political gold by this "alchemist of modern social conservatism." In a series of lectures accompanying the biography, Carter used the figure of Wallace to trace "the path bywhich the politics of racial conservatism broadened into a general program of resistance to the changes sweeping American society." In doing so, he insisted that "even though the streams of racial and economic conservatism have sometimes flowed in separate channels, they have ultimately joined in the political coalition that reshaped American politics" after 1968. The distinction between Wallace and the new conservatism, Carter bluntiy concluded, should be considered "more a matter of style than substance."Notwithstanding the obvious appeal of this analysis to liberal...