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to confirm his assumption and finds that most leave out the qualifying component of Key’s assertions about race. Key posits at the beginning of Southern Politics that “politics is the South’s number one problem.” At the end of the book, Key asserts that “the race issue broadly defined thus must be considered as the number one problem on the southern agenda. Lacking a solution for it, all else fails.” Stanley then must ask whether politics or race is the number one problem in the South. He explains that the fix for the race problem is political, and this solution is the competitive two-party system coming to the South. Key saw race as distracting the populace from the real issues. Prospects for this future were hampered by one-party politics and race, dividing the less fortunate. Racial populists were able to convince people that racial concerns trumped genuine issues. Stanley explains that Key “thought a class-based, competitive two-party politics could democratize the South, giving it a politics capable of coping with the region’s problems”; but this was hampered by a number of factors (mainly race). The Essays: The Post-Key South The leading chapter in part 3 describes how Key underrepresented the significance of race. Dan Carter explains that Key neglected gender, religion, and African Americans (except victimizing) in his analysis. Some of this can be understood because of the time in which Key lived and unforeseeable future events, but with the role of race playing such a crucial role in the development of a southern politics, why were African Americans not sufficiently included in his study? The role of race loomed large in the South during Key’s time, and Carter attempts to describe how Key’s analysis could and should have emphasized the role of African Americans in southern development. Conservative intellectuals have tended to de-emphasize the role of race in southern politics over recent decades, but liberal voices have shown that race was a key factor in the southern political framework. Carter explains how race played a role in the rise of Republicans in the South. Though some scholars claim that this development stems from white suburbanites’ economic concerns, demagogic racial rhetoric brought many of them to the Republican Party through coded racial language. Much of this rhetoric attempted to use the language of economics to disguise racial appeals, illustrating how these two concepts cannot be considered separately. Carter goes on to explain the holes in the argument for economics playing the key role in southern development. He sharply criticizes Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston for making claims “at such variance with conventional 214 ■ Wayne Parent wisdom.” Shafer and Johnston posit that white southerners’ concerns about race remained secondary in their decisions to become Republicans, which Carter believes is a false claim. They make claims about suburban whites’ voting based on economic concerns, but they fail to address that these suburbs largely came about because of racial concerns. Carter also touches on Matthew Lassiter’s work, which claims that after the racial antagonism of the 1960s and 1970s, white suburbanites tended to “look like” the rest of the nation in their political preferences. This group of scholars tends to believe that race is overemphasized and economics is de-emphasized in the development of a white southern party realignment. Because race is overemphasized, these scholars tend to think that the South may not continue to be exceptional and, therefore, may be more like the rest of the nation. Though some scholars argue that the South has lost some distinctiveness, Carter claims the South continues to remain exceptional. Immediately after Carter criticizes Shafer and Johnston’s argument, they defend it in chapter 8. Their central contention is that economic development is key to the development of a southern politics since Key’s time. Shafer and Johnston contend that there are two central features that Key posits develop over time. Legal desegregation and economic development are the forces that would solve the problems of the South. In clear contrast with Carter, they further suggest that race and economics should be separated in order to study a southern politics. The other assertion made by the authors is that religion has played a crucial role in shaping southern politics since Key’s time. In contrast with Charles Reagan Wilson in chapter 1, they suggest that Key overlooking religion in his analysis was possibly an acceptable oversight and that he may not have...

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