Democracy Heading South: National Politics in the Shadow of Dixie (review)

The disengagement of the American polity from the democratic process has become an accepted proposition among academics, citizens, and political leaders alike. As signs of this disengagement, observers point to low voter turnout, Americans' entrenched cynicism regarding politicians' motives and efficacy, the escalating cost of political campaigns, and the highly partisan and even vitriolic nature of political debate. These phenomena have myriad causes and troubling implications. Augustus Cochran offers a provocative framework for understanding these trends: At the start of the 21st century, American politics are in a state comparable to the Solid South of the early and mid-20th century. Cochran, a professor of political science, devotes his book to building the argument for this metaphor and considering its explanatory power.

Cochran bases his analysis of the Solid South on V. O. Key's influential 1949 study, Southern Politics in the State and Nation. One of the contributions that Cochran makes is a lucid and engaging summary of the characteristics of the Solid South, including a power structure that favored political elites, the politics of explicit racism, and the lack of a meaningful two-party system. This political environment produced legendary demagogues and stories that ranged from colorful to appalling. But, as Key pointed out, and as Cochran also asserts, the demagogic politics of the region "did not reflect some sick Southern cultural trait but rather structure, or lack of it, in the one-party political system" (38). In addition to discussing the Solid South as a region, Cochran devotes one chapter to examining two states in particular—Georgia and North Carolina—to trace their development from the New Deal to the present day. Here Cochran illustrates in detail how the South has changed from the Solid South to a region that now reflects national trends. It is also here that Cochran makes one of the less compelling arguments of the book: that some of the political characteristics of the South have helped create the national arena today. While the South has influenced attributes of the national political scene, such as the decentralization of the American welfare system, so have many other factors, as Cochran acknowledges elsewhere in the book. Moreover, this argument seems tangential to the more significant analogy that Cochran develops.

Cochran argues that there has been a dual convergence of southern and national politics. Due to changes wrought by the civil rights movement, the region's economic development, and the growth of the Republican Party in the South, the South is more like the rest of the country than ever before. At the same time, American politics have become strikingly similar to the politics of the Solid South; the two-party system has become dangerously attenuated, political and corporate elites drive electoral politics as they drive citizens away from the political process, and racial and cultural issues have given rise to the frequent use of coded symbols and wedge issues. Cochran warns that "the Solid South with its perversions of democracy stands as a warning to the nation that without nurturing the roots of democratic institutions, the substance of democracy can be lost even while the trappings of democracy are retained" (205).

The author supports his analogy with an impressive variety of research from political science, history, mass media, and communication studies. He also qualifies his claims appropriately. He enumerates the systemic differences between the Solid South and today's political situation. The political control by white southern elites during the era of the Solid South depended on the active and deliberate disenfranchisement of African Americans. As Cochran details, racism in today's political arena is different from the de jure segregation of the Solid South. Racism today is more likely to register privately in opinion polls and publicly in code issues. Another significant difference is that, unlike the dominant Democratic Party that gave the Solid...