WHISTLIN' DIXIE?

The web is a good place to find people with whom you disagree, and also a good place to try to hash out both ordinary and professional accounts of the world with people on a different side of a given topic. If I understand what's at issue on the question of the elusive southern strategy, there are really two questions: first, Jim and Steven don't think that there really was a southern strategy, or that if there was one, it wasn't a strong causal factor in the rise of the Republican south. The second question concerns the differences between Reps and Dems on race.

As for the first: In the wide world out there, causal stories are elusive because the world is complex. "Reality is overdetermined." I'm sure you've seen Polsby's (?) argument that air conditioning helped get Republicans elected in the south, because it allowed northern liberal Democrats to move south without sweating to death, and thus helped to move the Democratic party in the south more leftward and thus polarize both parties, to the advantage of Republicans who could pick up conservative southern Democrats. If for some odd reason you had to choose between the invention of air conditioning and Nixon's appeals to southern whites to explain the rise of Republicans in the south, it might be a tough choice. That doesn't mean that Republicans in the south haven't pushed the race issue really, really hard over the past thirty years, in a variety of ways that have varied in their subtlety, however you want to link that push to electoral success. A monocausal account that only looks at race would be silly, if for no other reason than the way that race gets talked about or not talked about is itself complex. But still, the Trent Lott affair shows Republicans overcompensating for a weakness that exposes them to some real heat. Republicans can grumble about unfair treatment of Lott, but the existence of ex-segregationist, ex-dixiecrats among their ranks is something that Republicans do have to explain, even if the first generation is finally dying off. With Trent Lott, Republicans chose a ritual ablution ceremony -- albeit only after the initial testy denials.

The long and short of it is that however you want to tell the causal story (and the details are interesting), what needs explaining is the fact that Democrats killed their segregationist wing and Republicans picked up conservative southerners and also ran hard on issues linked to race, such as "law and order" and, eventually, opposition to affirmative action. Opposition to affirmative action doesn't make you racist, to be sure. Attempting to whip up white resentment against a black opponent as Jesse Helms did against Harvey Gant, using affirmative action, is racist and should be acknowledged as such. By the way, as Steven notes, Jesse Helms may have been only one of 5 NC Rep Senators since Reconstruction, but numbers certainly do not tell the whole story about this nasty individual who represented NC for three decades.

On the second question -- how do Reps and Dems differ on race -- the issue is, if possible, even more muddy than the causal account, simply because causality at least can be approached relatively neutrally, but it's hard to find neutral commentators on such a question as the difference between Reps and Dems on race, even if you can frame the question in a fairly neutral fashion. As far as I'm concerned, you certainly don't need to be a racist in order to be a Republican, but that issue is really a distraction. Appealling to racial groups is a traditional move in American politics. It's something that both parties do, of course. But the main problem with Republican rhetoric on race is that they have to do a fancy dance every time someone claims that racial inequalities matter and should be addressed. First, Reps say that racism is in the past (and that current inequalities, by implication, are the fault of the individual). Then there are the standard Republican responses -- "grow the economy," get government off people's backs, allow private initiative to take over, use state power only when there is proof of discriminatory intent on the part of the state, cut social welfare programs, lock more people up for longer terms -- these policies are not necessarily great ideas to begin with, in my view, and they probably are not going to help people who face inequalities structured by race. If anything, many of these policies have strong racial overtones and racial histories to them.

So much for a crude outline of my private, partisan views. A more subtle discussion of race and the Republicans would look at something like colorblindness as a Republican constitutional ideal, for example. See Jack Balkin's discussions here and here, especially the second post, which explains the differences between the visions of the civil rights movement and "colorblind" opponents of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.