This conclusion is borne out both by the history of political fights over key welfare-state programs and by the shape of regional politics today.
Start with the New Deal reform that didn’t happen: universal health insurance. Every advanced country except the United States has a universal health care system; how did we miss out? Perhaps the best opportunity to create such a system came in the late 1940s, when Harry Truman attempted to create a system that would have looked essentially like Medicare for the whole population. Opinion polls suggested overwhelming public support for universal care (as they do today). But as described in chapter 4, Truman’s bid failed in the face of opposition from two crucial groups: the American Medical Association and Southern whites, who would have gained from the program because of their low incomes but who opposed it out of fear that it would lead to racially integrated hospitals.[8]
The effects of race on support for the welfare state are also clear from a comparison across U.S. states. Alesina, Glaeser, and Sacerdote show that there’s a strong correlation between a state’s racial makeup and its policies: Broadly, the higher the black fraction of a state’s population, the lower its social spending per person. To some extent this may reflect the fact that Southern states are, despite the northward migration of African Americans and the convergence of regional incomes, both blacker and poorer than the rest of the United States. But it’s more than that: Even after taking levels of income into account, the correlation remains.
To make the point more concrete, suppose we compare politics and policy in Massachusetts and Virginia. The two states are roughly comparable both in average and in median income per capita—which tells us that the states have similar levels of income and that there aren’t big differences in the extent to which income is concentrated at the top. Yet the politics are dramatically different: Massachusetts is famously liberal, while Virginia has long been deeply conservative. (That may now be changing, but the blueing of Virginia is a very recent phenomenon.) You can do similar pairwise comparisons between other states of the old Confederacy and their Northern economic counterparts; in most though not all cases the more southerly, blacker state is far more conservative. It’s hard not to conclude that race is the difference.
Yet the New Deal coalition included the South, for reasons discussed in chapter 4. There was raw self-interest: The South was long a poor region, which gained disproportionately from the welfare state. There was history: The Republican Party remained, in Southern minds, the party of Lincoln. And there was the initial willingness of Northern liberals to make a bargain with the devil, tacitly accepting Jim Crow in return for Southern support on the broader welfare-state agenda.
Eventually, however, the marriage between Southern whites and the rest of the Democratic Party broke down over irreconcilable differences. The process began with Barry Goldwater, who took a strong states’ rights position and came out against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Aside from Arizona, all the states Goldwater won in the 1964 election were in the South. In 1968 much of the South went for George Wallace, but Nixon picked up several border states. By 1980 Reagan could win Southern states with thinly disguised appeals to segregationist sentiment, while Democrats were ever more firmly linked to civil rights and affirmative action. In fact the real mystery is why it took so long for the South’s congressional delegation to flip.
What share of the political rise of movement conservatism can be attributed to the Southern switch? What the numbers suggest is that the switch accounts for all of the conservative triumph—and then some.
Compare the makeup of the House of Representatives on two dates half a century apart. After the 1954 election Democrats had just begun what would turn out to be a forty-year dominance of the House, holding 232 out of 435 seats. After the 2004 election Republicans had exactly the same number of seats the Democrats had had in 1954, giving them the largest majority they ever achieved in their twelve-year rule. So where did the Republicans gain their advantage? The answer is that the Democrats actually gained seats outside the South. More than all of the Democratic net loss to the Republicans came from the Southern switch.
The Southern switch reflects a change in the voting behavior of white Southerners. In 1954 Southern whites at all levels of income were vastly more likely to vote Democratic than were their counterparts in the North. By 2004 low-income Southern whites were no more Democratic than low-income whites elsewhere in the country, while middle-and upper-income Southern whites were disproportionately Republican. In the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections whites outside the South favored Bush, but only by modest margins. In the South they voted for Bush by margins of 35 or more percentage points, enough to outweigh the overwhelmingly Democratic vote of Southern blacks.[9] Without those Southern white votes Bush wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near chad-and-butterfly range of the White House.
The overwhelming importance of the Southern switch suggests an almost embarrassingly simple story about the political success of movement conservatism. It goes like this: Thanks to their organization, the interlocking institutions that constitute the reality of the vast right-wing conspiracy, movement conservatives were able to take over the Republican Party, and move its policies sharply to the right. In most of the country this rightward shift alienated voters, who gradually moved toward the Democrats. But Republicans were nonetheless able to win presidential elections, and eventually gain control of Congress, because they were able to exploit the race issue to win political dominance of the South. End of story.
Or maybe that isn’t quite the end of the story. Even before the 2006 election, some analysts—notably Tom Schaller, a political scientist at the University of Maryland—suggested that the Republicans had overreached, and had themselves become vulnerable to a regional flip comparable to the one that drove the Democrats from power.[10] Just as the Democrats continued to hold many Southern congressional seats long after the historic marriage of convenience between New Dealers and Dixiecrats had broken down, relatively moderate districts in the rest of the country continued to send Republicans to Congress long after the GOP congressional delegation had become, in practice, a solid right-wing voting bloc. Indeed, a number of those Republicans finally lost their seats in 2006. After the 2006 election 42 percent of the seats still held by Republicans were in the South—not far short of the 47 percent Southern share of Democratic seats in 1954.[11]
All that said, one thing remains something of a puzzle: What do Southern whites think they’re actually getting out of the GOP? Republicans in Washington haven’t made the world safe for segregationists again—and to be fair, it’s doubtful whether many Southerners would seek a return to Jim Crow even if the feds allowed it. What Reagan offered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, was mainly symbolism—a stick in the eye of censorious Yankees—rather than a real prospect of rolling back the achievements of the civil rights movement. Maybe Frank’s book should have been called What’s the Matter with Dixie? and the rant should have gone like this: “Vote for the good old days of Southern pride; receive Social Security privatization.” And when Bush did in fact try to use his 2004 “mandate” to privatize Social Security, the South was almost as opposed to the proposal as the rest of the country.[12]
Race, then, was essential to the ability of conservatives to win elections in spite of economic policies that favored a minority over the majority. But what about other forms of distraction?
8.
See Jill Quadagno,
9.
Exit-poll data at http://www.nytimes.com/packages/ pdf/politics/20041107_ px_ELECTORATE.xls.
10.
Thomas Schaller,
12.
See, for example, a