Colin Woodard (46 page)

Even when Congress does vote along strict party lines, Republican defectors are nearly always from the Northern alliance or the Midlands. In 1999 only four Republican House representatives refused to impeach Bill Clinton for lying about an extramarital affair: two Yankees and two Midlanders, one of them a transplant from Massachusetts. Only three Republicans broke ranks to pass Obama's 2010 financial reform overhaul, all of them from New England.
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In short, by the early twenty-first century, Northern alliance Democrats and Republicans had far more in common with one another than with their counterparts in the Dixie bloc. Indeed, the southern coalition stood against nearly everything the northerners held dear.

CHAPTER 28

C
ontrary to popular opinion, the Dixie bloc has not been a particularly stable coalition. The dominant parties—the Deep South and Greater Appalachia—have been archenemies for much of their history, having taken up arms against one another in both the American Revolution and the Civil War. The junior partner, Tidewater, was always less committed to apartheid and authoritarianism than its southern neighbor and today is increasingly falling under the influence of the Midlands. The Deep Southern oligarchy, whose economic interests the bloc ultimately serves, has had to contend with the enfranchisement of millions of black voters in its own region, a tendency toward gentlemanly moderation among the Tidewater elite, and the powerful populist sentiment of many Borderlanders. All of these forces threaten to undermine the Dixie coalition.

The goal of the Deep Southern oligarchy has been consistent for over four centuries: to control and maintain a one-party state with a colonialstyle economy based on large-scale agriculture and the extraction of primary resources by a compliant, poorly educated, low-wage workforce with as few labor, workplace safety, health care, and environmental regulations as possible. On being compelled by force of arms to give up their slave workforce, Deep Southerners developed caste and sharecropper systems to meet their labor needs, as well as a system of poll taxes and literacy tests to keep former slaves and white rabble out of the political process. When these systems were challenged by African Americans and the federal government, they rallied poor whites in their nation, in Tidewater, and in Appalachia to their cause through fearmongering: The races would mix. Daughters would be defiled. Yankees would take away their guns and Bibles and convert their children to secular humanism, environmentalism, communism, and homosexuality. Their political hirelings discussed criminalizing abortion, protecting the flag from flag burners, stopping illegal immigration, and scaling back government spending when on the campaign trail; once in office, they focused on cutting taxes for the wealthy, funneling massive subsidies to the oligarchs' agribusinesses and oil companies, eliminating labor and environmental regulations, creating “guest worker” programs to secure cheap farm labor from the developing world, and poaching manufacturing jobs from higher-wage unionized industries in Yankeedom, New Netherland, or the Midlands. It's a strategy financial analyst Stephen Cummings has likened to “a high-technology version of the plantation economy of the Old South,” with the working and middle classes playing the role of sharecroppers.
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For the oligarchs the greatest challenge has been getting Greater Appalachia into their coalition and keeping it there. Appalachia has relatively few African Americans, a demographic fact that undermined the alleged economic and sexual “threat” raised by black empowerment. Borderlanders have always prized egalitarianism and freedom (at least for white individuals) and detested aristocracy in all its forms (except its homegrown elite, who generally have the good sense not to
act
as if they're better than anyone else). There was—and still is—a powerful populist tradition in Appalachia that runs counter to the Deep Southern oligarchs' wishes. Most of the great Southern populists have been self-made men from the borderlands, including Lyndon Johnson (from Texas Hill Country), Ross Perot (Texarkana), Sam Rayburn (eastern Tennessee), Ralph Yarborough (born in Northeast Texas, based near Austin), Mike Huckabee (Hope, Arkansas), or Zell Miller (of the North Georgia mountains) in the first half of his political career. Appalachia also gave Dixie many of its most successful progressives, including Bill Clinton (also from Hope), Al Gore (from an elite Nashville-area Scots-Irish family), and Cordell Hull (born in a log cabin in north-central Tennessee). Further complicating the oligarchy's strategy, much of Appalachia fought against the Confederacy in the Civil War, which always made the Lost Cause story line a bit harder to sell.
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Two factors worked in the oligarchs' favor, however: racism and religion. During the Civil War, Borderlanders fought to maintain the Union, not to help African Americans, and they were deeply offended by the Yankee drive to liberate and enfranchise blacks during Reconstruction. (“It is hard to say who they hate the most,” Tennessee governor William Brownlow said of his fellow Appalachian Unionists in 1865, “the rebels or the Negroes.”)
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Second, Borderlanders and poor whites in Tidewater and the Deep South shared a common religious tradition: a form of Private Protestantism that rejected social reform, found biblical justification for slavery, and denounced secularism, feminism, environmentalism, and many key discoveries of modern science as contrary to God's will. After 1877 this suite of “social issues” bonded together ordinary people across the Dixie bloc. It's much the same dynamic that Thomas Frank described in
What's the Matter with Kansas?
which revealed how the oligarchs of his native state used social and “moral” issues to rally ordinary people to support the architects of their economic destruction. “The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off,” Frank writes:

Mr. Frank was writing about developments over the past forty years in a state straddling the Midlands and Far West, but the strategy he describes was originally developed a century earlier in Greater Appalachia and used to great effect.

 

For the first few decades after 1877, the federal government was in the hands of the Yankee–Left Coast axis. During that time Dixie-bloc representatives voted en masse against nineteenth-century Yankee tariffs and pensions, African American voting rights, and Senator Lodge's Force Bill. Dixie arguments against civil rights and free elections were explicitly racist. “We will never surrender our government to an inferior race,” argued (Appalachian) Georgia representative Allen Candler, who was later elected governor. “We wrested our State government from negro supremacy when the Federal drum-beat rolled closer to the ballot-box and Federal bayonets hedged it deeper about than will ever again be permitted in this free Government.” In solid Borderlander tradition, Representative William Breckinridge of Kentucky likened the Force Bill to those “passed by an English Parliament for Irish constituencies and defended on precisely the same grounds.” Rarely mentioned was the fact that so long as blacks and poor whites were disenfranchised, the oligarchs would retain power in the Deep South and Tidewater. Even as the Force Bill was being debated, Dixie governments were imposing new poll taxes and other measures to suppress democratic participation. In Mississippi voter participation fell from 70 percent in 1877 to less than 10 percent in 1920. “The results were everywhere the same,” historian Richard Franklin Bensel found. “Almost all blacks and most poor whites were disfranchised and the plantation elite achieved hegemonic control over the region.”
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Dixie's effect on federal politics was minimal, however. In the early twentieth century the coalition secured the White House only once, when Teddy Roosevelt founded the Progressive Party, split the Northern alliance vote, and gave the presidency to Woodrow Wilson. Wilson, as we've already seen, was a committed segregationist who persecuted dissenters during World War I. But he was also an Appalachian Southerner, born in Staunton, Virginia, to a Borderlander family of mixed Scots-Irish, Scots, and north English origin. In accord with national stereotype, he combined racism and intolerance of dissent with attempts to curb corporate power: namely, the creation of the Federal Reserve system, the Federal Trade Commission, and programs to channel credit and innovations to small farmers of the sort who dominated his home region. The oligarchs of the Deep South had not yet had their day.

The dynamic changed in the 1960s, when Democrats JFK and LBJ backed up civil rights activists against extralegal resistance in Dixie. “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come,” Johnson told an aide hours after signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law. Indeed, much of the Dixie coalition promptly abandoned the Democratic Party and the populist Appalachian president who'd dared betray the caste system. In 1968 their presidential nominee was the radical Deep Southern racist George Wallace, who ran as a third-party candidate on a promise to demonstrate that “there sure are a lot of rednecks in this country.” They might have backed him in 1972 as well had he not been shot and paralyzed by a deranged fame seeker while campaigning in Midland Maryland. They rallied instead to a new cohort of Dixie-style Republicans from El Norte's Anglo minority—Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan—who succeeded in overthrowing the Northern alliance's control of the GOP.
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Since the mid-1960s these three nations have always endorsed the more conservative presidential candidates, except when faced with a choice between a Dixie Southern Baptist and a more conservative Yankee. They all endorsed McCain over Obama, George W. Bush over Kerry, George H. W. Bush over Dukakis, Reagan over Mondale, Nixon over McGovern, and Nixon and Wallace over Humphrey in 1968. Defections came when the more liberal candidate was from the Dixie bloc: Appalachia and the Deep South went for Carter (a Georgian Baptist) over Ford (raised in Yankee Michigan) in 1976, while Tidewater split; Appalachia and the Deep South chose Arkansas Borderlander Bill Clinton in 1992 while Tidewater went for more conservative (but Yankee-bred) George H. W. Bush. Appalachia also defected to Clinton in 1996 (over Midlander Bob Dole) and was divided by the candidacies of liberal Borderlander Al Gore (against the younger Bush) and Carter (against Reagan).

Dixie-bloc voters back ultraconservatives with remarkable consistency. As of 2009 eighteen serving U.S. senators had earned a lifetime rating of 90 or above (out of 100) from the American Conservative Society. Every single one came from the Far West or the Dixie bloc. White representatives in the Dixie coalition voted en masse against the civil rights and voting acts of the 1960s; for the removal of bans on union shop contracts in the 1970s; for lowering taxes on the wealthy and eliminating taxes on inherited wealth in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s; for invading Iraq in 2003; and for blocking health care and financial regulatory reform and increases in minimum wages in 2010.

Dixie's congressional leadership has consistently advocated policies and positions that are often shocking to public opinion in the Northern alliance. The 1984 Republican Party platform, Deep Southern senator Trent Lott declared, was a good document because it was full of “things that Jefferson Davis and his people believed in.” Tidewater senator Jesse Helms tried to block the creation of the Martin Luther King holiday on the grounds that the civil rights leader had been a “Marxist-Leninist” who associated with “Communists and sex perverts.” Deep Southern House majority leader Tom DeLay proclaimed in the early 2000s, “The causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills.” “Nothing,” DeLay told bankers in 2003, “is more important in the face of war than cutting taxes.” As the U.S. economy unraveled in 2008, former Deep Southern senator and Swiss bank vice chairman Phil Gramm told the
Washington Times
the country was in “a mental recession” and that its people had “become a nation of whiners . . . complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline.” After the 2010 BP oil spill, Representative Joe Barton (from Deep Southern Texas) publicly apologized to the company for having been pressured to create a fund to compensate its victims, calling the initiative—but not the spill—“a tragedy of the first proportion.”
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From the 1990s, the Dixie bloc's influence over the federal government has been enormous. In 1994 the Dixie-led Republican Party took control of both houses of Congress for the first time in forty years. The Republicans maintained their majority in the U.S. House until 2008 and controlled the Senate for many of those years as well. While perhaps disappointed with the progressivism of Jimmy Carter's presidency, Deep Southern oligarchs finally got one of their own in the White House in 2000, for the first time since 1850. George W. Bush may have been the son of a Yankee president and raised in far western Texas, but he was a creature of east Texas, where he lived, built his political career, found God, and cultivated his business interests and political alliances. His domestic policy priorities as president were those of the Deep Southern oligarchy: cut taxes for the wealthy, privatize Social Security, deregulate energy markets (to benefit family allies at Houston-based Enron), stop enforcing environmental and safety regulations for offshore drilling rigs (like BP's
Deepwater Horizon
), turn a blind eye to offshore tax havens, block the regulation of carbon emissions or tougher fuel efficiency standards for automobiles, block health care benefits for low-income children, open protected areas to oil exploration, appoint industry executives to run the federal agencies meant to regulate their industries, and inaugurate a massive new foreign guest-worker program to ensure a low-wage labor supply. Meanwhile, Bush garnered support among ordinary Dixie residents by advertising his fundamentalist Christian beliefs, banning stem cell research and late-term abortions, and attempting to transfer government welfare programs to religious institutions. By the end of his presidency—and the sixteen-year run of Dixie dominance in Washington—income inequality and the concentration of wealth in the federation had reached the highest levels in its history, exceeding even the Gilded Age and Great Depression. In 2007 the richest tenth of Americans accounted for half of all income, while the richest 1 percent had seen their share nearly triple since 1994.
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