On Dec. 5, Trent Lott, a Republican senator from Mississippi and
the majority leader of the Senate, addressed a 100th birthday party
for Sen. Strom Thurmond on the eve of Thurmond’s retirement
from the U.S. Senate. Among his compliments was a generous
exaggeration of the importance of a very old man about to retire
from a career marked more by its extraordinary length than by its
distinction: “When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we (the
state of Mississippi) voted for him. We’re proud of it. And
if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t
have had all these problems over the years, either.”
The statement was little noted for several days. But ultimately
a firestorm of criticism erupted, leading to Lott’s abrupt,
even rude, replacement as majority leader by his fellow
Republicans. Why such a drastic response to what surely was
intended as no more than the harmless hyperbole conventional on
such sentimental occasions? Analysts of all stripes, white and
black, liberal and conservative, agreed that it had been a coldly
realistic political decision by George W. Bush and other
Republicans who felt it too politically risky to have Lott continue
as its most visible spokesman in the Senate. But why?
A little history is helpful. In the depth of the Great
Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt swept into power. He and his
fellow Northern liberal Democrats cut a faustian deal with the
white supremacist South. They would not meddle with the Southern
segregationist Jim Crow system, and in return white Southerners
would continue to give solid support to the national Democratic
party. Both sides kept their sides of the bargain until 1948, when
a new generation of liberals successfully voted a strong civil
rights plank into the Democratic party platform. Strom Thurmond,
then the Democratic governor of South Carolina, mounted a
segregationist “Dixiecrat” presidential campaign,
vehemently opposing civil rights. Indeed, Trent Lott grew up in the
strongly segregated Mississippi of those pre-civil rights days,
when blacks who challenged that system were subject to intimidation
and occasionally death. Lott himself helped maintain the
segregation of the University of Mississippi and of his college
fraternity. And Trent Lott’s Mississippi was among the few
states Thurmond won in 1948.
But by the early 1960s, under intense pressure from civil rights
advocates, this regional split in the Democratic party was no
longer tenable. Northern Democrats almost unanimously supported
civil rights legislation and Southern Democrats almost unanimously
opposed them, with the mainly Northern-based Republicans falling
somewhere in between. In 1964 the Republicans, sensing an
opportunity in Southern Democrats’ overwhelming opposition to
civil rights, nominated for president a man who had opposed the
Civil Rights Act, Barry Goldwater. This gamble failed in the short
run: he won only a handful of states in the Deep South, and little
else. But in the long run it was a fabulous success. Now-Sen. Strom
Thurmond switched to the Republican party in 1964, leading a
gradual but ultimately massive switch of white Southern Democrats
into the Republican party. Today the white South is the strongest
and most reliable base for the national Republican party.
Why has the white South moved so sharply from solidly Democratic
to strongly Republican? Liberals often charge that longstanding
Southern racial prejudices have had much to do with it, as blacks
have become a more visible piece of the Democratic coalition while
the Republican party has moved to the right on racial issues.
Conservatives respond that white Southerners’ shift to the
GOP has more to do with their fiscal and moral conservatism on
non-racial issues such as tax cuts, government regulation, and
opposition to abortion.
But this debate is usually carried out at only a speculative and
partisan level. My colleague Nicholas Valentino of the University
of Michigan and I have done extensive research directly testing the
possible role of racial prejudice in white Southerners’
partisan realignment. We have used national surveys of American
adults done over the past 40 years that allow us to track
voters’ changed attitudes and the bases of those changes.
Among our findings are the following:
Even among white Southerners there is little support today for
the old Jim Crow racism, such as formal segregation or the belief
that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. But extensive
racial prejudice remains, in a more modern form that we call
“symbolic racism.”
White Southerners have continued to be more racially prejudiced
than white Northerners, a regional difference that has held
constant since the 1960s. In this respect the “New
South” looks much like the Old South.
White Southern Republicans are markedly more racially prejudiced
than white Southern Democrats or white Northern Republicans, a gap
that has actually increased with time as more prejudiced white
Southerners abandon the Democrats.
Among white Southerners, racial prejudice has played an
increasingly important role over time in attracting support for
Republican candidates. Racial prejudice is considerably more
closely linked to support for Republicans in the South than it is
in the North.
Southern white support for Republicans is better predicted by
conservatism on racial issues than by conservatism on non-racial
issues such as abortion or national defense.
In other words, racial animosity has a continuing power over the
political attitudes of Southern whites, despite the hope that a
“New South” has put racial divisions behind it. Race
has less resonance in the North. But the surge of racially
prejudiced Southern whites from the Democratic party into the GOP
has sparked the Republican transformation from being a chronic
minority to national political dominance.
How can this be? We rarely hear about overtly racist appeals
these days, even from the old South. But the special link between
racial prejudice and the Southern Republicans leaks out in issues
like retention of Confederate symbolism, hostility to welfare and
other social services for the poor, support for harsh treatment of
the disproportionately black criminal defendants, and opposition to
affirmative action. George W. Bush played to this gallery in his
2000 campaign when he spoke at Bob Jones University, celebrated for
its ban on interracial dating, and when he withheld comment on
official displays of the Confederate battle flag at the South
Carolina statehouse.
This is the “dirty little secret” at the heart of
the Republicans’ current dominance of American politics.
Conservative Southern Republicans have every reason to hide it. The
vast majority of white Americans today, even in the South, have
repudiated the segregationist system that dominated the old South
not so long ago. Outside the South, most are embarrassed and even
horrified by that history. To avoid being tainted with the charge
of racism, Republican conservatives must bend over backwards to
avoid any suggestion of support for America’s segregationist
past.
Rather, they must hold fast to their assertion that racial
conservatism reflects no more than a more general preference for
smaller and less intrusive government. Our research suggests
otherwise, that racial prejudice is an important additional factor.
Trent Lott’s crime was letting this dirty little secret slip
out. His seeming nostalgia for those years threaten to remind too
many people of “how the South was won” by the
Republican party. His successor, the physician Bill Frist, with a
history of medical volunteering in black Africa, puts a better face
on the “New South” than does a Trent Lott enveloped in
the thick accents of the old Deep South. Frist’s difficult
job will be to persuade Americans, especially black Americans, that
a Republican party led by conservative white Southerners is truly
free from the taint of racism.