Look away (from) Dixieland

Rick Perlstein’s new piece in TNR ought to make my favorite Southern Nationalist hopping mad. Perlstein writes about a number of issues related to the possible geographic redistribution of political power, a realignment on preliminary display in last month’s elections. Among other things, Perlstein considers the one factor that no one who studies the recent history of party realignment can avoid — race. Put simply, there’s strong empirical evidence to suggest that racial attitudes continue to shape Southern white voting behavior, and Thomas Schaller — author of Whistling Past Dixie — advises that the Democratic party use Southern revanchism as a foil to help consolidate their gains in other regions of the country. In a reversal of Kevin Phillips’ famous analysis of The Emerging Republican Majority, Schaller contends that the South can be isolated and abandoned to the Republicans without creating an electoral disadvantage for the Democratic Party.

Interestingly, one of the academic articles Perlstein mentions in support of Schaller’s claim — Nicholas Valentino and David Sears, “Old Times There Are Not Forgotten: Race and Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South,” American Journal of Political Science (July 2005) — has been part of the regular rotation in the social science writing course I teach. Valentino and Sears argue that Southern white voters who display racially conservative attitudes are significantly more likely to vote Republican than other groups of Southern white voters. To put it crudely, then, the article suggests that while not all whites who vote Republican do so because they are racist, white racists in the South are likely to recognize the Republican party as a comfortable home for their aberrant views on black intelligence, patriotism, work ethic and and trustworthiness among other character traits. There’s a “no shit” dimension to all this, but the specifics of the piece are quite interesting. Predicatably, I usually have a few students who blow a gasket over the argument — mostly because they assume the authors are “biased” against Republicans or “unfair” to the South.

And looking at my preliminary enrollment list for next semester, I can predict with near-certain confidence that I’m going to be physically assaulted right about mid-February, when the Valentino and Sears piece comes up for discussion. The perp will be the same fellow who’s currently seeking to kick my ass for assigning Chris Hedges’ War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning in my “Self, Culture and Society” seminar.

(Via Yglesias)