An interesting question: How did the Democratic party, which for so many decades was a dominant force in the politics of the southern United States, lose the south to the Republicans? The self-serving myth of the Democrats is that the parties “switched” due to persistent racism following the social turmoil of the 1960s.
Ever since the founding of our Republic, there has been a trend towards re-concentrating the political power which the framers of the Constitution wisely attempted to divide. Following the Civil War, the power of state governments under federalism has been in decline, and the power of Washington D.C. has correspondingly grown.
The waning of federalism was largely begun by the Republican party during the Reconstruction period, when the defeated southern states were essentially under occupation by the central government.
Even within the central government itself, the divided centers of legislative, executive and judicial power established in the Constitution have become progressively re-concentrated in the bureaucratic regulatory state (pun intended).
This re-concentration of power within the central government, and establishment of the centralized regulatory state, I’d largely attribute to the Democratic party and its New Deal response to the Great Depression, and it accelerated further during the mobilization of American industry to fight World War II.
It was during this period that Democrats acquired their reputation as the party of labor, particularly organized labor, while Republicans became cast as a party of the wealthier, and business interests. The coalition of southern agricultural labor, and northern industrial labor served the Democrats well for decades as the Democratic Party dominated Congress.
Following World War II, during the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s subversion and infiltration of American institutions was remarkably successful. Both the Republicans and Democrats initially were hardline anti-Communist, but the Democrat base soured on anti-Communism as a result of the protracted war in Southeast Asia, and activist movements encouraged in part by the political Left sought to weaken American power and exacerbate existing social tensions. This culminated in the tumultuous 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, which began a gradual takeover of the Democratic Party by the Left.
Meanwhile, the industrialization of agriculture meant that the North-South industrial divide that had characterized the United States at the time of the Civil War lessened during the Cold War period, and weakened the hold of the Democrats on southern voters as they became wealthier. Farming also became more entrepreneurial, and capital-intensive.
Once the rest of the world rebuilt from World War II, the dominance of American industry which had characterized the immediate postwar period of the 1950s likewise began to decline. The Democratic Party, since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal a party of bigger government, eventually was left with primarily government employee unions, rather than labor unions as their base.
As the Democrats applied the power of the regulatory state to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and into the 1970s, completing the century-long Reconstruction from the Civil War, they alienated some white voters with “affirmative action,” “busing” for desegregation, and other race-conscious policies, further strengthening the Republicans in the south. These policies weren’t only applied in the south, of course. Geographic self-segregation, rather than government-enforced segregation, had long existed in the north as well. The regulations made no distinction.
The widespread implementation of containerized intermodal freight since the 1960s removed a substantial source of “friction” in international trade, accelerating globalization and further intensifying international competition for American industry, resulting in many manufacturing industries relocating to other countries with reduced labor costs and lower regulatory burdens. Despite losses of industrial jobs, these traditional Democrat voters continued to remain committed, for a while.
The Democrat voting base gradually shifted to represent those who sought to apply the power of the regulatory state to more and more aspects of life, quite opposed to the structure of our Constitution, and many of these were academics and so-called “knowledge workers” in urban centers, particularly on the East and West coasts. The Democrats became correspondingly less connected to issues of “small town America” and rural life. As the southerners whose parents and grandparents had lived through Reconstruction began to die off, younger southern voters didn’t feel as strong an affiliation to the Democrats.
Meanwhile, in the Republican Party, there was a renewed appreciation for federalism, for deregulation, for anti-Communism, for religious traditionalism, which culminated with the Reagan presidency, and victory in the Cold War. Reagan’s robust Americanism attracted many who, like him, were former Democrats alienated by the increasing radicalism of their party. The rise of the ideological “conservative movement” in the Republican Party paralleled the takeover of the Democrats by the Left. With the end of the Cold War, both major parties struggled with their own insurgencies, and how to best appeal to voters looking for a “peace dividend.”
During the early 1990s, as supposed “New Democrat” Bill Clinton attempted to vastly expand regulation of the health care sector, and curtail Americans’ 2nd Amendment rights with the first federal gun ban, the proto-populism of the Contract with America brought Republicans full control of Congress by 1994, with House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia’s “Republican revolution.”
The so-called “Double Bubba” southern-boy ticket of Arkansas governor Bill Clinton and second-generation Tennessee Senator Al Gore, Jr. marked the end of Democratic party dominance in the south. When Al Gore ran for President himself in 2000, he couldn’t even win his home state.
Gore’s own political transformation from an anti-abortion southern Democrat to a Oscar-winning green environmental crusader parallels that of the party as a whole.
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(H/T to @Gbrian15 's question this morning on how the Republican Party came to dominate the South.)