THE SOUTHERNIZATION OF AMERICA

Two Alabaman journalists, one White and one Black, examine the expansion of Southern prejudices into the larger nation.

The Southernization of which journalists Gaillard and Tucker write boils down to racism and White supremacy. This racism has been conservative gospel since at least the Reagan era, when, as one scholar observed, “the views and tools of Southern segregationists had become the official position of the national Republican party.” Chief among those tools are voter-suppression laws to disenfranchise ethnic minorities, and agents of this change include Karl Rove, the master of whispering campaigns that hinted that one Democratic candidate was “a homosexual pedophile”; and the blowhard politico Newt Gingrich, “Donald Trump, but with a higher IQ.” Trump, of course, was an adept follower of Gingrich’s methods: “bitter polarization [and] the combativeness and crude insults that characterize Republican political rhetoric and the tactics of obstruction, including stand-offs over paying the nation’s debts.” However, Gaillard and Tucker show that the true model for Trump was George Wallace, who eschewed Richard Nixon’s “veiled racism” for the real deal, carrying his message of ethnic division and hatred to audiences at rallies across the country, their attendees almost exclusively White blue-collar workers disaffected by the civil rights and anti-war movements. There is another South, of course, and while Trump’s “bigotry, mendacity and sheer incompetence upended a campaign he had expected to be a cakewalk to victory” in 2020, his defeat was caused in part by votes against him in Georgia, Virginia, and the region’s blue urban cores. The struggle will continue, the authors suggest, and likely to bad ends. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. This was Dr. King’s affirmation at the end of the Selma to Montgomery March,” they write. “We are not still sure if we should believe him.”

A thoughtful, probing look at a national character that is trending ever uglier.