The Long Southern Strategy

How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics

By: Angie Maxwell, Todd Shields

Narrated by: Tom Parks

Length: 16 hrs and 14 mins

Publisher's summary

The Southern Strategy is traditionally understood as a Goldwater and Nixon-era effort by the Republican Party to win over disaffected white voters in the Democratic stronghold of the American South. To realign these voters with the GOP, the party abandoned its past support for civil rights and used racially coded language to capitalize on southern white racial angst. However, that decision was but one in a series of decisions the GOP made not just on race, but on feminism and religion as well, in what Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields call the "Long Southern Strategy."

In the wake of Second-Wave Feminism, the GOP dropped the Equal Rights Amendment from its platform and promoted traditional gender roles in an effort to appeal to anti-feminist white southerners. And when the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention became increasingly fundamentalist and politically active, the GOP tied its fate to the Christian Right.

Republicans embodied southern white culture by emphasizing an "us vs. them" outlook, preaching absolutes, accusing the media of bias, prioritizing identity over the economy, encouraging defensiveness, and championing a politics of retribution. In doing so, the GOP nationalized southern white identity, rebranded itself to the country at large, and fundamentally altered the vision and tone of American politics.

©2019 Oxford University Press (P)2020 Tantor

I finally understand why Southern Politics feel manufactured

I recommend this book to anyone else who grew up in the south and wants to understand the political history of the region. I grew up in Texas and never could figure out why politics seemed so over stated in daily life. My political outlook has not changed but the way in which I view the political landscape has. In the first reading the statistics get overwhelming but going back to look over the graphs really makes the authors points pop. Very informative book!

Fascinated read

I'm a former Republican. it was interesting to me to learn where the party went wrong, and how it got to the point it's at now where I felt compelled to leave it.

Thorough account how GOP became what it is today

I read (listen to) a lot of books about how the United States got into the political mess it's in today. This one is different in that it goes into more detail about the unique characteristics of southern life/culture that came to capture the GOP. I'm one of those Reagan Republicans who later abandoned the GOP because of my perception that the party had become a party of religion rather than one of conservative (not racist or sexist) values. This book tells that story. I particularly like the focus on southern white women who have, frankly, baffled many of us with their conservative votes against their own self interests.
There is one downside: there are many statistics and charts in this book that don't translate well to an audible experience. However, the narrator does a great job of incorporating the numbers into the story to keep things moving--nice job! Still, this might be one of those books that you buy in written format in order to see the charts and graphs that accompany the narrative. A very enlightening book overall.

Elucidating explanation...

A thorough and exhaustive explanation of the decades long quest of conservatives to appeal to white southern voters, after the advent of the Civil and voting rights acts, by exploiting their propensity for racial animus, anti feminism and fundamentalist Christian beliefs, core among them, a visceral resistance to black social, economic and political equality. The work is extraordinarily well researched and the narration performance is excellent...