The Long Southern Strategy, Angie Maxwell
The Long Southern Strategy, Angie Maxwell
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The Long Southern Strategy
How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics

Author: Angie Maxwell, Todd Shields

Narrator: Tom Parks

Unabridged: 16 hr 14 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 02/18/2020

Synopsis

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.

About Angie Maxwell

Angie Maxwell is the Director of the Diane D. Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society, an associate professor of political science, and holder of the Diane D. Blair Endowed Professorship in Southern Studies at the University of Arkansas. She is the co-editor of several volumes and the author of the The Indicted South: Public Criticism, Southern Inferiority, and the Politics of Whiteness, which won the Southern Political Science Association's 2015 V. O. Key Award for best book in Southern Politics.

Reviews

Goodreads review by William on June 10, 2024

Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” is one of the more important stories in American politics in the last 60 years. It's little understood. This well-researched book helps. The strategy exemplifies how party leaders (on both sides) strategically attract blocs of disparate voters with little regard f......more

Goodreads review by Online-University on March 02, 2021

Good book, although a sociological statistics mentality will help you get through the sections using data and surveys to prove their points. But it details the major shift in US politics in the late 1950s onward by studying Southern Identity and then breaking it down to three core features--clinging......more

Goodreads review by Drew on December 26, 2019

I was expecting this to be a sort-of history of the Southern Strategy. Instead, it was an academic paper that backs up all the longstanding beliefs associated with the Southern Strategy. It was incredibly well-written, and dense in the subject matter, but overall a fantastic read.......more

Goodreads review by Alex on December 28, 2023

Ten years ago at UW-Madison, I wrote an undergraduate political science thesis, "Democracy's Externalities and American Race Policy," relying upon much of the polling data and political science scholarship that this book references to. I checked this book out to get a refresher on what I learned fro......more

Goodreads review by Erik on January 23, 2022

Inspired by Jaquelyn Dowd Hall's article on "the long civil rights movement," which argues that the civil rights movement should be viewed as an expansive story lasting from the 1930s and in some days continuing today, Maxwell and Shields writes about "the long southern strategy" as not just a Nixon......more

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