The Dixification of America

What the South could never do on Civil War battlefields it has managed to do through the ballot box: take control of the country. The last two national elections have firmly established the South as the most powerful political region.

Bill Clinton of Arkansas and Al Gore of Tennessee are the first president and vice president team from beneath the Mason-Dixon line. When Bob Dole resigned as Senate majority leader to concentrate on his presidential campaign full time, Mississippian Trent Lott became the GOP leader in the Senate.

As Speaker of the House, Republican Newt Gingrich of Georgia is the most powerful congressman. Gingrich’s lieutenants, Dick Armey, House Majority leader, the sultan of the flat tax long before former presidential candidate Steve Forbes, and Tom DeLay, House Majority Whip, who never met a regulation he liked, hail from Texas.

Key House committee and subcommittee chairmanships are in the hands of Southern Republicans. Bob Livingston of Louisiana chairs the powerful Appropriations Committee. Thomas J. Bliley of Virginia heads the Commerce Committee, which stopped congressional inquiries into tobacco companies as soon as he assumed the chairmanship. Bill Archer of Texas heads the Ways and Means committee. Larry Combest of Texas chairs the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

In the Senate, Republican Strom Thurmond, the senior senator from South Carolina and 1948 presidential candidate for the segregationist States’ Rights Party, is chair of the Armed Services Committee. Fellow senior senator Republican Jesse Helms of North Carolina heads the Foreign Relations Committee.

As of 1994 Republicans hold 67 of the 125 congressional seats from the 11 states of the old Confederacy. It’s the first GOP majority since post-Civil War Reconstruction. Of the 22 Southern Senate seats, only nine are held by Democrats.

The heads of both major political parties are Southerners, too: Haley Barbour of Mississippi heads the Republican National Committee (RNC) and Don Fowler of South Carolina chairs the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Add to that the Virginia-based Christian Coalition, which has virtually taken over the Republican party in several Southern states, including South Carolina and Virginia.

In addition to taking Congress, the GOP took legislative chambers in 1994 in the Tennessee Senate, South Carolina House, and North Carolina House. These were in states where Republicans have not controlled a chamber since Reconstruction.

“Might as well designate ‘Dixie’ as the official party anthem for next month’s Republican National Convention,” said Miami Herald columnist Fred Grimm in July. “The peckerwoods have taken over the GOP and the party leadership.”

 

How’d They Do It?

The Southernization of American politics is due in large part to Newt Gingrich, the architect of the GOP’s 1994 takeover of Congress.

Using GOPAC, a political action committee launched to help Republican campaigns across the country, Gingrich and his strategists latched on to the Southern strategy invented by Barry Goldwater, the conservative Arizona Republican who lost the presidential election in 1964 by a landslide to Lyndon Johnson. The strategy involved the Republican Party’s abandonment of any semblance of support for civil rights and social programs to benefit the poor. White voters, especially in the South, were easily persuaded that support of civil rights and social issues important to blacks would only hurt the white population. Republican strategists were willing to alienate a receptive black population to gain a much larger white vote.

Republican Richard Nixon used the Southern strategy to good effect, winning the 1972 presidential election. Ronald Reagan and, to a lesser extent, George Bush continued using the successful strategy. Like their predecessors, these Republican candidates targeted white voters with racially charged language in campaign ads and attacked legislation to help the poor and minorities. Gingrich and GOPAC went further by teaching candidates how to run a winning campaign. This paid off with the GOP takeover of Congress in 1994.

If the GOP’s Southern strategy is the mother of today’s GOP, then the old-time Southern Democrat — the “Dixiecrat” that dominated Southern politics in the 1950s and ’60s — is the father. Strom Thurmond started the steady stream of defections to the GOP when he left the Democratic party in 1964. The Republican party welcomed the old Dixiecrats with open arms.

The Southern Democrats and the Republicans suited each other perfectly. The old Dixiecrats brought their rhetoric of states’ rights, less taxes, religious conservatism, dislike of federal intrusion, and opposition of aid to blacks and the poor. But there is one major difference, said Hastings Wyman Jr., editor and publisher of the newsletter Southern Political Reporter (and author of “The South Holds the Key” on page 23). “Where the old Dixiecrats were merely obstructionist, Southern leaders of the GOP are in the majority.”

 

Republicans and Lawn Fertilizer

This Republican majority has created a more conservative, rightward swing for the region and across the country, said Miami Herald columnist Fred Grimm. “Suddenly, there are members of the Republican party flying the Confederate flag. Suddenly, the GOP’s big tent includes folks who want to give science the heave ho in favor of teaching creationism, and they’re hanging out with slow-talking folks whose opposition to affirmative action and welfare seems just a trifle too gleeful. Suddenly they are anti-gay”

While much of this may be true, it oversimplifies the appeal of the GOP to Southern voters. Like the Dixiecrats, today’s GOP does indeed appeal to those fire and brimstone conservatives who support flying the stars and bars and teaching religious doctrine in the classroom — Trent Lott was one of the last politicians to address the White Citizens Council, a white supremacist group known as “the educated Klan.” And both he and Dick Armey have ties to Larry Pratt, whose resignation from Pat Buchanan’s campaign for president last year made headlines after Pratt’s ties to white supremacists became public.

But the GOP’s appeal also extends to voters who would much rather burn a tax return than a cross.

Unlike the poor, blue-collar, fringe elements who joined the Ku Klux Klan and helped push former Alabama Governor George Wallace and other virulently racist Southern politicians to national prominence, the GOP owes much of its recent success to major demographic changes in the South. White-collar workers who have higher educational achievement than ever before live in the South, and a new suburban culture has transformed the region over the past 20 years.

“As every political consultant knows, where the lawn fertilizer is heavy and the minivans are parked, the GOP will do well,” wrote Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Carrie Teegardin in 1994.

 

According to data from the Census Bureau:

■ From 1970 to 1990, the proportion of Southerners with a high school education rose from 45 percent to 71 percent.

■ The poverty rate rose nationally during this same period but declined in the South.

■ Metropolitan populations in the South rose at twice the average rate for the nation.

“The more suburban, better educated, and more affluent South is a Republican South,” said Charles S. Bullock II, a University of Georgia professor of political science, who has challenged black voting districts (see page 26). “These lifestyle changes, moving up the socio-economic strata, coincide with people who are suspicious of what the government may do to them and less interested in what the government may do for them,” Bullock said.

 

Anti-tax and Uncle Sam

Southern Republicans may despise big government, but the South is actually more dependent on the federal government than any other region. As Vern Smith wrote in Newsweek in 1995, “Taking Washington’s money is as Southern as cornbread and whiskey.”

Taxes — The anti-tax Southerners actually do succeed in ducking high taxes — at least well-to-do Southerners succeed. According to the Tax Foundation, a business-supported research group in Washington, D.C., residents in the Northeast — not the South — pay the highest taxes. In 1995, residents of Connecticut and New York bore the highest tax burdens (this includes all taxes: federal, state, sales, income, and property). The average total tax per person in Connecticut was $12,584 and $11,373 in New York. No Southern state was among the top 10 taxpaying states. In fact, eight of the states with the lowest taxes were in the South. Maryland had the highest tax burden of the Southern states with an average per person tax debt of $9,200. It ranked 22nd in the nation.

The problem, according to the nonprofit Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ), is that despite paying some of the lowest taxes in the nation, the South’s tax burden is not distributed fairly. Tennessee, for instance, charges no state income tax, but does have a steep average 8.25 percent sales tax on goods, including food. Low-income people spend a high proportion of their income on food, which means they are paying a higher percentage of their income in taxes than more affluent people. According to CTJ, five of the 10 states that make the poor pay disproportionately high state and local taxes are in the South: Texas, Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, and Florida.

Big Government — No issue appears to bother Southern voters more than their perception of federal government intrusion. But, in truth, no other region benefits from big government as much as the South does. According to the Census Bureau, 19 of the 37 counties that receive the greatest amount of federal expenditures are in the South. A January 16, 1995, article in Newsweek shows that there are an average of 12 military bases or installations per Southern state — 50 percent more than the average for states outside the region. According to Newsweek, Texas alone nets $4 billion per year in active duty and civilian military revenue.

Alabama provides a perfect example of how politicians play on the anti-big government themes while reaping benefits from the federal government. When Governor Fob James was elected in 1994, he vowed to fight federal intervention, even if it meant “sending back Uncle Sam’s money.” So far, that hasn’t happened. A Birmingham News computer analysis of federal spending in Alabama shows that for every $1 the state sends to the federal government, it gets back just over $1.50. The federal government spends $21.2 billion in Alabama on contracts, grants, and social programs. In contrast, the state only pays out $13.9 billion in federal taxes. Every second, the federal government spends $673 in Alabama.

In Mississippi, anti-big government themes also play well. Last year, smaller government proponent Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi tried unsuccessfully to get NASA to steer a $1 billion project and hundreds of jobs from Utah to Mississippi. A confidential agency assessment found that the project would have cost taxpayers $850 million just for relocation. The project was killed. When reporters asked about the inconsistencies in trying to steer federal dollars to his home state while attacking big government, a spokesperson for the senator replied, “What do you want him to be, a purist?”

Being anti-big government has not stopped Lott from trying to get the government he said he despises to help his family. According to FBI records, Lott used his influence to get his mother a job with security firm Hyde Security Service, Inc. (HSSI), a contractor for NASA. FBI records show that despite the fact that Iona Lott had no previous experience, she was hired by HSSI as a public relations director with an annual salary of more than $60,000. A letter dated April 4, 1990, from the Internal Revenue Service to the U.S. attorney in Jackson, Mississippi, said that Iona Lott’s services to HSSI were “minimal and meaningless.” According to FBI documents, HSSI also authorized the use of federal funds for the direct benefit of Lott’s campaign activities. Records show that Lott used his influence to stop an investigation into the alleged improprieties.

States’ Rights — The South’s quarrel with big government historically has been about states’ rights. According to the 10th Amendment, individual states have authority within their borders over anything not mentioned specifically in the Constitution. Like their antebellum predecessors who said that Washington couldn’t abolish slavery, the Southern Democrats in the 1950s and ’60s used the 10th Amendment to declare that the federal government had no business ordering integration of public facilities. In 1956, South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond drafted the “Southern Manifesto,” signed by 90 percent of Southern members of Congress, that called the U.S. Supreme Court decision ordering desegregation, Brown v. Board of Education, a substitution of “naked power for established law.” After Brown, Mississippi adopted a “Resolution of Interposition,” asserting the power of state government to block unilaterally any federal decision or law.

The rest of the country responded with shock and ridicule to such virulent manipulation of the Constitution to perpetuate segregation, but today, states’ rights have made a comeback of sorts. During the South Carolina GOP presidential primaries, candidates, including moderates Lamar Alexander and Steve Forbes, along with Bob Dole, asserted the states’ rights argument in defense of South Carolina’s right to fly the Confederate flag. That argument sounded remarkably similar to the rhetoric of old-line segregationists. But states’ rights arguments today go beyond the old race-based arguments of the 1950s and ’60s, even though they’re used to justify changes in welfare and kill affirmative action programs aimed at helping blacks and other people of color.

Now the argument has to do with deregulation and is driven more by the corporate bottom line than resistance to equal opportunities for people of color. The recent struggle over regulating tobacco is a case in point. As Morton Mintz wrote in the May 1996 Washington Monthly, the tobacco industry, under the cover of states’ rights, has tried to stall any federal regulation of its products in a number of Southern states. According to Mintz, at the 1995 Annual Conference of the National Foundation for Women Legislators, Inc., the Smokeless Tobacco Council, an industry trade group, sponsored a workshop called “FDA’s Assault on the Constitution and Legislative Prerogative.” The purpose of the workshop, according to the Smokeless Tobacco Council, was to alert the legislators of the FDA’s proposal to regulate tobacco, “on the grounds that this is clearly a states’ rights issue.”

Like the tobacco companies, chemical, hazardous waste, and other industries have been quick to follow suit in the states’ rights argument. “It’s enough to make you think twice about the Republicans’ devolution solution,” Mintz wrote. This spirit of deregulation Mintz described does have voters worried, even in the South. The themes of anti-big government, fewer taxes, and states’ rights may play well in the South and elsewhere, but when less government means cutting funding for Social Security, Medicare, or veterans benefits, or if it means deregulation of environmental, consumer, and other protections in the name of states’ rights, it remains to be seen how Southern voters will react. Conservative voters may recognize that welfare recipients and people of color aren’t the only ones who benefit from Washington, D.C.’s coffers.

Indeed, polls across the country now show that the Southern GOP-led takeover of national politics may have run its course. “There is also a perception that the 104th Congress did little,” said David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, D.C. “I mean, for all the talk about the Contract with America, very little of it actually passed. What have they done except target programs for cuts that the majority of the American people want?”