Scholars and writers have long argued that the Republican Party rose to influence in the US South by taking advantage of white backlash against integration and civil rights to cajole white working-class people to vote against their own financial self-interests. Thomas Frank, in his modern classic What’s the Matter with Kansas?, writes that backlash conservatism rests on the foundation that “ignoring one’s economic self-interest may seem like a suicidal move to you and me, but viewed differently it is an act of noble self-denial; a sacrifice for a holier cause.”
