How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America

by Heather Cox Richardson

In 1956, Eisenhower backed the largest public works program in America’s history, the Federal-Aid Highway Act, which provided $25 billion to construct 41,000 miles of the nation’s first interstate highways.

Eisenhower, and after him Democratic president John F. Kennedy, expressed concern about the rising power of what Ike called “the military-industrial complex,” which by 1961 employed more than 3.5 million Americans directly and many more indirectly.

In May 1954, the complicated dance between Thurgood Marshall and Earl Warren led to the unanimous landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, which outlawed the “separate but equal” doctrine that had segregated schools since the Civil War.

In 1956, ninety-nine congressmen, led by South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond (who, it was discovered many years later, had fathered a biracial daughter with his family’s maid), took a stand against government-enforced desegregation. Their “Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” which was quickly dubbed the “Southern Manifesto,” maintained that desegregation was unconstitutional.

Buckley’s National Review gave these segregationists cover by providing an intellectual defense of segregation. Buckley hired James Kilpatrick, a southern newspaper editor, to assure readers that desegregation did not promote American values, as Eisenhower said, but undermined them.

Buckley dismissed the idea of universal suffrage as “demagogy” and declared that whites were entitled to dominate black people because they were “the advanced race.”

Baseball legend Jackie Robinson—until then a keen Republican—left the Cow Palace shaken. “A new breed of Republicans has taken over the GOP. It is a new breed which is seeking to sell to Americans a doctrine which is as old as mankind—the doctrine of racial division, the doctrine of racial prejudice, the doctrine of white supremacy,” Robinson said. He added that he now knew “how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”

Dixiecrat South Carolinian Strom Thurmond switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party and publicly supported Goldwater. Thanks to Movement Conservative ideology, southern Democrats had begun to shift to the Republican Party. Thanks to the American West, the ideology of the Confederacy had regained a foothold in national politics.

Immediately after the 1964 election, most observers thought Goldwater’s movement was cooked. Instead, the 1964 Republican campaign marked the start of the process of creating a coherent narrative that could attract voters by selling them on the corollary to the American paradox. Over the next fifteen years, Movement Conservatives would argue that the claims of minorities and women for access to opportunity were destroying individualism and the way of life it represented. That narrative would enable them to move from the political margins to the White House.

In 1964, Goldwater supporter Phyllis Schlafly turned the idea that the complexities of the postwar world needed expertise on its head. Her book A Choice Not an Echo argued that an “Eastern Establishment” was deliberately complicating postwar foreign policy.

Goldwater’s crash-and-burn in 1964 meant that Lyndon Johnson had a supermajority of Congress to support what he dubbed a “War on Poverty.” In 1965, Democratic-led coalitions passed federal aid to education, housing legislation, anti-poverty laws, rural development aid, and Medicare/Medicaid. Crucially, Republicans joined Democrats to pass the Voting Rights Act, designed to protect minority voting, especially in the South, where black voters had been kept from the polls for almost a century.

To bring Movement Conservatives to his standard, Nixon went after the southern states Goldwater had won in 1964. He courted Strom Thurmond with the promise that he would not use the federal government to pursue desegregation. This was the point at which the Republican Party made the decision to abandon its attempts to attract black voters and instead to focus on attracting whites opposed to desegregation, a process that came to be known as the “southern strategy.”

The Kent State shootings in May 1970, when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on college students, killing four and wounding nine others, committed Nixon fully to the notion of holding power by inflaming Middle Americans against “the media, the left, [and] the liberal academic community.” Vice President Spiro Agnew deliberately exacerbated this division before the midterms that year, riling audiences with attacks on “avowed anarchists and communists,” “thieves, traitors and perverts,” and “radical liberals.” Nixon’s people were aiming to break the liberal consensus and swing working-class white men to the Republican Party. Agnew later explained that he was working for “positive polarization”: positive in the idea that it would bring voters to Nixon. “Dividing the American people has been my main contribution to the national political scene since assuming the office of vice president,” he admitted, adding, “I not only plead guilty to this charge, but I am somewhat flattered by it.”

When Reagan tapped the thirty-five-year-old Michigan Congressman David Stockman to be his Budget Director, Stockman, who had grown up on Conscience of a Conservative, set out to bring Goldwater’s dream to life. As soon as he took office in 1981, Reagan proposed cutting $47 billion from the previous year’s budget. To do that, Stockman slashed funding for food stamps, education, job training, and unemployment insurance. Then the administration turned to tax cuts.

“A rising tide lifts all boats,” as they said, and the election of Reagan was the latest step in a long-standing campaign to destroy the liberal consensus and replace it with the kind of unfettered capitalism that had preceded it. And so, with Reagan in office, these true believers set their sights on destroying the activist state that had been in place since the 1930s and freeing up businessmen to develop the economy.

When Robertson lost to Reagan’s vice president, traditional Republican George H. W. Bush, Norquist’s friend Ralph Reed helped to turn Robertson’s following into a permanent political pressure group: the Christian Coalition. This group organized evangelicals behind Movement Conservative policies, arguing that traditional family values depended on an individualist economic system. It also encouraged evangelicals to run for state and local offices, attacking regulation and taxes while they spread their religious policies at every level.

In April 1995, an internal memo identified tax cuts as the central principle of Republicanism, and Norquist explained why: “All reductions in federal spending weaken the left in America. . . . Defunding the government is defunding the left.”

As Stockman’s numbers had shown before they reprogrammed the computers, however, supply-side economics—“voodoo economics,” as George H. W. Bush, a traditional Republican, had called it—did not, in fact, create widespread prosperity. As had been the case a century and a half before, the program of keeping capitalists free from regulations and taxes moved wealth upward.

Movement Conservatives had taken over the Republican Party with the intention of destroying the liberal consensus. Wealth was moving upward, and women and minorities were headed toward positions of subordination. America was on its way to becoming an oligarchy.

Since the 1920s, the government had required public broadcast media stations to present information honestly, balancing different points of view. That arguments should be based on facts put the ideology of Movement Conservatives at a disadvantage. Adherents insisted that the fairness doctrine biased the media against them. The media was, they said, liberal. Under pressure, and with Reagan’s appointees voting, in 1987 the FCC caved and ended the policy. Released from the constraints of the fairness doctrine, the media, rather than presenting informed debate and encouraging listeners to weigh evidence, could simply push ideology. And it did. Within a year talk radio had become a national phenomenon. Hosts like Rush Limbaugh warned that socialism was creeping through America, and he identified the enemy: black people, feminazis, “Liberals.”

In October 1996, an ideological media network became a reality when Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch established the Fox News Channel (FNC)—with Roger Ailes as its CEO.

Movement Conservatives had finally managed to take over the political conversation, and they continued to move it rightward. A vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a think tank, explained that there was a window of ideas the public would accept. To move that set of ideas rightward, believers had to promote fringe ideas aggressively until they became acceptable. FNC moved the Overton Window to the right with a constant stream of media chatter about creeping socialism and the assault by minorities and women on American freedom.

In 2013, in the landmark Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Republican Supreme Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act by declaring unconstitutional its rule that states could not change voting laws without prior clearance from the Department of Justice. Immediately, Republican state officials began to introduce voter ID laws and bills restricting voter registration.

In 2012, Romney claimed that 47 percent of the American people felt they were “entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it,” and told supporters that those people would only vote for Democrats who would give them stuff. Former Republican senator Rick Santorum put it more starkly: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them someone else’s money.”