The Long Southern Strategy Quotes

“The combination of bait the GOP used to catch southern whites was tailored to the region, but it is still bait to all who are hungry. So calls for states' rights, law and order, fiscal conservatism, colorblindness, anti-feminism, men's rights, and Christian nationalism can summon a Southern white majority, but other Americans are beckoned too.... That explains why, over time, at the national level, Republican candidates had no choice but to echo all three of those dog whistles in order to win. Those who did not or could not lost.”
― Angie Maxwell, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics

“So complete is the southern white fundamentalist Republican merger that the good and evil dichotomy so historically critical to southern white culture now underscores a partisan foreign policy, laced with racism and misogyny, the consequence of a Long Southern Strategy to convert the hearts, minds, souls, and voters of the Bible Belt.”
― Angie Maxwell, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics

“Historically, many southern white churches have not been places of comfort. In fact, as Ernest Kurtz observes in his essay "The Tragedy of Southern Religion," "through all these — slavery, defeat, poverty, and more — the southern white Christian churches have remained singularly blind to the nature and meaning of tragedy and thus also to the significance of suffering." Fear, defensiveness, distrust, and conformity have too often been their currency. Conformity, specifically, necessitated a strict moral code, while evangelicalism required proselytizing and conversion. Together they established a sacred canopy in the region, whereby homogeneity and the sheer volume of believers shields them from pluralism, diversity, resistance, and a reactionary backlash.”
― Angie Maxwell, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics

“It is more than ‘backlash politics.’ It is orchestrated backlash politics. Campaigns made choices, set fires, and even poured on the gasoline if accelerant was needed, which is why the passage of time has not, in fact extinguished, such prejudice. It is kept aflame as long as it is stoked.”
― Angie Maxwell, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics

“So when Trump, in his defense of the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, claims that there is “literally no difference” between Lee and George Washington—both “owned slaves,” both “rebelled against the ruling government,” “both were great men, great Americans, great commanders,” and both “saved America”—he is equating Confederate nationalism and American patriotism. He is equating the defense of slavery with the revolutionary cause of independence and scolding the media for not getting the parallel.”
― Angie Maxwell, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics

“White superiority, justified by blaming minorities for their own oppression, is so fundamental to southern white identity that any challenge or perceived challenge to it was met with a vigorous defense, often to political ends. Those ends were GOP victories, secured at the expense of the same white southerners—many of whom overwhelmingly benefit from healthcare reform and other entitlements—who provided them.”
― Angie Maxwell, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics

“The “us vs. them” mentality consequently reaffirms the GOP as the protector of white power.”
― Angie Maxwell, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics

“Privilege and patriarchy and fundamentalism, of course, have no geographical limitations.”
― Angie Maxwell, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics

“Fear and rage and resentment, the bread and butter of the Long Southern Strategy, often drive more people to the polls than optimism or likability or hope, no matter where they live.”
― Angie Maxwell, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics

“Only when the sheer force of cultural change became insurmountable would the SBC soften its position on race. But it merely unclenched one fist while clenching the other, shifting its sacred massive resistance to women's liberation.”
― Angie Maxwell, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics

“Over time, assessments of the educational attainment of white American women from the 1970s to the late 1990s show that a Baptist affiliation is a highly significant and negative predictor of educational advancement. For both young and older women, being Baptist, and the expectations for "family, marriage and child bearing," means they are less likely to get a degree.”
― Angie Maxwell, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics

“Thus, when the SBC dropped its anti-integration rhetoric for the most part in the 1970s, it had to find another outlet to protect the status quo, as well as its own power. "For religious conservatives," argues Paul Harvey, "patriarchy has supplanted race as the defining first principle of God ordained order." The SBC's relationship to women and to feminism in general became, in additional to biblical inerrancy, a linchpin for fundamentalists. And that is critically important in terms of the Long Southern Strategy. Racism and racially coded rhetoric may have driven many white southerners to the GOP, but they did not stay there. In order to win them back after the administration of one of their own, Jimmy Carter, the GOP trumpeted the ‘family values’ mantra to woo social conservative voters. In order to cross from racial politics to religious politics, they built a bridge on the backs of feminists. In fact, of all of the cultural issues arising during the 1970s and 1980s, the partisan gap was widest and grew only wider on the ERA specifically and on evaluations of the Women’s Movement in general. Among mainline Protestants nationwide, women’s rights was the first social/cultural issue significantly correlated with partisanship.”
― Angie Maxwell, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics

“Though racial animus is often cited as the source of regional realignment, the debate over gender roles has become a powerful component of partisan polarization.”
― Angie Maxwell, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics

“In 2016, THE idea of a female president was not an abstraction, but a real possibility. In the end, whites who live in the South, particularly white women, played a big part in Hillary Clinton's loss.”
― Angie Maxwell, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics

“All of these findings are surely part of the gender gap as it exists in parts of the country, but little research covers why, in light of all of those reasons, so many white women in the South turned away from the Democratic Party. Though the samples are limited, the white women did exactly what white men in the South did, turning red over the course of the Long Southern Strategy. Ignoring southern white women not only results in a misperceived universality of the American gender gap, but it also concludes the Southern Strategy prematurely, which creates a shortsighted interpretation of the southern realignment.”
― Angie Maxwell, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics

“Tapping into "The Not-So-New Southern Sexism"... Schlafly inspired them to protest and march against their own equality—which had been cast as unnecessary or a threat to their own privileges—and to do so under the banner of "family values." The pitch rang clear to many across the country, but nowhere was it more embraced than among white southerners, for whom traditional gender roles remained as sacrosanct as white privilege. Even women's educational opportunities, particularly in the South, have been constructed to support gender norms and preserve women's space, which in turn, preserves male (and white) power. Since the two were mutually constructed, not only have the struggles against racial and gender inequality been "ever-intertwined," so too has the backlash that seems always to follow.”
― Angie Maxwell, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics

“In its quest to win over white voters in the American South, the GOP played a full house of racial cards, but these were not the only cards they played. They could not secure the region for their party on white racial resentment alone. Realignment from solidly blue to solidly red requires tectonic shifts. The Civil Rights Movement was, indeed, a cultural earthquake for white southerners, but so too was the Women's Movement that followed.”
― Angie Maxwell, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics

“What started as a defense of traditional gender roles morphed into an offensive drive for Christian nationalism, in part sparked by southern, white, primarily Christian women who demonstrated against their own liberation.”
― Angie Maxwell, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics

“To that end, what Earl and Merle Black called ‘The Great White Switch’ was actually ‘The Great White, Anti-Feminist, Christian Switch.’ Absent an understanding of the role of Southern white sexism in this realignment, racism and religiosity read as two chapters of separate books. They were and are an ensemble cast in the same story.”
― Angie Maxwell, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics

“This southern white way of life, however, is not based solely on white superiority. Rather, it is best viewed as a triptych with religious fundamentalism and patriarchy standing as separate hinged panels that can be folded inward–bent to cover bent to cover or reinforce white supremacy throughout much of the region's history.”
― Angie Maxwell, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics