Donald Trump’s first and in many ways most enduring political accomplishment is not the humiliation of the Democratic Party he has toppled in two of the last three presidential elections. It is the devastating defeat he has inflicted on the Republican establishment he has marginalized and dispersed. Our once and future president will not win every battle with what remains of the old Republican establishment, and in politics nothing is eternal. But as of Nov. 5, 2024, the “man from Queens” has achieved a domination of the Republican Party that no previous Republican president has ever enjoyed. The modern Republican Party that Ronald Reagan made, and that George W. Bush took into the 21st century, has fallen before the MAGA hordes, and today’s ambitious Republican politicos must say to Trump what Ruth said to Naomi: Whither thou goest I will go; and where thou lodgest I will lodge.
Until recently, when people thought about the political divisions inside the Republican Party, they saw two camps. There was the predominately liberal Republican Party rooted in the Northeast and represented by figures like Nelson Rockefeller and Mitt Romney, and there was the Sunbelt Republican movement led by Ronald Reagan. Sunbelt Republicans were seen as further to the right than their Rockefeller Republican rivals on both economic and social issues. The shift of white Southerners in the 1970s and 1980s to the Republicans from their traditional post-Reconstruction Democratic affiliation decisively tipped the balance between Sunbelt and Rockefeller Republicans, driving the whole party into the more conservative form it assumed under both Reagan and Bush.
Donald Trump clearly does not fit into this model, and his entry into Republican presidential politics in 2015 revealed the existence of powerful forces inside the Republican coalition that its nominal leaders knew little or nothing about. Their consistent underestimation of the importance and staying power of the Trump phenomenon likewise betrays a preference for forgetting the past rather than being warned and instructed by it. Trump’s message and his style have antecedents in our political history, and his ideological, rhetorical, and cultural links to the Jacksonian tradition in American life suggest that his extraordinary political success represents the return to national prominence of potent and enduring forces in American political culture that establishment Republican figures still don’t understand.
The Reagan Republican old guard never understood the complex political cultures of the Southern ex-Democrats and the ethnic Reagan Republicans of the blue-collar Rust Belt. At least since the time of the Civil War, Jacksonian populists have felt deeply alienated from an intrusive and powerful national establishment. The specter of a deranged wokitarian government aligned with the dominant media, the great universities, and enforced through the HR policies of “woke corporations” and “woke generals” is exactly the kind of thing that, historically, has triggered waves of popular and populist rebellion, particularly but not exclusively among Jacksonians. It is a fear in Anglo-American culture that dates to the Reformation: a satanic conspiracy aimed at destroying freedom, reducing people to servitude, disarming them, and delivering them over to the ruthless designs of an internationalist elite.
This fear and the demand that politicians do something about it helped break the trust between the populist and progressive wings of the Southern Republican Party, and it was not only in the South that the angry reaction to radical wokitarianism gathered force. That reaction is one of the principal sources of fuel for the Trump movement, and no American politician understands better or more intuitively how to exploit its possibilities than our new president-elect.
The Reagan-Bush old guard, while sharing Jacksonian distaste for the excesses of the woke movement, never understood how key policy decisions of the George W. Bush administration discredited both the ideas and the policymakers of the Republican establishment in the minds of a radicalizing base. They did not perceive that they had lost their party until Donald Trump walked away with it.
To understand the story of how Donald Trump cast the party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt into his own likeness is to understand much more clearly the course of modern American history and to see also why he was able to win two presidential elections with his new coalition. It is also to gain important insights into the meaning of the Trump movement for the American future. For both friends and opponents of the MAGA Republicans, a deeper understanding of the dynamics driving the Trump train will allow them to respond more creatively to the political conditions in which we now live.
William Faulkner once wrote that “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” Donald Trump and Team MAGA are living proof that Faulkner got it right. Not only does the living past shape American politics today, but the specific Southern history that so obsessed one of America’s greatest novelists has come alive, and its mighty footsteps have shaken our comfortable postmodern, posthistorical political age to its foundations.
White Southern political history after the Civil War is not a subject many people bother with anymore. To display any interest in such a retrograde set of people, customs, and institutions is in the first place suspicious. It isn’t healthy for the career prospects of a rising academic or journalist. And the generation of political activists who’ve grown up since Newt Gingrich brought Republicans a majority in the House of Representatives for the first time in decades saw little point in revisiting the battles and controversies of what, to them, was an antediluvian and faintly embarrassing past.
But history does not lose its influence because people don’t study it. And the political and cultural conflicts that defined Southern history from the collapse of Reconstruction in the 1870s through the remaking of Southern politics more than a century later play decisive roles in today’s battles over the future of the Republican Party.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, the former Confederacy lay in ruins and was under military occupation. War had ravaged much of the South. Over a quarter million Confederate soldiers were killed in action—killed by disease, wounded in battle, or died in prisoner of war camps. An estimated 50% of the wealth of the antebellum South was the “property” of human slaves. This was wiped out by abolition. Confederate currency was worthless as well. Roughly a decade after the Civil War, per capita wealth in the South was a meager $376, with no Southern state coming within $550 of the national average of $1,086 among non-Southern states. The South’s traditional political rivals in the Northeast were now thoroughly in control of the federal government and used that power to construct an economic system favoring the interests of Northeastern industrialists and financiers over the impoverished South and the agrarian West.
The first goal of the postwar political leadership of the white South under these circumstances was to regain control over the destiny of their own states by breaking the alliance between Northern Republicans and Southern Blacks. That was largely accomplished by 1877, when the last federal troops were withdrawn from the former Confederacy by a North grown weary protecting Black rights and Republican governance in the South.
For the Redeemers, as those who “redeemed” the white South from Reconstruction were called, the next goal was economic: to restore the fortunes of the South by attracting Northern investment in projects like railroads, mines, and factories. While they did not scruple to support and in some cases to lead the racial violence and terrorism associated with the Ku Klux Klan in the effort to break Yankee and Black political power across the South, their approach to economic development involved cooperation with Northern financial interests and the promotion of reconciliation between North and South. It also involved a certain limited toleration of Black political activity. This was partly out of a certain sense of noblesse oblige among some of them, partly as an offset to the ambitions of poorer, populist whites who might challenge the hold of the elite-based Redeemers on Southern politics, and in part because acceptance, however limited, of Black rights reassured those in the North who still concerned themselves with such matters that the Redeemers represented a “New South” with which one could do business.
To attract Yankee capital to the ruined and embittered region required some fancy footwork, smooth talk, and the creation of economic conditions that even Northern capitalists who had fought in the bitter battles of the Civil War would find alluring. In essence, the economic strategy of the Redeemers and their successors anticipated the policies of low-wage, low-regulation, low-tax, export-oriented economies in the global south in the 1950s and beyond. Southern laws and mores were hostile to labor unions. Southern wages, depressed by the devastation of the war and subsequent disruption, were far below Northern levels. Redeemer-dominated legislatures passed laws offering subsidies, loans, and favorable business conditions to railroads and other enterprises. Southern taxes were low.
By keeping business conditions favorable and reducing the salience of cultural and historical differences between North and South, the Redeemers and their successors would seek for the next 100 years to restore the wealth, the power, and the prestige of the South in national affairs.
By and large, the Redeemers were the successors of the antebellum Whig Party in the South. The Whigs had always been pro-business, and while many had been large slaveowners, their attitudes toward the South’s “peculiar institution” were often more pragmatic than ideological. They were often great believers in the Union, seeing a natural alliance between the financial and industrial interests of the North and the expanding commodity economy of the South. They were generally among the last and least enthusiastic to take up the secessionist cause, and many, like Robert Toombs and Alexander Stephens, the former secretary of state and vice president of the Confederacy, respectively, had hoped for a compromise ending to a war they did not think the South could win.
But the Redeemers did not have the former Confederacy all to themselves. Their economic policies, many Southerners both white and Black noted, might or might not be ultimately good for the South. But in the short to medium term, they were very bad for a lot of poor people in Dixie. Pro-business legal codes left workers with little or no protection against their often-unscrupulous employers. At a time when rates were regulated by individual states, railroad companies had a free hand to raise freight rates to levels that struggling farmers could scarcely afford. Against the background of falling cotton prices and soil exhaustion, many former slaves and white small farmers could only survive as “sharecroppers,” semipeons working the fields of large landowners under difficult conditions and with little financial reward. The Redeemers, whose ranks included many of the large Southern landowners, passed laws that made life even harder for sharecroppers, seeing the defense of the system as necessary to the Southern economy. And keeping taxes low meant skimping on resources for education, public welfare, and other social services.
Redeemer economic policies did help catalyze a Southern recovery from the Civil War, but the harsh impact of some of their policies and laws energized populist revolts in state after state. Often seeking allies with populist movements outside the South, and occasionally making common cause with poor Blacks, populist politicians like Georgia’s Tom Watson, Arkansas’ Jeff Davis, Mississippi’s James Vardaman, South Carolina’s “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, Louisiana’s Huey Long, and Texas’ Jim Hogg (who did indeed have a daughter named “Ima,” but did not have another named “Eura”), fought back against the pro-business agenda of the Redeemers, and later on the partisans of the New South.
Their left-wing economic views went along with what would today be considered a right-wing take on social issues. After an early period in which some, like Tom Watson, formed cross-racial coalitions with Black Southerners, populists generally turned against their participation in politics and supported the suppression of Black voting rights and the enactment of the notorious Jim Crow laws mandating increasingly onerous forms of racial segregation. This was partly because populists stressed what today would be called identity politics among poor Southern whites as a way of mobilizing against the Yankee-loving Redeemer elites. It was also partly because the wealthy Redeemers and their successors could coerce Black tenant farmers to support their candidates or bribe desperately poor Blacks to vote the “right way.” And it was partly because poor whites believed that by limiting Black rights and preventing Blacks from competing for scarce jobs or educational opportunities, the condition of poor whites would improve.
Right up through the era of Alabama Gov. George Wallace and beyond, the traditions of left-wing economics and support for segregation and other hard-right cultural shibboleths would largely, though never universally, define the politics of Southern populists.
There is a reasonably straight line between the pro-business, laissez-faire, and nationalist New South agenda championed by the Redeemers and the equally pro-business Reagan and Bush Republicans of more recent times. But the populists also had successors. The differences between these two factions were as deep and bitter as the cleavages between any two parties in American history, but one of the peculiar features of white Southern politics back then was that these two movements both belonged to a single, all-embracing party: the Democrats. In my childhood in the 1950s and 1960s, across most of the South the “real” election was the Democratic primary contest. The general election in November was a formality as no serious opposition to the Democrats existed.
Political competition between the two wings of the Democratic Party in the South revolved not only around policy differences, but also culture and symbolism. Populists often adopted the kind of rogue clown persona that attendees of Donald Trump’s rallies will have little trouble recognizing. Like Trump, the one-eyed, race-baiting provocateur “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman of South Carolina was known just as much for his inflammatory behavior as for his often-vulgar rhetoric and terrible manners. The last sitting United States senator (to date) to assault one of his colleagues in the Senate chambers, Tillman earned his nickname by calling President Grover Cleveland an “old bag of beef” and threatening to “go to Washington with a pitchfork and prod him in his old fat ribs.” Cleveland, like Tillman, was a Democrat. In one of many horrified reactions by the respectable press to his antics, The New York Times called Tillman “a filthy baboon, accidentally seated in the Senate chamber.”
Tillman catapulted into prominence following a bellicose speech at an 1885 backwoods gathering of farmers and politicos gathered to bemoan the headwinds facing farmers across the impoverished state. He leapt onto the podium to denounce the aristocrats who ran the state and the lawyers and crooked politicians in their pay while superintending South Carolina’s “descent into hell.” He then gave a string of policy prescriptions which met the unanimous horror of the accredited delegates but were loudly applauded by poor farmers standing in the back. He was applauded, a biographer notes, because of his uncouth appearance, unrefined speech, and wildly impractical but impassioned policy ideas—not in spite of them.
For the firebrand populists, shouting the unsayable, proposing the impossible, demanding the unthinkable, and not infrequently doing the deplorable were ways to tell their audiences whose side they were on. Whether it was by taking extreme stands on hot button issues (Tillman made speeches all over the country in defense of lynching), by wearing rugged farmer overalls to formal events, telling raucous jokes that made their genteel opponents purse their prissy lips, or using ethnic stereotypes and racist slurs that were anathematized in polite society, they entertained their audiences and bonded with them. “Going up to the Senate to hear Tillman speak was like running to a fire,” one spectator remarked.
Their open and thrilling violations of gentry norms signaled their allegiance. They were with the plain poor farmers, not the snooty elites. The more polite society frowned on their antics, the more their popularity soared. Tillman was once purportedly asked by a friend, “Why do you raise so much hell?”
“Well,” Tillman replied, “if I didn’t, the damn fools would not vote for me.”
The scandalized editorials, the grave addresses by university presidents, the condemnations of the clergy, and the howls of rage from the United Daughters of the Confederacy only made the rogues more famous, and, by demonstrating how much the gentry loathed them, reassured angry voters that the populist insurgents were really on their side.
Ridiculed and insulted by almost every newspaper in his state of Arkansas, Sen. Jeff Davis (no relation to the Confederate ex-president) quoted the negative press coverage to show voters how much the “mainstream media” of the day loathed him. For the poor laborers, farmers, and miners that made up large swaths of the state’s electorate, the “crooked” press represented the interests of the hated establishment: the lawyers, businesspeople, and state officials who lived by oppressing the working poor. Davis, described as a “carrot-haired, red-faced, loud mouthed” ox driver who was a friend of moonshiners and other dubious characters, wore his bad press notices like a badge of honor. Sen. Tom Watson, reportedly the smallest man in the Senate, threatened at least three of his political opponents, including the then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, with physical violence. Sen. James “White Chief” Vardaman of Mississippi frequently campaigned dressed in a white Prince Albert suit with a cape and white boots, arriving at rallies in a wagon pulled by a team of white oxen—all to emphasize his devotion to the poor white people who supported him.
This tradition of the purposefully transgressive, flamboyant, and above all entertaining populist rebel is what Donald Trump has revived, and it has worked for him just as it worked for his predecessors. He resurrected not only the style but the political approach of the old populist Democrats and, like them, he found that it opened the doors to political power that existing elites could neither circumvent nor destroy.
When most white Southerners moved into the Republican Party in the last third of the 20th century, it was two parties, not one, that entered the Republican fold. There were the populists, and there were the “responsible,” pro-business Southerners who believed that sound economic policies would help both rich and poor—and perhaps didn’t always mind if those policies helped the rich first. The members of these parties hated each other as cordially as members of rival parties normally do, and their support was embedded in different organizations, churches, and regions across the South. They had different narratives, different heroes and villains, and very different views of the world.
That said, the Reagan and Gingrich era, when the marriage of the white South and the Republican Party was fully consummated, came at an unusual moment in Southern history. It was a time when the pro-business element was more dominant than at any time since the 1870s, and when the populists were demoralized and in retreat.
The reasons for this were simple. First, the shock of the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision desegregating schools combined with the threat of the Civil Rights Movement to the Jim Crow system of legally mandated segregation to energize populists like George Wallace to promote “massive resistance” to racial change. The state of Virginia voted to close its public schools, and several Southern states repealed provisions in their constitutions mandating the state to provide public education to all children. Politicians encouraged mobs to resist. Men like Birmingham Commissioner for Public Safety Bull Connor attacked peaceful Civil Rights protesters with clubs and dogs.
It all ignominiously failed. The mass closure of public schools was both ridiculous and unsustainable. The combination of federal force and the extraordinary dignity and self-restraint on the part of Dr. Martin Luther King’s supporters overcame all resistance. And the shock and horror felt around the world and in the North at hate-filled mobs in cities like Birmingham underlined the point New South advocates had been making for decades. Like it or not, the white South simply could not attract the investment on which its prosperity depended if it gave its lowest racial instincts free rein. From Dallas to Savannah, local business and community leaders realized that they did not want to be another Birmingham or Selma. Yankee, European, and Japanese investors would not be building factories in racially polarized dumpster fires of civic culture. All over the South, quiet discussions among Black and white community leaders over peaceful desegregation started to take place. The fiery political speeches of people like Wallace might vent the frustration some white Southerners felt, but the path of resistance was the path of economic ostracism.
At the same time, the promises of the pro-business forces—that minimizing culture war and identity issues while attracting outside investment to the region would make all Southerners better off—had never seemed more convincing. Part of the New South strategy had always been to use federal funding to build up the South’s infrastructure. During the New Deal and World War II, the efforts of Southern solons (whose power in Washington was magnified by the Southern habit of keeping the same politicians in office long enough to accumulate seniority and committee chairmanships) brought massive investments to the South. From the network of military facilities to the Tennessee Valley Authority under Franklin Roosevelt to the Interstate Highway System, the impoverished region built up the infrastructure a modern economy requires. Air conditioning also helped. After 1945, the South was better placed than ever before to attract investors. Wages were still lower than in the North, labor unions were much less powerful, and taxes were generally low and regulations more permissive. The years after World War II saw the South gradually overcoming a long legacy of backwardness, poverty, and isolation to emerge, in some places at least, as one of the country’s more prosperous and dynamic regions. Living standards surged. Scourges like sharecropping faded slowly toward extinction, and both Black and white Southerners had more economic success and educational opportunity than ever before.
That was the mood of the white South when a solid majority of white Southerners overcame a century of bitterness to join the party of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant. It was a mood that matched the sunny optimism of a Ronald Reagan very well. Under Reagan and George W. Bush, the South no longer thought of itself as the least American, most discontented, and alienated section of the country. It was the old Confederacy that most wholeheartedly embraced tenets of the American creed like faith in capitalism, American exceptionalism, and the value of the American experience for the rest of the world.
But Southern history hadn’t ended with the triumph of Reagan and the end of the Cold War any more than world history ended with the fall of the Soviet Union. Around the turn of the century, the balance of power in Southern politics would begin to shift, and given that many of these forces also operated among blue-collar voters in the North, a political opportunity would appear that Donald Trump alone would have the vision and the talent to seize.
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