The Books of My Life: From the New Deal to the New Right

Joseph Lowndes in his book From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008) takes on the backlash theory, which argues that the rightward drift of the Republican Party since the 1960s was a backlash to the Great Society and the civil rights and countercultural movements of the era. Lowndes argues that the rightward drift of the Republican Party is not the product of the 1960s, but instead goes back to tentative and selective alliances between Republican conservatives and Southern Democrats or Dixiecrats in the later years of the New Deal.

Lowndes argues that between the third New Deal and today several streams of radical rightism and conservatism merged to produce the Republican Party of today. The first stream, Lowndes argues, was Southern states rights radical rightism, a Southern states rights rightism grounded in the defence of Jim Crow. The second stream, Lowdnes argues, that created the Republican Party of today was GOP conservative small government laissez-faireism. The third stream, claims Lowndes, that created the Republican Party of today, was the increasing anti-communist and anti-liberal ideologies of both.

These three streams, Lowndes argues, were woven together by three sources. The first was National Review conservative intellectuals trying to expand conservatism into the sold Dixiecrat South beginning in the 1960s. The second was Barry Goldwater's campaign for the presidency in 1964, which had some success in the Dixiecrat South. The third was George Wallace, who created a right populism out of the states rights keep your hands off of our Jim Crow, the big government is tyrannical discourse, and the those trying to end Jim Crow in the South are communists discourse. Wallace's rhetoric, which he toned down particularly in the North during his run for the presidency in 1964 and 1968. appealed, it turned out, not only to Southern Dixiecrats enraged about judicial and federal actions against Jim Crow segregation, but also to middle class and working class ethnic Whites in the North, fearful about the impact of affirmative action on their job security and on their and their children's ability to move up the social mobility ladder, and the impact of desegregation on their neighbourhood schools.

It was Richard Nixon, Lowndes argues, who was behind the mainstreaming of Wallace style raging populism in the Grand Old Party. Nixon, always looking for the means to the end of becoming president, selectively stole Wallace's populist thunder and Wallace's ability to talk about race without talking about race in the late 1960s and early 1970s and rode it into the White House. Eventually, Lowndes argues, Nixon took populist rightism to where it had never gone before, namely, into mainstream Republican Party policy and government policy and action, if in fits and starts. In the 1980s, Lowndes argues, Ronald Reagan rode this populist rightism to electoral victory and led a Republican Party, cleansed of most of its moderates and liberals by that time, further right.

I was impressed by Lowndes's focus on culture and the role it played in instutitonalising populist conservatism in the Republican Party and eventually into American governance itself. I liked how Lowndes tied the new conservatism not only to cultural discourses but to interactions between cultural discourse and broader economic, political, and cultural events like the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and Watergate. I found Lowndes critique of backlash theory and the role Southern states rights anti-statism played in the rise of modern conservatism quite compelling. If further proof of Lowndes's thesis is needed may I present for your consideration Republican president Donald Trump. Trump's I am not a racist or a White separatist or supremacist racist rhetoric of rage, which parallels that of the Dixiecrats, clearly shows, I think, that the modern day Republican Party has now been fully dixiefornicated.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in recent American history, New Deal and post New Deal politics, the history of the GOP, the American right, and particularly the modern American right. It offers an interesting peek into how demagogues use fear to manipulate the masses to their ends.