The South, the economy, and racism

Matt takes issue with what Paul Krugman says here:

And if you look at the political successes of the G.O.P. since it was taken over by movement conservatives, they had very little to do with public opposition to taxes, moral values, perceived strength on national security, or any of the other explanations usually offered. To an almost embarrassing extent, they all come down to just five words: southern whites starting voting Republican.

His objection?

It's true that the recent political success of the GOP has an enormous amount to do with the party's success in the white south, but I think the evidence strongly suggests that conservative politicians get the votes of white southerners precisely because white southerners like conservative positions on taxes, moral values, and national security. Southern Democratic politicians of the Jim Crow era, after all, mostly took conservative stances on all of these issues. The weird thing about Jim Crow politics is that white southerners with conservative views on taxes, moral values, and national security would vote for Democratic presidential candidates who didn't share their views. They did that as part of a strategy for maintaining white supremacy in the South....

Racism is a key part of the story, but it plays a much bigger role in explaining why Adlai Stevenson and John Kennedy won South Carolina than in explaining why Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush won there.

I usually wait until it's late on a Friday to interject myself into a debate between two people who are substantially smarter than I am, and here we are! Fortunately, I'm just here to say that I think they're both correct.

Implicit in what Matt says is the fact that, in the south, racial and social issues trumped economic ones by quite a ways. It was only after the day finally came when the Democratic party became less racist than the Republican party that southern whites switched allegiances. When that happened, the Republicans went Hail Mary on both social and economic conservatism--a strategy that has been to their great, but perhaps temporary, benefit--and over time this has resulted in a shift in public opinion. As it was happening, though, national public attitudes about both economic and social policy weren't changing day by day. Barry Goldwater's economic ideas were still of middling popularity nationwide and Jim Crow-esque ideas about race and sex were, if anything, falling out of favor nationally, but as the culmination of a years-long political movement.

Indeed, southern whites were more at home in the Republican party and their big switch was only natural. But it didn't signify in any way that conservative ideas about welfare and social security had won the day with the American people.