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ABSTRACT
It is well-established that the realignment of the past half-century sorted southern whites into the Grand Old Party (GOP) while southern blacks have remained stalwart Democrats. Surprisingly, however, there has been little systematic investigation of the relationship between party identification and opinions toward the South’s Confederate legacy. If it is indeed the case that race played the dominant role in the partisan sorting of southern whites into the Republican Party, then it should follow that contemporary GOP adherents have also taken a more favorable view toward Confederate symbols. In this study, we present data from numerous surveys that show southern whites of opposing parties have polarized on opinions toward the Confederate legacy in a historical reversal so that those aligned with the party of Abraham Lincoln are now the staunchest defenders of the “Lost Cause.”
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 As Campbell (Citation1977) shows, many southern blacks who were disfranchised prior to the 1965 Voting Rights Act were not partisans, but were then mobilized to support the Democratic Party because of its embrace of racial equality.
2 While Historians have long debated issues of Confederate symbols (e.g., Cox Citation2013), empirical political scientists have only recently begun to examine these questions (see Grose and Peterson Citation2020; Johnson, Tipler, and Camarillo Citation2019; Ryan and Hetherington Citation2018).
3 The “Lost Cause Myth”, consists of three tenets: “the Confederacy’s cause was noble and just and the war was fundamentally about states’ rights, not slavery. Second, slavery was benevolent and slaves were content in their station, so much so that the Civil War and Reconstruction upset a natural racial hierarchy. Third, Confederates were among the greatest soldiers in history and they were only defeated due to the Union’s superior manpower and resources” (Domby Citation2020, 4).
4 The waving of the Confederate flag first saw its revival in the 1948 Dixiecrat presidential campaign, but its sustained use in southern politics was a reaction to the black Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
5 This development has roots elsewhere in the literature. For example, McVeigh, Cunningham, and Farrell (Citation2014) demonstrate that areas that once exhibited high levels of Ku Klux Klan activity are precisely the areas today that are more likely to have a large number of Republican identifiers. Racial attitudes once associated with Democrats are, therefore, now associated with the Republican Party. Similarly, Avidit, Blackwell, and Sen (Citation2016) find that due to the process of behavioral path dependence, racial attitudes acquired by whites during slavery are passed down from one generation to the next, so that places with higher rates of slavery in 1860 have higher support for the Republican Party and Republican candidates today—despite the fact that it was the Democratic Party, rather than the Republican Party that was primarily responsible for reinforcing traditional racial hierarchies in the century after the Civil War.
6 Throughout this essay, the South consists of the 11 former Confederate states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.
7 The state surveys can be found at the UNC Dataverse: https://dataverse.unc.edu/.
8 Similarly, the sheer number of datasets presented in this paper makes it extremely unwieldy for us to present the data in a way that shows every response option. Further, the results do not change in any substantive way based on alternative methods of presentation.
9 While these are adjacent states in the Deep South, there are important distinctions between them. Nonetheless, we are limited by the state data available and the consistency with which certain questions were asked. Pairing Alabama and Georgia (bordering states), and then pairing South Carolina and North Carolina (bordering states), allows us to compare these states and provide consistent reporting of similar questions that were asked in a chronological progression.
10 Of course, given a large decline in official and unofficial displays of the Confederate flag (Huffmon, Knotts, and McKee Citation2017–18), it follows that there are now naturally less conflicts over this symbol.
11 As of this writing, the Robert E. Lee statue still stands.