No other region has such strong religiosity, anti-unionism and racial animosity.
A Uniquely Vehement Mix of Ideological Passions in the Southern United States
Todd Shaw is an associate professor of African-American studies and political science at the University of South Carolina.
Updated October 2, 2012, 9:11 AM
George Lipsitz’s theory of "possessive investment of whiteness” partly explains why many in the white working class in the South remain strongly anti-Obama and strongly conservative. Given a history of racial discrimination against blacks and other minorities, Lipsitz reasoned that white identity has a “cash value” as accumulated from white advantages in education, occupational attainment, home values and wealth.
V.O. Key noted in the 1940s that Southern white aristocrats and elites had long used race and color lines to convince working-class and poor whites to psychically identify with “whiteness” against the demands of blacks and other minorities, even when there were strong rationales for economic solidarity across racial lines. And the more things change, the more they stay the same.
But why does this deal with the demons of race over class still lock many working-class whites into a Faustian bargain with Southern conservatism?
It is partly a matter of "path dependence" -- where Southern whites started out 50 years ago still affects where they are today. Today’s Southern whites’ possessive investments are rooted in three enduring factors -- morality, class and race. These factors certainly matter elsewhere, but they run deep in the South.
No other region has a white working-class with as deep of a baseline of religiosity and morality politics as evidenced by the South’s leadership in continued anti-gay-rights amendments and anti-immigrant initiatives. No other region has as strong an opposition to class politics and is as strongly antiredistributive as evidenced by continued Southern opposition to unionization and the fervor against "Obamacare." No other region has as enduring a history of racializing differences, coupled with as rapid a shift in the political, if not economic, fortunes of African-Americans and other minorities.
Until the divisive powers of morality, class and race are lessened, the white working class in the South will remain locked into that Faustian bargain in which its support for hyper-moral, antiredistributive policies hinders whites' economic opportunities in return for the scant psychic benefit of remaining real (white) Americans -- impoverished but free to fly Confederate flags.