Why are White Americans in the Southern region of the USA much more conservative and Republican than elsewhere?

Question

Election results and polling show that White voters in the South are the most Republican and ideologically conservative in the entire country. This is especially evident in the votes cast in counties with small Black population shares versus large ones, especially more rural ones. This also serves as a counterweight to the near unanimous Democratic support from Black individuals who are a large share of the South's population but nowhere near a majority.

I wonder why this is, and what causes it.

Answer 1

Deep Roots

First, relative political conservatism and liberalism are remarkably stable in any given geographic area over time (even though, in absolute terms corresponding to specific policies, almost every place gets more liberal over time).

For example, even at a county by county level the 1876 Presidential election and the 1976 Presidential election look almost identical (flipping the Democratic and Republican parties, which traded places on the political spectrum in that time period). The fact that the Democratic Party and Republican Party traded places is weird, but largely just a branding issue that hides long term ideological stability.

At the state level, the relative positions of representatives of U.S. states in Congress on issues like national security, defense spending, foreign policy and social issues on a liberal to conservative scale from the 1790s are essentially the same as they are today in most cases.

Incidentally, this isn't unique to the U.S. You see ideological stability over similar time frames all over the world, for example, in regions within Germany (e.g. the modern politics of Saxony with deep historical roots and the continuing Protestant and Catholic divide in a far more secular country), Italy (e.g., between the North and the South were were united only in the 1870s), and the U.K. (e.g., differences in political attitudes and institutions between Scotland and England) associated with early modern kingdoms that predate these modern states and had not yet been fully consolidated. Outside the West, regional political differences in India, and differences in attitudes and political culture between Northern China and Southern China similarly have deep roots, as do those in Nigeria which is practically two different countries with an Islamic North and Christian/Animist South at the moment).

So, the bottom line is that the highly conservative leanings of the American South are largely legacies of the pre-Civil War slavery regime. In that environment, most of the South had free whites and lots of black slaves. The distrust between the two ran deep.

This reality is explored much more deeply, for example, by David Hackett Fischer in Albion's Seed, and by Colin Woodard in American Nations: A History of Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. Also useful in understanding this sweep of American political history is Randall B. Riley, in his book, Congress: Process and Policy, the first half of which illustrates how much the federal government and its institutions were transformed from its pre-Civil War incarnations by the U.S. Civil War, and then, by the New Deal and World War II.

Little Diversity Or Disruption Due To Migration

Secondarily important is that from the late colonial era until the 1980s or so, the American South had much less immigration from outside the U.S. and from elsewhere in the U.S. than other regions of the country. So there was no one to shake up the mix very much.

This is because immigrants migrate to places that are the most economically prosperous, and that wasn't the South for most of its history.

This also means that whites in the American South, until the last 40 years or so, were extremely homogeneous culturally and in sources of ancestry.

At that time there were very few Catholics outside of Florida, Louisiana and Texas, there were almost no Lutherans, and there were very few Presbyterians or Congregationalists or Unitarians or Universalists or Jews or Quakers or Muslims or Mormons. Baptists, Episcopalians (restricted to a thin upper class), Methodists, and black Christian denominations with a shared but parallel theological origin, were pretty much it - although some rebranded as non-denominational or into splinter sects.

Some of this religious homogeneity was also because it was freshly emerged. Before the Second Great Awakening (ca. 1790 to 1840), the American South was the least religious part of the United States. This flipped at this time, with a new uniquely American style of faith emerging all at once and securing mass conversion to active, fervent Christianity. This new version of Christianity fit prevailing social attitudes at the time in the South to a "t". The Second Great Awakening "ironed out" many small ideological and cultural differences that had been present in the South between people there, before it actively embarked on uniting these folks in a common ideology and faith.

There was no significant linguistically different immigrant population and little linguistic diversity period outside old French in Louisiana and legacy Mexicans in parts of Texas. (Fun Fact: the Spanish language spoken by people native to New Mexico and Southern Colorado retains many words and language constructions from Colonial era Mexico that are no longer found anywhere else in the world.)

There were few Latinos (outside Florida and Texas). There were almost no Asians. The Native Americans who were there at the start were mostly dead, or exiled, by the time the Trail of Tears (1830-1850) was concluded.

The presence of only two very disparate cultural groups that are internally relatively homogeneous (i.e. white Southerners and black Southerners) leads to polarization.

A Narrower Range Of White Affluence Than The North

A tertiary factor is that despite our image of the South as dominated by big plantations epitomized by a home grown de facto aristocracy of plantation owners v. working class whites and black slaves in the Antebellum era, this is somewhat misleading. While there were lots of big plantations with wealthy families in them, there were almost no families that had wealth on the scale of Northern manufacturing, rail, shipping, and finance based businesses that were far more highly concentrated in wealth. The bottom also lacked the layer of dirt poor, just-the-shirt-on-their-backs new immigrants that was found among Northern whites.

During Reconstruction, many of the wealthy planter families experienced permanent or temporary total financial collapse, in part, at the hands of Northern carpetbagger financiers.

About 18% of white men in the South aged 13 to 43 died in the American Civil War (1861-1865) and Reconstruction, and many more were crippled as a result, for example, with amputated limbs.

The war destroyed much of the wealth that had existed in the South. All accumulated investment in Confederate bonds was forfeit. Income per person in the South dropped to less than 40% than that of the North, a condition which lasted until well into the 20th century. Southern influence in the US federal government, previously considerable, was greatly diminished until the latter half of the 20th century.

An effective Union naval blockade captured about 95% of the exports from the Confederate states during the war. In the short run, the war destroyed almost all 8,800 miles of Confederate railroads while the Union added about 7,300 miles to its existing 21,800 miles of railroad. The war also destroyed almost all of the South's manufacturing plants, and almost all of its cotton production, and almost all of its exports (70% of the total for the nation before the war).

(The quote is a second hand Wikipedia quote to which my link has rotted.)

The political ideology impact of the post-Civil War economic collapse in the South can be compared to the radical right influence that economic collapse in Germany after World War I in the Weimar Republic had leading to to fascism and World War II.

So, Southern whites, coming out of Reconstruction, were far more economically homogeneous than elsewhere in the U.S., which helped build a sense of solidarity.

Also, in 1860, there were about 22,100,000 people living in the Union states (only 400,000 of whom were slaves, about 2% of its overall population, of whom 340,000 were in Kentucky and Missouri) and 9,100,000 living in states that would become a part of the Confederate States of America (about 3,500,000 of whom were slaves, about 38% of its overall population). In the lowlands deep South including the Mississippi River valley, the percentage of the population that consisted of slaves was much greater.

The transition from a society where white Protestant men made up 98% of voting population to one where blacks made up 20%-50% of the voting population in particular counties and other political jurisdictions encouraged tactics of voter suppression and political unity in the face of a "common enemy" that was much more different from them than the political differences that existed among white Southerners.

Poor, Less Educated, Economically Insecure People Trend Conservative

Over all of that time, from the late colonial era to the present, the South was and remains less affluent as a whole than the North and less economically secure.

This wasn't confined to the rich either. Flush toilets and electricity for ordinary people came many decades later to the South than it did to the North too.

Literacy in the South among whites was also profoundly lower than the rest of the U.S. until long after the Civil War. A litmus test of the distinction can be seen these statistics:

In 1850…Arkansas had 97,402 white persons under twenty, and only 11,050 attending school; while of 210,831 whites of that age in Michigan, 112,175 were at school or college. Last year, Michigan had 132,234 scholars in her public common schools.

In 1850, Arkansas contained 64,787 whites over twenty, – but 16,935 of these were unable to read and white; while, out of 184,240 of that age in Michigan, only 8,281 were thus ignorant, – of these, 3009 were foreigns; while, of the 16,935 illiterate persons of Arkansas, only 37 were born out of that State. The Slave State had only 47,852 persons over twenty who could read a word; while the free State had 175,959.

Michigan had 107,943 volumes in “libraries other than private,” and Arkansas 420 volumes.

From Theodore Parker’s The great battle between slavery and freedom (1856).

And, in the long run, on average and barring intervening factors, poor, economically insecure, less educated people tend to be more conservative.

Obliquely related is that the American South was to a much greater extent a zero-sum game economy than other parts of the U.S. The South has a mostly agricultural economy until very late compared to the rest of the U.S., and almost all arable land in the South was farmed very early on.

In contrast, the Midwest and then the West allowed for win-win solutions by expanding into new territory (and displacing the Native Americans there). And, the North and Midwest also overcame the zero-sum game trap by industrializing so that agricultural land wasn't a limiting factor, an economic trend that came really a century or so later to the South than to the North.

Conservative thinking and political approaches are a better fit to a world that is a zero-sum game. Liberal thinking and political approaches are a better fit to a world where win-win solutions are widely available.

It is the liberalism of poor non-whites in the U.S., and the liberalism of whites in unions post-WWII, and not the conservatism of other poor whites in the U.S., that is the historical exception that requires explanation.

To oversimplify, poor non-whites in the U.S. are liberal because conservatism was taken by poor whites whose policies posed an existential threat to them, and working class union whites were liberal because the economy needed so many modestly skilled workers after WWII that they enjoyed unprecedented prosperity that unions helped to harness with liberal policies.

Answer 2

This would take a long history lesson to explain, but the basis is in three events:

1. The Civil War (1861-5)
2. The Reconstruction (1865-77)
3. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's, specifically The Civil Rights Act of 1964

Previous to the 1960's, Southern Whites voted predominantly Democratic because Democrats supported the secession of Southern States at the beginning of the Civil War, while Republicans opposed secession and slavery.

When Lyndon B Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he said,

"I know the risks are great and we might lose the South, but those sorts of states may be lost anyway."2

He foresaw that the white majority in these states would move away from the Democratic party and in fact they did, as you have observed in your question.

Answer 3

Within the USA the political divide between Republicans (conservatives) and Democrats (liberals) is a divide between rural and urban areas. Low population density areas tend to the conservative, minimal government beliefs and perceive government programs as more of an impediment than a benefit. They tend to be more independent and self sufficient. High population density areas are much more dependent on government services and see large government programs as more of a benefit. The "blue" democratically controlled states all have large cities whose population out numbers the rest of the state. This is easily seen if you look at election results by county instead of by state.

Most "swing" voters that determine election results are from the suburban areas, not truly liberal urban areas or conservative rural areas.

As always you will be to find exceptions.

The south does not have large urban areas, nor as many. There are some exceptions, such as Miami FL, a large urban area that has a number of Cuban and Central American refugees that is very much conservative, having seen the result of leftist socialism.

Answer 4

The Democrat Party, that's why. White Democrat elites ruined the South, and they ruined the Confederate States of America (CSA). Slavery brought them great wealth - the greatest in the nation, and understand that Lincoln originally intended to go after slave-owners not by outright abolition, but through taxation. And money is all that matters to old money. There was little difference to them between the black slaves they owned and the poor white sharecroppers they owned in all but name. Instead of abolishing slavery and switching to a wage labor system, which would've brought Britain and France into the war on the South's side, the White Democrat elites arrogantly believed they could maintain an ancient practice, essentially alone, in a world that had long outgrown it, and fight a war without a sufficiently developed infrastructure (also their fault because slavery resulted in all the South's wealth being concentrated on the hands of the very few.) Totally a war of justified Northern Aggression, thanks to the idiots who fired on Sumter.

Fast forward a bit, they lose that dumb war they had no business starting at Sumter. Black people are freed. It's worth noting the first person most of them went to for a job was their former master. However, the White Democrat elites, most of whom survived the war while untold numbers of average southerners died for their greed, didn't stop their attempts at controlling both poor blacks, and poor whites. Democrats told southern whites they had to fear the free black man because the white vote would be diminished, yet their predecessors going back decades had fought in Congress to have black slaves count for political representation. So many poor whites, bitter at their defeat, fell into their sway. So we got Jim Crow, Black Codes, the KKK, etc. The first prisons, and the prison industrial complex we know today, began with the leasing by the US federal government of unjustly incarcerated blacks right back to the plantations they'd been "freed" from, right back to their former owners in some cases - now their wardens. Puts the Civil War into a different perspective, don't you think? Not about ending slavery at all, just about changing who profited from it.

Fast forward to FDR, a white Democrat elite, a segregationist, and a pretty smart racist. He succeeded in turning the American South into the closest thing there's ever been to the Socialist States of America. Yeah, the same American South that's so reliably conservative and red today. People had pictures of FDR hanging in their hall beside Jesus. He was damn good at what he did, but FDR made a mistake. He gave the South infrastructure. For all his faults and as much as I despise him, he made the South modern. He is responsible for the lake that exists a mile from my house, among many other reservoirs that were built to control flooding and allow for more efficient farming of things besides cotton. The mistake in this, which FDR would not live to know of or regret, was that he ultimately is responsible for the economic and social diversity that made the Civil Rights Movement possible.

I'd be happier to go into greater detail if you'd like, but said movement would not have been possible in a pre-modern south, and would have ended with either most blacks or most whites in mass exodus to other regions of the country, far more than what we historically observed. So the Civil Rights Movement starts up in the South. For years, the prevailing sentiment most whites shared was that which was embedded in them, socially conditioned in them by their democrat elites for generations since the civil war - including during the administration of FDR. Fear of blacks drove most southern whites into the Democrat's arms, but many whites -now less isolated than they once were, and socially more exposed to black culture and black music - came to support the civil rights movement, and it became something of a counterculture among southern whites. This created all kinds of problems for the democrat party. They went to such extremes as orchestrating Tulsa in their efforts to maintain control.

Along comes Lyndon Baines Johnson. Most brilliant racist in American History. He once said "keep a white man worried about how deep a black man is in his pockets, and keep a black man worried about how deep a white man is in his pockets, and neither will care how deep the government is in both their pockets." LBJ realized that like slavery, like the pre-Napoleonic war CSA officers thought they'd fight and win, Democrats were hooked on an outdated method the world would no longer allow them to profit from. So he decided it was time for Democrats to control black people more subtly, time for their control to evolve with the times. His intention: gradually gain control over blacks using welfare. Keep them poor, keep them dependant. He is where that pattern truly began. While most democrats voted against the Civil Rights Act (this is what happens when you socially engineer hate in people for generations) he managed to get enough of them on board for the Act to pass. And in the coming years, his vision came to pass.

The lie of the Republicans and Democrats "flipping" is nonsense. Philosophically and functionally, and in their respective goals, both parties remained the same, they simply each changed their methods. In the generations that followed, the Democrats traded their white base for their growing and more promising black base. As a result of Democrats losing power in the South, the South finally became less and less racist. My parents saw the last of segregation, watched it die. From the time that I and every other southerner my age frost started pre-school, we were all together, white and black, and every color in between. We were taught at home and at school that we are equal, and with no political party capitalizing on and creating racial strife, it all stuck. The only thing for over a century and a half that kept the South hateful and divided traded us for the Northeast and the Left Coast. Today, most white southerners vote against Democrats, but not necessarily for Republicans, if that makes sense.

White Southerners do not understand how so many black people could settle for financial dependence on the party that once enslaved them, and oppressed them for decades after. And of course Democrats tell the black voter that it's the white's fault they need welfare to begin with - yeah, white Democrats elites' fault. They tax and spend and tax and spend, and the ghettos on the other side of the railroad tracks never get better policing or a new park, the government housing never gets renovated, and white southerners, wise to the Democrat's act, are naturally very opposed to it. They see white liberal democrats, not black people, as being too deep in their pockets. I hope this provides you with some insight about why we think what we think, and where it all comes from.

Some relevant books you might benefit from reading are: Ever is a Long Time, W. Ralph Eubanks - Redneck Liberal, Chester M Morgan - The Field of Blood, Joanne B Freeman - The Second Founding, Eric Foner - Revolt of the Rednecks, Albert D Kirwan - American Capitalism: A Reader, Louis Human and Edward Baptist (specifically the modules concerning the Pre-Civil War Economy of the South/FDR/The New Deal)