The Arc of a Covenant, page 54
From the beginning, the American right’s embrace of Israel was problematic for the largely liberal and Democratic majority of American Jews. Fifteen hundred years of grim history in Europe had taught Jews that popular Christianity was often twisted into antisemitism. The ugly history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe had shown that populist nationalism could also turn toward Jew-hatred. The anti-welfare-state, antisocialist ideas that inspired Ronald Reagan struck a large majority of American Jews as both mean-spirited and wrongheaded.
While Herzl had predicted that a Jewish state would be able to overcome antisemitism in other countries and form useful connections with them, the emerging alliance between Israel and the American right was not what he had in mind. Herzl expected that the emigration of Jews from other countries to Israel would gradually eliminate antisemitism, and that formerly antisemitic parties and politicians would learn to treat the Jewish state as just another factor in world politics.[1]
What happened on the American right was not that. What drew the American right to Israel was not the perceived normalcy of the Jewish people and state but their perceived uniqueness, whether as a focus of God’s intervention in history or as the focus of bitter, irrational hatred by groups who often also hated the United States and its capitalist economy and, as some would put it, its settler state ethos and cowboy culture.
For the Republican Party to fall in love with Israel, the eastern Republican establishment had to fall. In the 1950s, the American establishment looked much as it had since the Civil War: overwhelmingly Republican, overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly Protestant or culturally Protestant, overwhelmingly based in the great cities of the Northeast and the Middle West, with an enclave along the Pacific coast stretching from Seattle to San Francisco. The banks, manufacturing companies, stock and commodity exchanges, universities, publishers, foundations, and law firms based in these cities dominated both Republican Party politics and national life. While the streets of the great cities, and increasingly their city halls, teemed with Irish and Great Wave immigrants, the boards of directors who ran both the for-profit corporations and the nonprofit foundations, hospitals, and universities were drawn almost entirely from “old stock” Americans.
The domination of this American establishment was not only ethnic and racial. It was regional. The Civil War had brought both the abolition of slavery and the victory of northern industrial capitalism over the slave-based commodity capitalism of the South, and the domination of the urban manufacturing economy of the North over southern and midwestern farmers. Southern white resistance succeeded in installing a racial hierarchy and Jim Crow laws across the former Confederacy, but for many years it was unable to challenge the ability of the victorious Northeast to make economic and trade policy that favored industry over agriculture, cities over the countryside, Wall Street over Main Street, and the North over the South. Southern and midwestern farmers and local businesses united to fight the hard money, pro-monopoly Republican power structure, but for the first fifty years after the Civil War their occasional political victories did little to weaken the entrenched economic and cultural power of what came to be called the eastern establishment.
Beginning with the upheavals of the 1960s, the power of the eastern establishment in the Republican Party would gradually weaken. This did not mean a new era of nonhierarchical politics was developing in the United States. The American establishment was not lying on its deathbed; it was undergoing a metamorphosis. Over time, this process would yield a new, socially liberal multiethnic American establishment based largely in the Democratic Party. This new incarnation of the American establishment would dominate the universities, foundations, publishing houses, museums, cultural institutions, broadcasters, and corporate boards almost as effectively as the old incarnation, but it would gradually drop the Republican affiliation, the Protestant religious character, and the ethnic and racial exclusivity of its predecessor. The protean new American establishment would bring Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the Ivy League, and Hollywood into a powerful and fateful alignment.
This shift worked itself out over several decades, and was often generational: the sons and daughters of liberal Republicans became socially liberal, fiscally conservative Democrats. As the base of the Republican Party became more socially conservative and more demonstrably (some would say, obstreperously) Christian, the elite shift away from the GOP accelerated. By the start of the twenty-first century, what was left of the WASP establishment was largely Democratic; the Hamptons, Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and Cape Cod became, at least during August, among the most Democratic places in the country. A liberal Republican establishment continued to exist, but its power in the Republican Party continued to dwindle.
Rebirth of a Nation
The so-called Reagan Revolution was one of the most unexpected developments in American political history. The once marginalized right, a collection of fringe figures espousing what most American intellectuals and political activists regarded as discarded, discredited ideas, roared back from Barry Goldwater’s landslide defeat in 1964 to wrench American history into a new direction. Power shifted regionally in the United States as well in these years, from the Rust Belt North of declining factories and crime-ridden, fiscally strapped cities to the Sun Belt that stretched from modernizing and growing southern cities like Charlotte and Atlanta to the prosperous landscapes of Southern California. For the South, in particular, it was a heady time. A new generation of southern Republican leaders like Georgia’s Newt Gingrich made the audacious claim that the South was no longer America’s problem region, backward, bigoted, and blighted, but was now a modern, forward-looking place, leading the United States as a whole toward a brighter future.
Israel was part of the glue that held the Sun Belt coalition together and was encoded into the ideological DNA of the Republican Party from the Reagan era through the Trump years. The connections were often missed by those who saw the New Right primarily in terms of its economic agenda. How and why a program of deregulation and smaller government at home meshed with support for a small and in the 1970s still semisocialist country thousands of miles away was not immediately obvious. But the connections, though indirect, were strong. The Sun Belt Republican coalition was both unlikely and inherently unstable. Pious evangelicals, honky-tonking southern good ol’ boys, blue-collar midwestern Catholics, and elite neoconservative policy intellectuals were not naturally drawn toward one another.
Support for Israel helped unite Southern California with the old South, creating the Sun Belt alliance that dominated American politics for a generation. It helped to enlist often skeptical Jacksonian populists in support of an economic and social program and a foreign policy vision that would propel the United States to victory in the Cold War and shape a generation of Republican policy at home and abroad.
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“In Your Heart You Know He’s Right” was the slogan for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. “In your guts you know he’s nuts,” responded the Democrats,[2] and most voters sided with them as Goldwater lost the presidency in the largest popular vote landslide since FDR defeated Alf Landon in 1936. By 1980, when Goldwater’s political heir Ronald Reagan took up the New Right banner against President Jimmy Carter, somehow those same ideas had moved to the mainstream. From 1980 through 2008, when then-Senator Barack Obama defeated another Arizona senator in the Goldwater-Reagan tradition, the New Right was the dominant force in American politics. Even when, as from 1993 to 2001, Democrats controlled the White House, they found it necessary to co-opt rather than oppose key New Right themes. As president, Bill Clinton balanced the federal budget, reformed welfare to encourage recipients to reenter the labor market by limiting benefits, and passed some of the toughest crime legislation in American history.
The New Right challenged the political orthodoxies of New Deal America; as a movement largely grounded in the ex-Confederate states, it also shook the balance of power in regional politics. The South has not, historically speaking, been America’s trendsetter. It has more often been the exception than the rule, more stepchild than favorite son. It was not all that obvious even in hindsight how what since before the Civil War had been seen as the most backward region of the country emerged in the 1970s to set the national agenda, how the most Democratic region of the country reshaped the Republican Party in its image, how a region that still venerated the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy revived full-throated American nationalism, how the least developed, most agrarian, and most anticapitalist American region midwifed the greatest extension of global financial capitalism in the history of the world, and why the most inward-turning and anti-imperialist region of the country supported a global American foreign policy of enormous ambition and idealism for thirty years.
It was not, however, the South as a whole or even the white South as a whole that brought this about. Those responsible for the transformation, first of the South and then of the country, were the heirs of the New South pragmatic southern progressives who tried to steer a middle course between agrarian populists and Bourbon Democrats—whose ranks included many plantation owners and other members of the prewar southern elite—to promote modernization and development in a backward and impoverished region.
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When American historians look at the post–World War II history of the American South, the civil rights movement fills center stage, as it should. The discipline, focus, and moral leadership of southern Blacks astonished the region, the nation, and the world. It was not just that leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. made eloquent speeches or stood for uplifting principles. It was the patient courage and human dignity of people in all walks of life who insisted on their rights under God and the Constitution. Southern Blacks stood up to insidious economic pressure and outrageous violence. They could not be cowed; they would not stoop to the violence and vandalism of their opponents. That America could produce a people and a movement of this grace and strength is one of our greatest national accomplishments; that we needed such a movement is one of our great national shames.
But the civil rights movement was not the only thing that was happening in the post-1945 South. Even as the Black South began to see some of its long-deferred hopes move toward fruition, pro-business white moderates were also reaping the rewards of decades of work.
The end of Reconstruction left southern whites divided into two large political camps and one small one: Bourbon Democrats, agrarian populists, and New South modernizers. The Bourbons had little interest in improving conditions for either poor Blacks or poor whites. While remaining under the Democratic umbrella the Bourbons were conservatives, supporting the gold standard and opposing all forms of business regulation. They were more interested in preserving their own privileged status than in building up either the region or the country as a whole.[3]
Opposed to the Bourbons were agrarian populists, small farmers in many cases who wanted cheap money and tough regulations on railroads, banks, and other companies seen as exploiting them. In some cases, white southern populists made alliances across racial lines with Black southerners against Bourbon rule, but such alliances were mostly short-lived and always vulnerable to race-baiting politicians ready to exploit prejudice for political gain.[4]
A much smaller third force also existed. These so-called New South supporters were the closest thing the South had to the Progressive movement in the North. Like the Bourbons, men like North Carolina’s Josephus Daniels and South Carolina’s James Byrnes were frankly and fully pro-capitalist. But unlike the Bourbons, they wanted to transform the southern status quo—to promote public education, to invest in infrastructure, improve public health, and otherwise bring the South into the twentieth century. It was largely due to their efforts that school attendance finally became compulsory throughout the South, that state bureaucracies were at least partially professionalized, and that various progressive “good governance” reforms were introduced. At times they supported the regulation of nonsouthern companies like railroads and banks, but they wanted taxes and regulations to remain low overall.[5]
While the Bourbons were happy with the racial status quo, believing that poor whites could always be manipulated into supporting Bourbon policies as long as the race card was available, the New South Democrats were on the whole embarrassed by the suffocating consequences of entrenched southern racial attitudes and sought to downplay the race issue. They supported segregation in the aftermath of Reconstruction because they believed that an ordered, administered system would reduce the outbreaks of violence that disfigured the South and made it unattractive to investors. It was also a concession to the reality that the Bourbon Democrats could always checkmate attempts to provide public services like schools unless the mass of white voters felt that first, Blacks and whites would not mix in the schools and, second, that funds collected from white taxpayers would be spent primarily on white people.
The three-cornered fight for supremacy between Bourbons, populists, and New South progressives was perhaps more bitter—and was certainly harder for outsiders to follow—because the post-Reconstruction South had shifted to a one-party system that was quite peculiar in other ways. Not only were most Blacks excluded from voting, but poll taxes and other factors discouraged poor white voting as well. This opaque system produced results that often confounded outsiders, but over time some patterns emerged. There was a premium on outsize personalities and sometimes outrageous political behavior. Electoral corruption was widespread and routine, with ballot box stuffing common. Loyalties were often tribal. Once one candidate played the race card, it was hard for competitors not to follow suit.
Through it all, New South progressives continued to pursue what we would now call a regional development strategy, and over time it began to pay off. The idea was to attract northern industry and investment to the South. To achieve this, the South would need to build better railroads and, later, highways and airports. It needed cheap and reliable electric power, partly to run factories and partly to make air-conditioning—a technology that would change the arc of southern history almost as dramatically as the cotton gin—widely available. It would need to achieve basic universal literacy and improve public health. And it would need to be competitive on costs, offering lower wages, lower taxes, and less burdensome regulation than states in the North.
As late as the 1930s, the southern states were desperately poor. In 1940, the per capita state income in Mississippi, the poorest state in the union, was $212 per year—20 percent of the figure in wealthy Delaware.[6] In 1940, 15 percent of Arkansas residents had a high school diploma, less than half the percentage in California, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia.[7] While more than half of young people between sixteen and twenty living in western states were enrolled in school in 1940, fewer than a third of young people in Kentucky, North Carolina, Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina stayed in school after age sixteen.[8] While Blacks were at the bottom of the economic ladder across the South, poor whites lagged well behind the rest of the country as well. Unpainted cabins without running water or plumbing were still relatively common sights into the 1950s and 1960s in some areas; chain gangs of convicts still toiled on the roads. Prevailing wages were considerably lower across the South. In textiles, the lowest paid category of industrial employment, southern workers earned 18 percent less in the South than their northern counterparts before World War II.[9] This was an improvement from 1922, when Alabama textile workers earned 21 cents an hour compared to 40.9 cents an hour in Massachusetts,[10] but stark wage differentials remained, and skilled factory and industrial jobs remained scarce across the South.
The New South strategy had already begun to enjoy both economic and political success in the late nineteenth century, but it took the New Deal, World War II, and the Cold War buildup to bring the South closer to parity with the rest of the country. Federal spending played a critical role; long-serving southern Democrats controlled key committees in Congress and ensured that the South had its fair share and more of any available money.
Thanks to New Deal projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority, the South was able to power the factories and military bases needed for World War II. Waves of new factories propelled urbanization across the region. The Interstate Highway System linked southern cities with each other and with the national market. The G.I. Bill jolted sleepy southern universities into new life. Cheap Veterans Administration loans gave the rising generation of white southerners access to modern housing. (Shamefully, Black veterans were only able to use G.I. Bill money in underfunded and less developed all-Black institutions, and were generally unable to find bankers willing to lend them money for housing.) With space program facilities dotting the South in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Huntsville, Alabama, Houston, Texas, and elsewhere; with nuclear facilities in Georgia and South Carolina; bustling navy yards and giant military bases including Fort Bragg, Fort Benning, and Fort Hood, the South teemed with federal facilities hosting everyone from rocket scientists to GIs undergoing basic training.
The waves of prosperity that flooded across the South helped solidify the political appeal of the moderates over both the populists and the Bourbons. As more southerners moved off the farms, and the sharecropper system disappeared, agrarian populism seemed less relevant. And working for good wages in an air-conditioned factory did not seem like exploitation to people who had grown up in rural or small-town homes without electricity or piped water.
The greatest challenge moderate leaders faced was the civil rights movement, and the most emotional issue was school integration. The Supreme Court’s unanimous 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision declared segregated school systems inherently unconstitutional and ordered the integration of public schools across the country. Moderates, who had long understood that southern racial politics were, if nothing else, “bad for business,” did their best to temporize and find ways to avoid scenes like the violent mobs in cities like Little Rock and Birmingham, Alabama. However, white opposition to integrated schools was so strong that several states made plans to close all of their public schools rather than integrate. Some went so far as to repeal state constitutional provisions that required the state to provide free public education for their children.
