Is There Still a South?: And Does it Matter?

ATLANTA AND THE MAKING OF MODERN CONSERVATISM by Kevin Kruse Princeton University Press, 2005 352 pp $35 THE TRANSFORMATION of the solid Democratic South to the predominantly Republican South after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the mid1960s is one of the most critical developments in American politics and only a handful of dyed-in-the-wool conservative Republicans have denied the important role that race played in triggering this process. (Translation: earlier writers about the South foolishly believed that voters' political choices spring from a complex mixture of rational decisionmaking, inertia, prejudice, selfless idealism, ignorance, and deep-seated emotional attitudes that can only be approximated; as impartial social scientists, however, we have constructed statistical models that can differentiate the racial and economic motivations of voters and establish their importance down to the last quarter percentile.) Unlike these earlier writers who assumed that race was central to post-Second World War Southern politics, Shafer and Johnston claim to have approached this issue with an open mind, using systematic voting data on Southern House races (heavily), Senate contests (secondarily), and presidential races (occasionally) to separate the political effects of racial desegregation from economic development.