Waiting for Liberal Democracy in the American South
Our country’s constitutional order is withering before us. In the states of the former Confederacy, democracy never fully flourished.
DONALD TRUMP’S FAST-MOVING, catastrophically implemented project of recreating American government to better suit his own purposes has elicited white-hot reactions from critics who claim his administration is making a fundamental and irreparable break with the traditions, norms, and stability-conferring institutions that have defined America’s global identity for over a century.
They’re not wrong about the scope of his intent—but when critics go so far as to claim that there is no precedent for what Trump is doing in the history of American government, they are forgetting about the political history of the American South.
Liberal democracy has never put down deep roots in the South in the way it did across the rest of the country. The region never really abandoned its warped electoral politics and inclination to single-party cronyism, a Southern political instinct that helps explain how Democratic dominance transformed so completely into Republican one-party rule following the civil rights era. Inequality continues to define economic life in the region. Southern states have remained hostile to many minority groups, particularly LGBTQ Americans, and they are wildly out of step with most other states on reproductive rights. And incarceration in the South remains both less humane and more common than in other regions.
These characteristics of the South already have an outsized role in our national politics. And if Trump, Vance, and Musk aren’t stopped, these features may scale up until they come to define the nation—so it is important that we see and think clearly about their origins and what they mean for our political destiny.
“AMERICAN HISTORY IS A CONSTANT war between Northern Yankees and Southern Bourbons, where whichever side the hillbillies are on, wins,” Vice President JD Vance said on a podcast during the runup to the election last fall. “And that’s kind of how I think about American politics today, is like, the Northern Yankees are now the hyperwoke, coastal elites.”
Bourbon rule across the South is a good starting place for understanding the challenges facing the region. The Bourbons—Southern Democrats of the planter and professional classes who opposed Reconstruction—came to dramatically shape American politics from the 1870s into the early twentieth century. For decades, this small elite fomented discord among poor whites to keep their political energies focused on their peers rather than their de facto rulers. As Reconstruction began to falter in the mid-1870s, Bourbon power brokers gained control in Southern states like Alabama and Georgia. By the 1890s, the Old South was aggressively reasserting itself. In 1896, the Supreme Court enshrined the principle of “separate but equal.”
In 1898, America’s first coup d’etat took place as the Democrats of Wilmington, North Carolina issued a “White Declaration of Independence.” They were attacking the coalition of black Republicans and white Populists that had control of the local government in the 1890s, which the old Confederates of the city found intolerable. With their resentment and rage being fueled by white Democratic powerbrokers, two thousand armed men forced out the duly elected government. None were more pleased by this result than their Bourbon backers.
V.O. Key Jr., one of America’s greatest scholars of Southern politics, blames this “banker-planter-lawyer” class for the South’s political and economic underdevelopment. Ostensibly pro-business but viciously self-interested, the Bourbons not only defended the South’s racial apartheid but also exploited the region’s poor rural whites, as the Wilmington coup attests.
The consequences of this, as of the Civil War, are still being felt. In a 2024 essay for Aeon, academic and writer Keri Leigh Meritt laid out the many ways the South as a region lags economically—pinned down by poverty, hobbled by an absence of public investments, and choked by a miasma of disillusionment and isolation:
Southerners in general are isolated and lonely, and wealth and power are heavily concentrated: there are a few thousand incredibly wealthy families – almost all of them the direct descendants of the Confederacy’s wealthiest slaveholders – a smaller-than-average middle class, and masses of poor people, working class or not. The South, with few worker protections, prevents its working classes from earning a living wage. It’s virtually impossible to exist on the meagre income of a single, low-wage, 40-hour-a-week job, especially since the US has no social healthcare benefits.
Vance’s comments on the Bourbons place them in a national frame, which brings us to another important dimension of the post-Civil War South. Historian Heather Cox Richardson and others have argued that the South’s oligarchic power structures were not dismantled following the defeat of the Confederacy. A number of modern studies have shown that, in many places in the South, the self-styled aristocrat Bourbons recovered their wealth and status in the years following the Civil War.
But not only were Bourbon power and prerogatives preserved. Richardson claims that the dynamics of Southern aristocracy came to shape and influence the country at large in determinative ways. The South fused its historical antipathy toward market restrictions with the new culture wars of segregation and anti-communism, positioning its white elites as a vanguard of American democracy and thereby placing a heavy hand on the electoral politics of the nation. Vance was right about at least one important thing: The Bourbon legacy has continued into the present.
NOWHERE IS THAT CLEARER than in the South itself. Today, Southern states perform poorly on measures of inequality. Using Census Bureau data, New York and the District of Columbia rate the worst for household income inequality, measured by Gini coefficient. But the South as a region performs relatively poorly, all of it falling into the bottom half. Louisiana ranks fourth worst out of fifty states plus D.C. Alabama, Georgia, and Florida are all in the bottom ten. Even with better-performing states like Virginia (26th), South Carolina (27th), the average rank of states in the region is 37 out of 51.
But it’s not just economic power that’s unevenly distributed in the South. Political power here rests almost entirely in the hands of one party, the GOP. It’s a continuation of the South’s longstanding tendency toward single-party democracy.
Key, the Southern politics scholar, singled out my state of Arkansas as the extreme example of one-party dominance in the early to mid–twentieth century. In 1949, he observed that “perhaps in Arkansas we have the one-party system in its most undefined and undiluted form.”
Of course, in that time, it was the Democratic party that enjoyed uncontested power. But the fracturing of the Democratic coalition between civil rights advocates like Lyndon Johnson and diehard segregationists like George Wallace helped push the South into the arms of the Republicans. Richard Nixon and other GOP politicians famously exploited the South’s racial and economic dynamics as part of the “Southern Strategy” starting in the late 1960s. But, as Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields observe, decades of politicking to secure dominance in the region ultimately transformed the GOP more than it did the South. In their book The Long Southern Strategy, they approvingly cite an observation of historian Glenn Feldman’s: “The South did not become Republican so much as the Republican Party became Southern.”
In many cases, the party labels flipped while the elites stayed the same. Strom Thurmond switched from the Democratic to the Republican party in 1964. Jesse Helms, Phil Gramm, John Connolly, Mills Godwin, and a host of other politicians followed the same path between the 1960s and 1980s. Except for a merely nominal change—and the interlude of Reconstruction—the South’s ruling caste has been essentially continuous for centuries.
In 2025, the Solid South remains. Of the eleven states of the former Confederacy, only North Carolina and Virginia are not currently governed by Republican trifectas. Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas have all voted Republican in every presidential election this century—seven in a row. (Georgia voted for a Democrat just once in that span, in 2020.)
IT SHOULD COME AS NO SURPRISE that a region with an entrenched Bourbon aristocracy and one-party rule has important deficits in both democracy (competitive electoral politics) and liberalism (individual rights and freedoms). While voter turnout is an imperfect indicator of the health of a democratic system, low turnout combined with an entrenched ruling elite and more illiberal policies points to a region that suffers from what in national contexts might be called a democratic deficit. In every midterm and presidential election since at least 2010, voter turnout in the South on average has lagged behind turnout in the United States as a whole, sometimes by as much as 3.5 percent of eligible voters.
At the same time, the liberal values of pluralism and protection of minority rights have undergone severe challenges owing to the region’s long history of racism, segregation, patrimonialism, and terrorism, all at times sponsored by the state. While the horrors of Jim Crow are gone, Southern states are still more tolerant of a hands-on government in spheres other than economics. Take, for example, the fact that of 1,435 school book bans on record across the country in 2022, 922 of them were instituted in the former Confederacy. Or the fact that among those states, only Virginia doesn’t ban abortions before twelve weeks of pregnancy. Looking at the map, the South is the clear outlier on abortion policy, with the vast majority of other states adopting less restrictive laws.
According to data from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, women in general perform abysmally across a range of metrics in the South. Graded on employment and earnings, political participation, poverty and opportunity, reproductive rights, health and well-being, and work and family, no Southern state outside Virginia received higher than a C+ in any category. My home state, Arkansas, ranked 47th in the country in three different categories.
The data are similar for LGBTQ rights and equality, according to the Movement Advanced Project. Per MAP’s data, eight of the bottom ten states are from the former Confederacy. All of the former Confederate states except Virginia are in the bottom half. The Human Rights Campaign’s State Equality Index labels every Southern state except for Virginia as a “high priority to achieve basic equality.”
But the South’s most egregious abuses remain in the realm of criminal justice. According to the Sentencing Project, the three worst states for per capita incarceration are Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. The three states with the highest felony disenfranchisement rates are Tennessee, Florida, and Alabama. In both cases, these states blow national averages out of the water.
And it isn’t just that Southern states are locking people up at higher rates. They are also subjecting them to harsher conditions. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, Alabama has recorded a prison homicide rate five times the national average for the last five years. In 2019, the Department of Justice—Donald Trump’s Department of Justice—stated that the Alabama Department of Corrections “routinely violates the constitutional rights of prisoners.”
The organization Human Rights for Kids, which assesses the treatment of minors in each state’s justice system, found that four of the five states it classified as the “worst human rights offenders” in 2022 were in the South: Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee. It found that the states had “made little to no effort to protect the human rights of children in the justice system and [are] likely in violation of international human rights standards.” Once again, Virginia was the outlier—no other Southern state was found to have made more than “minimal” efforts to protect the rights of children in the criminal justice system.
The inalienable rights of people are key tenets of liberal democracy and are even written into our founding documents—including protections against inhumane treatment as punishment for crimes. Both the Bill of Rights and the Reconstruction Amendments wrestle directly with the criminal justice system’s place in sustaining a free society and the dangers of its abuse: The Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth all protect Americans in some way from violations of their fundamental liberties by this system. The lamentable distinctions of the Southern states in this area speak to just how far the region has to go in order to realize its potential as a true liberal democratic society.
JOANNE B. FREEMAN, in The Field of Blood, notes that, in the decades preceding the Civil War, “Southern congressmen had long been bullying their way to power with threats, insults, and violence in the House and Senate chambers, deploying the power of public humiliation to get their way.”
So what does it mean today if the Republican party—or America—has become Southern?
Though the South accounted for just 30 percent of the national population in 2020, of the 147 Republicans who voted to overturn that year’s election, 76—just over half—hailed from the former Confederacy, with all 11 states represented. Including Civil War border states and Oklahoma, the total rises to 91 votes—62 percent of all the votes to overturn the election representing states with just 40 percent of the national population.
Trump’s second accession to power marked the beginning of an administration even more willing to defy laws and abuse power than the one he led during his first term. With the vocal support of GOP majorities in Congress, the president has moved to impose a harsh program of mass deportations, major reductions in the federal workforce including purges of public servants deemed hostile to him, and a collapse of international aid and foreign assistance. He has encouraged the systematization of malfeasance and corruption on a level that has rarely been seen in our history, and he is prepared to enact a budget intended to put savings from sweeping cuts to the federal bureaucracy towards the tab for an array of tax cuts that will benefit the wealthiest Americans—our national Bourbon class. Trump’s administration is being empowered by a deeply anti-democratic and illiberal Republican Congress whose biggest power base is in the American South. Former Confederate state representation in the Senate, where the region’s impact is most distorted, accounts for 18 of the chamber’s Republicans.
Faulkner’s old mot—“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”—is as true, and as deeply felt, as ever. This is partly the result of a refusal to reckon deeply and profoundly with the traumas, shocks, and violence of Southern history. The process is not unimaginable: Germany undertook a public reckoning that led to reparations in the aftermath of the Second World War. But Southerners like myself might have to wait a long time for our region to gain the political will to displace its deeply entrenched traditions of anti-liberalism, state violence, and inequality. For now, our deep political deficit remains, and it threatens not only the region but America as a whole.
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