Why White Liberals Fail: Race and Southern Politics by Anthony J. Badger

Abstract

Reviewed by: Why White Liberals Fail: Race and Southern Politics by Anthony J. Badger Daniel K. Williams Why White Liberals Fail: Race and Southern Politics. By Anthony J. Badger. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2022. Pp. x, 242. $27.95, ISBN 978-0-674-24234-0.) For much of the mid-twentieth century, white liberal politicians in the South appeared to have a chance. Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas and Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee won U.S. Senate races in the 1950s with campaigns that advocated strongly for social welfare spending, and Jimmy Carter of Georgia and Bill Clinton of Arkansas won gubernatorial elections in the 1970s thanks to a biracial coalition that favored increased aid to education. But today there are almost no white southern liberals in Congress or statehouses. States such as Tennessee that were once represented in the Senate by moderate liberals now have all-Republican Senate delegations that are strongly supportive of Donald Trump’s brand of politics. What happened to white southern liberalism? Why did white southern liberals fail to change the political culture of their region—and ultimately fail to [End Page 393] win elections? One might think that the answer is race—and Anthony J. Badger agrees. But it is not merely the case, he argues, that white voters rejected liberal politicians because the liberal politicians were too racially progressive for regional norms. Rather, he says, white liberals were too moderate on race to offer a convincing alternative to conservatism in the South. In the 1930s and 1940s, all white southern liberals—even the most ardent supporters of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal—were segregationists. Some wanted to increase economic aid to the African American community, but none wanted the federal government to intervene on matters of race relations. But southern white liberals’ hopes of transforming their region economically without addressing racial discrimination were dashed when the U.S. Supreme Court made desegregation a national issue with Brown v. Board of Education (1954)—a move that prompted a southern backlash that endangered southern white liberalism. The African American civil rights movement also caught white southern liberals off guard, and they gave it almost no support. Despite this failure of the first generation of postwar southern white liberals, a new generation of moderately progressive southern Democrats, including Carter and Clinton, were elected in the 1970s on the promise of economic uplift through education spending and partnerships with business. Yet even though these new southern moderates were more supportive of civil rights, they made the same mistake as their predecessors, believing that they could promote economic uplift without challenging structural racism. For a while, white southerners who enjoyed the benefits of postwar federal and corporate economic investment in their region were sympathetic to this vision, but in the mid-1990s, as globalization and deindustrialization left the rural South impoverished, white southerners turned against these moderate liberals. Their opposition to liberalism has only increased in the intervening decades. White southern liberals staked their political future on the premise that liberal economic policies could deliver economic uplift to their region without challenging the white racist power structure. When that promise failed, white voters turned against them, and Black voters (who had never appreciated white liberals’ refusal to confront the problem of systemic racism) decided that they could find better advocates elsewhere. But Badger is not optimistic that today’s Black liberals can win many statewide elections in the South either; white opposition is too strong. Badger does not offer much political advice for the future, and he does not suggest that a different strategy could have necessarily led to a better outcome. He is critical of white southern liberals’ attempts to avoid addressing racial issues, but he is also mindful of the challenging situation they faced. Perhaps this book’s refusal to settle for easy answers is one of its key strengths. Badger’s analysis, which he supports with numerous historical examples drawn from his half-century of studying twentieth-century southern politics, is nuanced and thoughtful. Readers will probably find the book’s conclusions compelling, albeit unsettling. [End Page 394] Daniel K. Williams University of West Georgia Copyright © 2023 Southern...