How Civil Rights And Economics Reshaped Southern Party Loyalty

The neat story about the South “flipping” after the 1960s sounds satisfying—until you stack it against voting patterns, platforms, and constitutional arguments that tell a slower, messier tale. We take you beyond the sound bites to examine how civil rights, federal power, and economic modernization interacted to reshape Southern party loyalty over decades, not election cycles.

With Dr. Beienberg, we unpack the conventional switch narrative and test where it holds and where it breaks. Goldwater’s stance on the 1964 Civil Rights Act becomes a lens for understanding a deeper Republican throughline: support for formal legal equality coupled with skepticism of an ever‑expanding Commerce Clause. On the other side, Democrats moved from filibustering civil rights in the 1950s to championing federal enforcement in the Johnson era, paving the way for policies like affirmative action. That asymmetric movement set the stage for voter realignment—but the timing and causes defy the myth.

Zooming out, we track how the South’s economic transformation—from underdeveloped to increasingly middle class—nudged voting behavior toward national patterns, even as race remained a powerful organizing force. Nixon’s 1960 civil rights signaling, GOP gains before 1964, and the long lag in statehouse realignment complicate the idea of an overnight switch. Instead, cohort change, suburbanization, and evolving party coalitions drove a layered transition that spanned generations. If you care about political history, party ideology, and the mechanics of realignment, this conversation offers a clear framework for rethinking what really changed—and when.

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Transcript

Setting The Debate

SPEAKER_00 0:46

Welcome back to Civics in the Year. Today we're talking about how the civil rights movement shifted party loyalty in the South. And we have Dr. Beyenberg with us today to have that discussion kind of about political parties, American history, just all of it. So, Dr. Bienberg, when we talk about the civil rights movement, how did that shift party loyalty in the South?

Goldwater, Commerce Clause, And 1964

Democrats Move, Republicans Stay Steady

Southern Politics Organized Around Race

Economic Modernization And Voting Change

SPEAKER_01 1:08

So I'm going to take an iconoclastic take. And I actually think that the argument is not the one that's the conventional narrative. So I'll start with what the conventional narrative is, how most people understand it, and then say a few words about why I don't think it's actually correct. And that's a debate that's going on among scholars. So the conventional narrative goes something like this: that the Republican Party had historically been the party of civil rights, and the Democratic Party had basically been the party attached to sort of Southern white supremacy. Even in the North, even if Northerners weren't attached to white supremacy, they had an electoral incentive to play along with it for party coalitional maintenance. And so the narrative goes basically during the civil rights era, the Democrats, particularly in the 1960s, whether this is because Kennedy always wanted to do it or Johnson sort of cynically attached himself to it afterward or strategic reasons, but Johnson embraces the civil rights movement in 63 after Kennedy's death and pushes through particularly the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And the narrative then goes that because Barry Goldwater was squeamish about the Civil Rights Act, particularly, and we'll talk more about him, but that he ends up positioning the Democrat the Republicans as the relative anti-civil rights party, and Johnson positions the Democrats as the pro-Civil Rights Party. Again, there are reasons I'll talk about why I don't think that narrative is quite right. But and then the story goes that basically what happens is that white Southerners move into the Republican Party basically because they've been influenced by what they see as Goldwater's skepticism of civil rights and black democrats, basically black voters in the South who now actually can vote. It's worth emphasizing they basically couldn't vote before that. So they're pretty much entering the party system altogether, that they embrace the Democratic Party. And so the narrative effectively is, and there's often vulgar, I think it's apocryphal comment from Lyndon Johnson. There's two versions of it, but one of them is, but the core of it is he basically, according to this apocryphal quote, says he's pretty much capturing black voters to work vote as Southern Democrats. At the same time, he's scaring off Southern whites as Southern Democrats. Right. So there's very permutations of this that are, I think I said, I think mostly apocryphal. So that's the short version. So the narrative again is basically Republicans and Democrats switch relative places on civil rights, and so therefore the party coalition switch. That's the conventional narrative, probably what they want you to put on the AP test or whatever. There are a lot of scholars that still uh argue that. There are reasons that I think that that narrative doesn't work if you look at sort of the broader history, both before and after. So one thing that I think is worth emphasizing, and this teases a little bit of the podcast that we're going to do next on how the parties have shifted. But there actually isn't that much movement on the Republicans in terms of their perspective on civil rights. If you look at the Republican perspective on civil rights and say the 1850s or 1860s, they want to have formal legal equality. You can look at the Civil Rights Act of 1866. They want basically formal legal equality, colorblind. So Goldwater, for example, has, but even his critics concede this, as an exemplary record on civil rights when he's at the state level and in previous federal legislation. He's squeamish about the Civil Rights Act of 1964. So he's very defensive of the 57 Civil Rights Act and others, but he's squeamish about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, two parts of it. The rest of it he's on board with. But there are two sections, Title II and Title VI, that the Johnson administration is defending on grounds that the sweeping commerce clause lets them do that, sweeping the scope of the commerce clause. We've talked about that before, the Wickard case that we laughed at most of our colleagues end up chuckling about how silly the reasoning is. But that's the case that they cited for those two provisions. So Goldwater, who's squeamish about the Wickard case, doesn't want to vote for it on those two grounds. Not because he's against civil rights, but he doesn't think the federal government can regulate particular kinds of private businesses. Many of his other colleagues disagree. So Goldwater is in fact quite anguished about that. And he consults, he actually consults constitutional scholars and says, if I think this case sucks, can I still vote for this thing or not? So the Republican position doesn't really move. What is clear is that the Democratic position moves from being the anti-civil rights party. I mean, the the Southerners are filibustering basically the Civil Rights Act of 57, the Southern Democrats, to Johnson basically repositioning them. So there's movement on that front. So whether that's a like a flipping, I'm not really sure, I don't think is quite fair. Basically, I think the argument is the Republicans stay consistent and the Democrats move from being a very aggressively anti-civil rights party to being a pro-civil rights party with the understanding, particularly that develops into something like affirmative action, right? So they move basically versus the Republicans staying sort of flat. Now, whether, again, that's just me being descriptive, not saying which is better, worse, or anything. The one basically stays the same, the other moves. But so that's part of why, sort of as a normative thing, I think the narrative is a little odd. But as a more sort of just descriptive historical thing, if you look at who's voting for what party in the 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, the narrative is a lot more complicated. So for example, this is this is covering the north a little bit, but Republicans start, or excuse me, New Englanders start tilting Democratic in the 1920s and 30s because of first prohibition and then the New Deal, right? So it's not like they suddenly decide to flip on civil rights, they're flipping for something else. The Democratic Party in the South is a little more complicated. Did they make you read a book called VOK by VOK, Southern Politics, when you were doing any of the stuff? It's generally considered it's a really fun book. Most of the book is just like him basically talking to crazy Southern politics who are fun. So most of it's just fun narrative and colorful characters like Huey Long and whatnot. But at the end of it, he basically says, All right, having studied Southern politics, my assessment is that the Southern Democratic Party can be explained by one thing and one thing only. The whole party, he says, is organized around race. He says, to be a Democrat in the South in this era means that you basically agree with white supremacy. You can disagree on economics. And so he says there are basically libertarian, you know, economically conservative, whatever you want to call them, factions, minimal regulation, like pro-business types, right? This faction called the Bourbons, they tended to be a little less racist, partly because they wanted to make money off of northerners who were squeamish about really explicit racism. So you have that faction, but then you also have a sort of more sort of economically progressive faction. And every time the Democrats would have their primary vote, they would fight basically between those factions. And so, but the one thing that like you had to be signing off on in the party is race. And so Key basically says that if economics rather than race ever becomes the cleavage in the South, you would see the party system operate much more normally as it is in the rest of the country, where Republicans and Democrats are fighting about economic issues. So in the 1930s, basically, like everywhere else in the US, the sort of more economically progressive populist faction wins with the news, wins basically, and the New Deal is getting pushed through. Even after Franklin Roosevelt in 1938 tries to purge holdouts. So you get this really fascinating period in the 30s where Democratic senators are basically the backbone of Social Security and other things, very generally pro-federal power, except for anything on race. So you can go through and look at in the 30s and the most ferociously racist senators, Cotton, they have fun names, but they're crazy and monstrous. Cotton, Ed Smith, Theodore Bilbo, Jimmy Burns, we've talked about him from the Brown episode. He's basically the architect of opposing the effort to basically desegregate the schools, the folks that become the Southern Manifesto signatories. Iraq Hatz Nelson has a great book called Fear Itself, which goes through all this. So the Democratic Coalition in the 30s is pro-national power for economic basically redistribution and welfare state, except on race. Race sort of closes it. But the thing is, in the 30s through the 50s, the South starts normalizing economically. It's really hard for us to appreciate how economically backwards the South is in the 30s. It's like literally almost a third world country in terms of pick any economic measurement, educational atonement, whatever, right? It's it's so far behind the North and the West. But investment starts coming. Some of this is the New Deal, some of this is infrastructure, some of this is just private investment, starts looking around saying, wow, we've got a labor force that we can deal with. And so it turns out that the Southerners start making some money, and many of them decide, like, hey, we're middle class people, we should start voting Republican, like middle class people, middle class business people in other places. And so you start seeing this realignment in terms of voting behavior happen in the 40s and the 50s, especially. So Nixon, for example, I think the the the clearest reason why I don't buy this the sort of Southern switch narrative is the 1960 election. Richard Nixon in 1960 is arguing. Now, this is in tension with some of his other thinking later, but he's arguing, I am the civil rights presidential candidate. He says, look, Brown v. Board of Education was pushed through by, he says, a Republican Supreme Court. Earl Warren's my bro, right? So they hate each other, actually, but he's trying to, he's basically trying to claim credit for that. And so he says, Brown v. Board was Republican Supreme Court, enforced by Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican president. This the 1960 Republican Party platform is written by Nelson Rockefeller with a robust civil rights enforcement plank. And yet, the Republican Party continues its steady rise in the South, and the Republicans win 45% of the vote in the South and three states, even as Nixon is basically saying we will be the Civil Rights Party. Right. So the realignment is already starting to happen in some sense, well before the Civil Rights Act. And in fact, when the Republicans are signaling that they're going to be civil rights enforcers. And the the the sort of additional complication on this is if you look at how the state level politics realign, like Republicans are not doing very well in the South, even as late as like 10 years ago. I think 15 years ago, like Arkansas had two Democratic senators. I mean, you look at the state legislative levels as well. Democrats control most of the South, even through the 90s and the 2000s. So there's this more sort of cohort. So I guess one how do I word this? The the I think it's clearly empirically wrong to say there was just this immediate switch, and then all of the sort of anti-Southern, anti-sort of civil rights senator uh Democrats switched to the Republicans. You have a couple examples of that, like Strom Thurman, but most of them actually still remain in the Democratic Party until they get primaried out or forced to retire over the 60s and 70s. The more nuanced version that I think has more merit is that sort of the next generation that didn't grow up as sort of historic Republicans or Democrats, that they were more willing to switch on civil rights. Again, I don't buy that narrative for the reasons that I was just mentioning, in terms of the way the parties have shifted. But that's the sort of the more, I think, subtle version. But the sort of normy version that the journalists like and that a lot of tests, et cetera, like is the party switched basically in 1965 to 1968. But if you have a sort of longer scope of history, both before and after, I just I don't think that that narrative holds empirically. But there are still scholars that do. If you would like to, I hate to be self-promoting, but if you if you would like to, I have a new article coming out called States Rights and Civil Rights. And you can ignore everything I say, but buried in the bottom is the footnotes going through and sort of laying out the different scholars making these arguments. So you can go back and go and look at that if you really want to get into the awful, awful weeds of quantitative polling data paired with political history, tedious party political history. So yeah, my my states rights and civil rights piece that I don't know exactly when this is going to air, but it'll be getting published in the next couple weeks as of February, March, April, somewhere in there.

SPEAKER_00 14:33

And listeners, we will put that in there, and I highly suggest that you read it because Dr. Beinberg does not like to self-promote, but he is very popular among our educators and our students. So if it is not immediately in the show notes, I will make sure that it gets posted as soon as it is available. Dr. Beinberg, thank you so much for again, we're talking so much about political parties and they've changed, you know, so much since their kind of onset in the 1800s. So we greatly appreciate it. And listeners, join us for our next episode where we're just gonna kind of give an overview. I say we, it's Dr. Beinberg giving the overview of how Democrats and Republicans have changed over time. Thank you, Dr. Beinberg.