Talk:Southern strategy

Question on section titled "Scholorly debate"

The following text is included in the third paragraph of this section - "Lassiter says the Southern Strategy was a 'failure' for the GOP and that the Southern base of the Republican Party 'always depended more on the middle-class corporate economy and on the top-down politics of racial backlash' ".

This doesn't make sense to me in context. It seems like it should say "always depended more on the middle-class corporate economy THAN on the top-down politics of racial backlash." The language used in the article is also used by a number of other sources on the web. I could not find a copy of the referenced article with free access. If someone could get access, it would be helpful if the correctness of the text as written could be checked.Jpipersson (talk) 02:43, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

I looked it up in The Democratic Experiment..., and you are correct. I fixed it there....and another part of the quote was inaccurate as well so I fixed it too. Thanks for pointing this out.Rja13ww33 (talk) 03:02, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

2021 Jan removal of material

JzG, you removed a lot of significant material that was extensively discussed a few year back. The debate between the top down and bottom up narratives is a significant part of this article. Can you offer a bit more explanation why you removed so much sourced material? I'm not sure why Lassiter's article was red. I don't know who added the links, if they worked at one time or if they never worked. The other links did work. The book, The Silent Majority by Lassiter was cite almost 1000 times per Google Scholar. Springee (talk) 01:52, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

Agreed. I was about to revert until I saw your post. Too much RS material was removed that develops the debate on this issue. Not to say it cannot be trimmed.....but I don't follow removing it because the source does not have a wiki article. And the debate deserves some mention in the LEAD since we do have a lengthy section on it. (Although less lengthy now.)Rja13ww33 (talk) 02:01, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

Springee, because it makes a claim that the dominant view is "increasingly" disputed by "Southern" historians like Matthew Lassiter (redlink). We're here to publish mainstream scholarship, not to mainstream revisionism. Guy (help! - typo?) 09:58, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

JzG, I don't see where it says these are "southern" historians. Lassiter is not southern, he is at U of Michigan. His views are part of mainstream scholarship. This has been extensively discussed in the talk archives. I believe the actual claim from a scholar who was reviewing the sources was that the top down theory come out first and thus was, for a time the default understanding. The bottom up theory came out later and but once it came out it gained popularity with scholars. The "increasing" phrasing was based on the words of the scholar who did the review of sources/views. I think you have misread the debate. This is very much a mainstream theory. Springee (talk) 11:32, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

It is hard for me to gauge to what extent this is a minority assessment in the literature versus a substantial and prominent one. Ideally, we'd get inputs from actual historians and political scientists who are experts on the topic. Who wants to email the scholars who have been cited on this particular topic? Snooganssnoogans (talk) 16:10, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

We do have inputs from actual historians, Glen Feldman states it is "the dissenting—yet rapidly growing—narrative on the topic of southern partisan realignment".[10], Feldman, Glenn (2011). Painting Dixie Red: When, Where, Why and How the South Became Republican. University Press of Florida. pp. 16, 80. Feldman is specifically talking about Lassiter's POV. The fact that Lassiter et al's book has been cited nearly 1000 times is a very strong indication this is a mainstream view on the subject even if we can't say if it is the dominant view. Springee (talk) 16:35, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

Citation counts are not an accurate reflection of whether something reflects a mainstream view. In fact, minority views may often be way more cited than each publication that comprises the predominant view. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations has been cited 40,000 times, but primarily to be dunked on by topic experts. Snooganssnoogans (talk) 16:44, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

Are we trying to decide if this is the majority view (over 50%), not a fringe view (say over 5%) or simply minority view but one taken seriously, (say 40%)? I think the Feldman passage below should answer if this is just fringe vs if this is a view historians take seriously. This also aligns with much of the material Rjensen was proposing for the article a few years back. Springee (talk) 16:48, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

(edit conflict)Expanding the Feldman material, this excerpt from his book is from the talk archive:

All of this leads us, finally, to the dissenting - yet rapidly growing - narrative on the topic of the southern partisan realignment as represented in this book most clearly in the Tim Boyd, George Lewis, Michael Bowen, and John W White essays. All - to greater and lesser extents - follow the lead of the historian Matthew D Lassiter in The Silent Majority (2006) as well as that of the political scientists Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston in The End of Southern Exceptionalism (2006). Lassiter, and others since, have argued strongly against what they term the "white backlash" narrative of the South becoming Republican in reaction to national Democratic identification with civil rights and racial liberalism. The "Suburban school," as it may now be called, stresses a "suburban strategy" versus what it deems a "southern strategy" - and insists that post-World War II white southern suburbanites were relatively "color-blind" in their approach to politics. The argument goes on to reject the notion of a distinctive South as well as to downplay - and even at times dismiss - the role of race in motivating white southerners to leave the Democratic Party for the GOP. Race was just not something they cared a while lot about - this better-educated, upwardly mobile, suburban elite. In this volume, the suburban school approach is probably most clearly exemplified in the essays authored by Tim Boyd on Georgia and John W White on South Carolina, though it pops up in Dan William's and Leah Wright's essays, as well as elsewhere. The brewing debate between the "backlash" theorists and the "suburban school" is so important that I have chosen to include as many sides as possible in this volume. Feldman, Painting Dixie, page 16, Springee (talk) 16:45, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

I don't find "dissenting, yet rapidly growing" to be particularly compelling; it's a polite way to say "this view is on the fringes but it might go somewhere in the future, maybe." More importantly - that was in 2011, correct? Do you have anything more recent? A lot has changed in the past nine years specifically when it comes to racial and regional divisions in America and the scholarly assessment of them. I'm not seeing any evidence that the growth Feldman noted was substantiated in the long term. I can find barely any recent references to Feldman's views at all. --Aquillion (talk) 22:29, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

I can e-mail them if necessary....but we do know it is certainly a significant school of thought. If WEIGHT is a issue, we can trim down/paraphrase or perhaps make a footnote of the removed content. But I think it should be in to develop this POV to be clear on what it is.Rja13ww33 (talk) 17:33, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

Wouldn't it make more sense to email more mainstream scholars? Obviously every scholar is going to say their views are significant, but no, I do not at all see any evidence that it is a significant school of thought given how large the topic area is as a whole. There were a few Southern historians who praised it and speculated that it might prove to be more convincing then it actually turned out to be, but it looks to me (at least based on references to it relative to the size of the topic as a whole) that it didn't really go anywhere in the long term. --Aquillion (talk) 22:31, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

I (currently) haven't e-mailed anyone. Before I did, I would want consensus on who & the content of said correspondence. And I disagree that it isn't "a significant school of thought" Shafer & Johnson's work (and (to my knowledge) neither of them are southern) has been cited quite a bit since it came out. Numerous other citations in the article indicate this is not a uncommon school of thought. We simply do not know how much of a percentage it is among scholars. (I would assume a survey would to tough to ascertain.)Rja13ww33 (talk) 22:41, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

• We're definitely putting too much emphasis on Lassiter specifically. A Google Scholar search finds only 52 results for "suburban strategy" "southern strategy", many of them dismissing it (Adding the latter phrase is necessary because there are many uses of the term that don't refer to Lassiter's theories, such as the 2018 Democratic strategy in the midterms, which further underlines how comparatively fringe they are, ie. he's failed to even dominate the use of the phrase he tried to use for it; even scholars who focus on race relations and political divisions in America are often completely unaware of his theories or consider them so trivial that they use the term for unrelated things.) For comparison, "southern strategy" race america turns up over six thousand results. But that's not the most fatal problem here - if we restrict the search to recent (post-2017) results, there are five hits, most of which (at a glance) aren't even using the words in reference to Lassiter's theory (for comparison, there have been about 1700 scholarly references to the Southern Strategy in that timeframe.) The fact that Glenn Feldman spoke of it as growing back in 2011 is only worth so much when 1. he also acknowledges it is a dissenting view, ie. it failed to catch hold then, and 2. every indicator is that that growth didn't actually go anywhere. Obviously any broad assessment of American politics is going to have its dissent, and it's worth briefly noting the existence of such dissent in the lead, but Lassiter isn't even the most notable voice of dissent; the previous version practically trumpeted his views as if this was an even scholarly debate or as if he had substantially changed the discussion, which is absolutely not supported by the sources - there have been over seventeen hundred scholarly references to the Southern strategy in the past three years, of which at most five even bother to acknowledge that Lassiter's views exist. Highlighting Lassiter's views in the lead is grossly undue; a sentence or two in the body is defensible, but not more than that. --Aquillion (talk) 22:23, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

I can condense it down a bit further and perhaps switch his name out with someone else in the LEAD. (Maybe with Shafer or Johnson.)Rja13ww33 (talk) 22:33, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

That makes sense to me. To be clear, I'm fine with a sentence or two in the lead noting that dissenting views exist, and I'm even fine with mentioning Lassiter's name in passing there when mentioning scholars who disagree (though I'd also be fine with replacing him with a more notable dissent if we can find one.) There's definitely dissent worth noting overall, I'm just not convinced that Lassiter specifically ought to be highlighted as an alternative narrative in the lead. I think usually for broadly-popular theories like this where dissent exists, we note the existence of dissent but don't usually go into the sort of blow-by-blow "but X says [complete counter-theory]" in the lead, not unless the scholarly debate is really really close or really really important to the point where it's impossible to discuss the topic without immediately going into detail on it. --Aquillion (talk) 22:39, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

Some votes for who should replace Lassiter in the LEAD is welcome. (So no conflict down the line.)Rja13ww33 (talk) 22:53, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

The Lassiter material shouldn't be cut down. Sorry, when a historian who is writing a review of the various views on this subject says this is a notable (rapidly growing) theory we shouldn't pretend he actually meant "fringe". Additionally when the book has been cited almost 1000 times we can't decide it's not worth discussing. This is a very significant part of the big picture. At a high level this article says there was a plan and then says if the plan worked. If historians disagree then we cover it. If the article is too long there is plenty of other material that could be trimmed before this. Springee (talk) 23:37, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

There are, as far as I can tell, about five cites at most in the past four years using the term "suburban strategy" to refer to Lassiter's theories; again, your one cite talking highly of it is from 2011 and talks of it dismissively at the same time by noting it is merely a dissenting theory. (Likewise, of the "thousand cites", relatively few of them are citing it for the part you want to focus on. The book is not exclusively about the theory you're pulling out of it to place in the lead; people who cited it for that are comparatively few.) There's no indication that it actually grew in the time since then. Lassiter failed to even claim the term "suburban strategy", which is now used to refer to other aspects of the topic (again, if you do a scholar search for it and the Southern strategy today, several of the higher-profile hits refer to the Democratic strategy in the 2018 midterms, which makes it clear that his use of the term didn't have much impact.) It is absolutely not significant relative to the size of the topic as a whole - one book on a subject that attracted some attention but whose theories ultimately went nowhere is indeed still very firmly WP:FRINGE. I have no objection to mentioning it for a sentence or two, but your insistence that this is some major aspect of the topic that needs to be given central billing is an extreme reach to rely on using a single source from nine years ago that gives it a backhanded complement at best. "Dissident but rapidly-growing", in academia, is a polite way of saying "this is fringe but maybe it will attract more attention in the future." Now that it's nine years later, we can clearly see that it did not. I'm ok with a few sentences for it in the body, but highlighting it in the lead as the counter-narrative or going into depth on there is grossly WP:UNDUE - most of the sources you cite that reference it do so in passing while noting the broader range of dissidents. It simply is not as important as you make it out to be. --Aquillion (talk) 16:11, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

Your argument seems to be that you can't prove to yourself that the bottom up theory continued to have legs thus it must be bunk and we should only report on the top down theory. The problem is you haven't shown that "suburban strategy" is now accepted by at least a reasonable percentage of scholars or even that the "suburban strategy" is the common name (vs bottom up or even not specifically named - see Alexander article later in this edit). When we have a scholar in the field who says this is a view that deserves attention we can't dismiss that and decide it's actually a fringe theory after all. And, no, his statement is not backhanded or that the theory is crap but he's mentioning it anyway. Additionally, the Lassiter view is aligns with Alexander who specifically points to flaws in several of the sources that support the top down view. Alexander's Clairmont Review article discusses several of the top down books and points to flaws. [[1]] If you want to claim the bottom up narrative didn't gain traction then show a newer article that say so. This isn't a rapidly updating field of study since we are talking about events that are 40-50 years in the past. I don't expect to see new scholarship every year. Springee (talk) 18:50, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

At the risk of getting on a tangent, you've touched on something I've wondered about: the volume of research on this (on a year by year basis). The media was certainly slow on picking up on this.....I've always been curious as to the timing of academia. (I personally never even heard of some of this stuff until years (even decades) after the fact.) That info might be worthwhile to add to our Scholarly debates section.Rja13ww33 (talk) 19:10, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

The lead should clarify that regardless of whether scholars see the realignment of the parties as a top-down process or a bottom-up one, they all agree that racial conservatism was the main driver behind the realignment of the two parties. Currently[2], the lead makes it seem as as if Matthew Lassiter, Kevin M. Kruse and Joseph Crespino dispute that (per footnote 7, they don't). Snooganssnoogans (talk) 01:53, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

Well most do and some don't. Polsby, Shafer, Johnston, Lassiter, etc are quoted in the article as saying racial animus took a backseat to class and so on. Perhaps this will kill two birds with one stone. Maybe we could change (in the intro): This view has increasingly been disputed by some historians such as Matthew Lassiter, Kevin M. Kruse and Joseph Crespino, who have presented alternative theories for this realignment.[7][8][9][10][11] To (instead): Several aspects of this view have been debated[<<link to our Scholarly Debate section] by some historians and political scientists.[7][8][9][10][11] This would (I think) cover everyone.Rja13ww33 (talk) 02:13, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

(edit conflict)I'm OK with restoring the earlier earlier language of the lead which noted that point. "This narrative recognizes the centrality of racial backlash to the political realignment of the South,[8] but suggests that this backlash took the form of a defense of de facto segregation in the suburbs rather than overt resistance to racial integration". It's important to say how this racial conservatism was manifest. It was not in the form of displays of racism, rather it was those with means went to the suburbs which then because segregated not by law but in practice. Springee (talk) 02:17, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

To me, the nuts & bolts of this (i.e. so many opinions) are diverse enough to where I think if we just kick it into the Scholarly Debate section...we are most likely covered for all. (And that also solves the problem of which scholar(s) to mention in the intro.Rja13ww33 (talk) 02:27, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

Requested edit

I'd suggest that the final sentence in the first paragraph of the lead be removed. The sentence reads, "It also helped to push the Republican Party much more to the right". It is not entirely clear what the word "it" is referring to, but that's not the main concern. The main concern is that the cited source ([3]) doesn't support the sentence. 74.67.45.185 (talk) 01:59, 6 February 2021 (UTC)