Excellent article about the Long Southern Strategy.
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When the Equal Rights Amendment was on a trajectory to be approved by enough states to amend the constitution, the anti-ERA movement really went after Southern white women, because the Southern states were the states where they thought the ERA would have the best chance of failing because they’re the same states that had not ratified the 19th Amendment for women's suffrage. So if you're a strategist for the anti-ERA group and you're going, "Where might we kill this thing?," you're looking at places where the 19th Amendment wouldn't pass in 1920. And when they started talking to Southern white women, they really misrepresented the ERA.
They realized that Southern white women had been politicized by the anti-feminist movement led by Phyllis Schlafly, and then other movements like WWWW — Women Who Want to be Women [founded by Texas native Lottie Beth Hobbs] — and efforts from the Southern Baptist Convention to portray feminism as a threat to traditional gender roles. We’re starting to understand a little bit more about what happened. We talk about religion and Republicans in Southern politics, and we talk about race, but the bridge in the middle was the anti-ERA movement. It was one of their big sells. It's "family values."
The Republican Party finds it works. It helps them strengthen that growing allegiance with the Southern Baptist Convention and evangelicals and social conservatives. In the 2000s, for example, you see Republican strategists putting gay marriage amendments on ballots in states to really pull evangelicals to the polls, giving them much more of a place within the party.
It's important to know that they had to do all three of those things, because it turns out a lot of people are just one of those three. When we measure racial resentment and modern sexism, which is a measure of just anti-feminism, and Christian nationalism, there are some people that are all three, but a lot of people are two of three or one of three. It's just not enough that are all three, so it really takes that whole trifecta to define a new party brand.
It creates such a brand in the Republican Party that anybody who can come in and get those three elements the best can play to that hard right in a crowded field in a Republican primary. In 2016 Southern states move up their primaries, so whoever plays to those three things most effectively can gain quite a bit of momentum in the race for the Republican nomination.
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https://www.facingsouth.org/2021/01...gie-maxwell-countering-long-southern-strategy