civic associations, theDemocratic Party itself, local growth-oriented elites, and social policies thatreflected the worldview of industrial workers.

More generally, as partisan conflict was reorganized aroundrace, issues of economic equity declined in importance.

enthusiastically supporting the political parties that oversaw and facilitated thedestruction of their communities

dynamics disorganizing them and capturing theiraccumulated wealth

From scrapyards in theupper Midwest, material was loaded on otherwise empty trains and ships forthe return trip to China.

Midwest were being sucked into a new urban vortex in China

Much less commented upon is theeffects of extreme devalorization on the physical structure of the region’s neigh-bourhoods and communities.

Thegeographic dynamics of this growing inequality are often overlooked.

unions were still hamstrung, a freetrade regime in international commerce was being established, and disinvest-ment was continuing unchecked in the upper Midwest

Clinton left office welfare was tied to‘character

Rather than beingthe ‘universal class’ associated with America, the industrial working class wasreclassified as a ‘special interest’ that was scuttling the American economy withits greed.

incentivize a shift ofinvestment from manufacturing to finance, tech and services, and ensure theinvestment would pay off due to lower risk and higher profits than other invest-ments

radical reorganization of geo-graphic privilege over the last forty years

While it is notthe most important inter-group tension in American society, it is one of themost clearly evident ones

peripheraliza-tion in economic and political terms.

Indeed, looking atvoting behaviour in this election it would appear that the poor and workingclass of the region are unified in their growing hostility to the Democratic Partyeven if they are not unified in their attraction to Trump.

White post-industrial communitieshave benefited from racial privilege, but this has not conferred any immunity.

it merely exacerbated regionalracial inequality

“Fordism”–that was distinc-tive to the mid-twentieth century upper Midwest, but which was widely mim-icked around the world (Gramsci 1989).

butdue to disconnection between communities and their party representatives

More importantly, the inevitable transformation and decline of place will shapethe values of those living there, just as the initial development of industrial soci-ety once did

kleptocracy

Organizations, institutions, networks and associations, in turn, poten-tially shape these into political subjectivities and moral values which can beinstrumentalized and expressed in politics, development strategies, and culture,which we can summarize as a ‘communal ethos’

Americans and from mostAmerican communities.

not the economic protections that would facilitatebroader social inclusion.

In Detroit alone the decline in black voter turnout wasseveral times the margin of Clinton’s loss in Michigan.

thefew rural counties that were not already solidly Republican and (2) post-industrial counties (see Figure II)

. For the first time in the history of thetwo parties, Republicans did better among poor white voters than among afflu-ent whites

this is a notable contrast to the ethnona-tionalist and protectionist candidates who preceded him

Today, the Democratic Party is a party of professionals, minoritiesand the New Economy

The counties Trump won – over 2,000 more in number –accounted for a much smaller share of GDP

but what is more recent isthe collapse of the institutions that had been built to incorporate industrialworkers and their communities into the mainstream political life of the country,including governance arrangements, work and consumption arrangements, civicassociations, social policies, party organizations, and labour unions

to explain the largely enthusiastic support for Obama in thesesame counties

This way of thinkinghas set up an unproductive discussion of the relative explanatory power ofrace and class.

But the collapse of the regional economy has alsoresulted in the collapse of the institutions and organizations that provided thoseconnections.

with the plight ofthe industrial Midwes

Clinton lost the election because of radicaldeclines in support from within the Democratic coalitio

Due to this, the party pursued poli-cies that would magnify the region’s difficulties rather than alleviate its cir-cumstances

From thisperspective we can see that the active dismantling of the Fordist social orderset the region on a divergent path from the rest of the country

revanchism

This paper argues that the election of Donald Trump is the product of a con-fluence of historical factors rather than the distinctive appeal of the victorhimself. B

pers and magazines the “Trump Democrats” narrative and its historicalantecedent—stories about Ronald Reagan’s capture of the industrial Mid-west—will return with a vengeance once campaigning for the 2020 presi-dential election begins in earnest

Yet, as compelling as these critiquesmight be, they have had little effect on the broader narratives. Indeed, thepublication of articles on “Trump Democrats” continued without sign ofabatement.

politics was often shaped or driven moreby a desire to resolve problems that seemed to imperil the whole commu-nity than by deeply held ideological principles

challenges narratives that depict the 1980s as a de-cade of growing antitax, antigovernment conservatism.

As aresult, neither of the constitutional amendments was approved when thequestion was put before Ohio’s voters

At a state level, tax rises were even more commonplace. Much as withCleveland and Detroit, it was often fear of default and fiscal emergencydriving these decisions.

64 percent of voters supported the taxincrease

It is the revenue side of the budget whichmust be increased.

the political centerof gravity in the industrial Midwest did not shift decidedly to the rightduring the Reagan years. Perhaps most importantly, it also demonstratesthat though national politicians may have rediscovered the market andembraced a politics of antistatist individualism, this was not a develop-ment that inevitably led (or trickled down) to state and municipal politics

Cleveland’s Republican mayor George Voinovich described cuts infederal government urban programs as being carried out with “a meatax” rather than a “scalpel.

Young and his diverse coalition of public and private sector supportersembraced the Ford administration’s offer of funding for the constructionof a major new mass transit network.

Sincemost US cities depended on property and income tax revenues to providemunicipal services and maintain infrastructure, this eroded municipalrevenues

The economic shockwaves created by these events helped producetwo recessions and the worst economic downturn since the Great De-pression.

the demise of the New Deal order and rise of anew conservative/neoliberal order.1

Despite this national and Missouri trendtoward conservatism,

he opposed the Nixon administration’sattempt to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and voted to approve astrengthened extension of the law. He supported labor and Missouri agri-culture by advocating for federal subsidies for cotton producers.*”

a Republican won the state—by a mere 20,488 votes over Democratic presidential challenger HubertHumphrey.

landslide by earn-ing the votes of more than one million Missourians.*

his views opposing the nation’s en-try into NATO and the Marshall Plan.

The destruction of this social philosophy is the aim of the conservativesand reactionaries of both parties.

if the State would be willing to have two Senatorsfrom Saint Louis at the same time.

Long cast his vote infavor of the Civil Right Acts of 1964 and 1968 and the Voting Rights Actof 1965. In 1966 Long published the book The Intruders: The Invasion ofPrivacy by Government and Industry,

must be noted that Hennings made singular contributions toMcCarthy’s ultimate fall

federal anti-lynching law.”

internalsecurity createdanewadministrativecriminallawapparatus,inviolationoftheBill ofRights.

civillibertiesandcivilrights

New Deal liberalism with their support of civil rightsand voting rights measures during their respective terms in office,

the1946midtermelectionsreturnedRepublicancontroltobothhousesofCongressforthefirsttimesince 1930.

Midwest in twenty-sevenof thirty-one presidential

Indiana appears far gone for Demo-crats, but it has been right of center for a very long time; Illinois, a one-time swing state, now seems likely to stay Democratic for the foreseeablefuture.

but the trends inside these states are not all favorable to the GOP,although some of those changes are, and many of those trends emergedbefore Trump (although his candidacy, and Clinton’s, exacerbated thosechanges)

he Democratic nomineewon no Minnesota counties west of the Twin Cities. And yet, Clinton stillcarried the state.

but white voters without a four-year college de-gree were embracing it (or, at the very least, recoiling from Clinton)

stiff former managementconsultant

all provided Demo-cratic landslides and had roughly the same presidential deviations as theyhad four years prior

downstate Democratic decline.

all seven states discussed in this chapter, becoming only thethird Democrat to accomplish that feat: Franklin Roosevelt (1932, 1936)and Lyndon Johnson (1964) also did

Illinois senator Barack Obama waswell-positioned to reclaim the White House in what was a classic chang-ing of the guard–style election.

A “wall” constructed on such shaky foundations isn’t much of a wallat all.

Still, while the so-called blue wall held up for Democrats in much ofthe Midwest, the red tide in 2000 came fairly close to breaching the wallin several places

collar counties

but the trade-off between incremental improvement in one county and a falloff every-where else caused the Democratic deficit in the state to balloon

Similar shifts happened in other parts of the Midwest. In Michigan’sFirst Congressional District, which covered the Upper Peninsula andnorthern Michigan, a Clinton margin of seven points in 1996 turned intoa ten-point Bush win. In northwest Wisconsin’s Seventh District, Gorewon by two, down from Clinton’s fourteen.

This came at a time whenvoter choice was aligning on support or opposition to abortion rights,with the former increasingly becoming Democratic and the latter increas-ingly becoming Republican.

transplanted Yankee parents

a party that over time would do increasingly wellnot just in cities but also in suburbs, while falling off in some rural areas,small cities, and other places.

com-munity

imprimatur

run as a moderate

Bush beat Massachusetts governor MichaelDukakis by eight points. And yet some of the countervailing trends in theMidwest that emerged against Reagan in 1984 became more apparent in1988

Reagan Democrat

and Ohio swung against Carter,each giving Reagan double-digit margins

But even in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, the Carter-Mondale ticket’s decline was obvious

Carter, like Kennedy in 1960 and Roosevelt in 1944,won the election despite losing a majority of these Midwest states

This would be the last time that Illinois had a Republi-can-leaning presidential deviation.

southern

Jimmy Carter did something thatDemocrats routinely did before him but have not done since: he nearlyswept the South

It was around this time that big midwestern industrial/urbancounties such as Cook (Chicago), Cuyahoga (Cleveland), Milwaukee, andWayne (Detroit) began to consistently vote much more Democratic thanthe nation as a whole

were collectively likelier to voteRepublican than not

Presidential Deviation in the Midwest,

Illinois

The Midwest was crucial to both

nationalism

esident Donald Trump will write somethingsimilar, but unlike Fallows’s description, it will be hard to take such anobservation seriously.

That trend could help explain what has been to datean asymmetry in polarization, where congressional Republicans have moved right fasterthan liberals have moved left

The set of people who turn out to vote in Republican primaries are now moreconservative than before, and the set of people who turn out to vote in Democratic pri-maries are more liberal.

As theDemocratic and Republican parties became more homogenous, they sent clearer signals tovoters in the rest of the country.

conservatives in the non-South sorted more thoroughlyinto the Republican Party

mirroring thedivergence starting in the South a decade earlier.

Polarization

Fig. 6

Sorting only

Until 1978, conservatives were more likelyto vote in Democratic primaries than in Republican primaries

0.0

towards the conservative sid

looks very similar to the pattern of polarization in Congress.

This figure establishes that the distribution of ideology in the public asa whole has not become more polarized over this segment of time.

tion of one kind or the other in 12 surveys from 1958 to 2012.

This pattern is consistent withour argument that increasingly relevant Republican primary elections changed the brandsof the parties in the South.

which supports the notion that participation in theseRepublican primaries had a lasting effect on individual Southern voter behavior

his prompted segregationistSenator Strom Thurmond to switch from Democrat to Republican, and coincided withRepublican Barry Goldwater’s presidential bid in 1964 on a platform that opposed federalintervention in civil rights.

Voters with extreme views are more likely to participate inprimaries today, and primaries today are more ideologically homogenous than in the past.

primaries across the country

when the Democratic primary electorateshifted to the left as conservatives became Republicans in greater numbers

This is consistent with recentresearch showing that primaries with more open rules of participation do not have moremoderate primary electorate

which drew the most conservative voters into newly relevant SouthernRepublican primaries and left behind a less conservative Southern Democratic primaryelectorate.

eterogeneous congres-sional parties to the present era of more homogeneous parties.

polarization partially stems from polarized pri-mary electorates nominating more polarized candidates for office

The Democratic party prohibited Negroes from participating in its pri-mary

They sought to do this by purging theparty of Negro influence and a Negro share in the spoils of victory and byattracting the new South's businessmen.

they have a disproportionate influence in national politics.

still regarded as a threat of "black domination."

Practicallynone voted in the primary.

Politics isdecentralized.

But Southern liberalism has generally not reached even this preliminarystage of organization.

the future of Southernliberalism might become great.

It gets its power from outsidethe South.

Negroes are votingin some places in the South, and white people are tolerating it. In the newannual A.A.A. elections for the crop restriction program they are evenvoting right in the cotton counties of the Black Belt in perhaps even greaterproportion than whites.

The South is also strongly religious.

woman suffrage andeconomic equality, collective bargaining, labor legislation, progressiveeducation, child welfare, civil service reform, police and court reform,prison refor

mainly to the efforts of the federal government.The Southern masses do not generally organize either for advancing theirideals or for protecting their group interests.

which compels thewhite man to disenfranchise himself in order to take the vote away from the Negro

he fear is that this vast swarm of ignorant, purchasableand credulous voters will be compacted and controlled by desperate and unscrupulouswhite men, and made to hold the balance of power wherever the whites are divided.This fear has kept, and will keep, the whites "solid." It would keep the intelligenceand responsibility of any community, North or South, solid.

ut rarely ever for issues, unlessthe issue is defined in black and white."5

Panel Aalso shows that farm value was not affected by tax policy. Overall, thereis little evidence that tax policy broke up farms or lowered farm value

exactly the opposite effect of thetax policies advocated by black politicians.

$0.96 in 1870 to $0.98 in1880, while for counties with black politicians, revenue went from $1.56in 1870 to $0.89 in 1880.

–0.0129*** –0.0629***

0.197

manumission

This is the first quantitative evidence suggesting a strong effect of blackpolitical leadership on local public finance.

0.0993*** 0.0993*** 0.0986*** 0.0925**

far above estimates of literacy for the black population as a whole.

1,893.83

he existing scholarship about the known black politicianswas often incorrect and narratives about the illiteracy and poverty of theblack politicians was repeated in the historical narrative until the archivalwork in Foner (1996) and other histories were compiled. Indeed, thehistories of Reconstruction that noted black officials often did so deri-sively.

20 percent and expendi-tures per pupil declined by 60 percent from 1871 to 1880.

notes that while some white officials sought to drasti-cally reduce all education expenditures after Redemption, the popularityof public schooling among whites led to fewer reductions in educationalexpenditures for whites

Southern whites began a widespreadcampaign to undo the Congressional Reconstruction process

In Alabama, a property tax was proposed; inTexas, the sale of public lands was offered; in Maryland, changes to thestate tax code to allow local taxation were put forth; in South Carolina,Murray suggested that unclaimed Civil War bounties could be used; andNorth Carolina debated a specific consumer tax for education. GovernorHarrison Reed’s plan in Florida was to increase land assessments to fundpublic goods, and this model was followed in other Southern states byblack political leaders

Southerners of both races noted that the low taxes in the antebellumera encouraged the acquisition of unimproved land by wealthy land-owners

The results here show that black political leadershipis an important and omitted factor in black socioeconomic outcomes afterthe Civil War.

public education and land redis-tribution

Put another way, the tax effects of black poli-cymakers left no lasting effects on local public finance.

0.62 standard deviations

$0.09 increase in per capita county taxrevenue.

In particular,did their time in service have any effects on local public finance, publicgoods provision, land reform, and socioeconomic outcomes?

You never saw a people more excited on the subject of politics than are thenegroes of the South. They are perfectly wild

By pri-vatizing carceral functions, Southern states were able to furtherscale incarceration, in particular of freedpeople, at essentiallyzero cost.

The work of reformation must be begun and prosecuted with the coloredmasses outside of the Penitentiary. The only difference existing betweenthe colored convicts and the colored people at large consists in the factthat the former have been caught in the commission of crime, tried andconvicted, while the latter have not. The same results would happen tothe latter should the same opportunities for criminal action and criminalconviction occur. The entire race is destitute of pride of character.

While the investigationuncovered widespread mistreatment and neglect of convicts, itproved difficult to end the contract altogether—in no small partbecause some of the main stakeholders in the leasing companieswere also current and former Bourbon politicians.

it became difficult for the state torenegotiate—let alone terminate—leases before they eventuallyexpired in 1896.

redi-rect institutions or policies toward purposes beyond their originalintent.

the legislators were more con-cerned with taking steps to reduce expenditures for incarcerationeven further.

Interestingly, of the twenty-five blackstate legislators in Louisiana, all but one voted in favor of theact.

The seemingly bipartisan support of the lease system inGeorgia, or at least the lack of partisan opposition to it, mirroredthe experience in other Southern states during CongressionalReconstruction

his will increase the debt of the State that amount.... It seems tous a propitious time to revise our Penal Code, and abolish the penitentiarysystem—adopting in lieu thereof the principles embodied in the Codes ofSouth and North Carolina [corporal and capital punishment].

Importantly, however, this surge in prisoner popula-tions after the Civil War preceded—not followed—theintroduction of convict leasing.

First, they wereused to restrict African American labor market mobility.Land-owning whites in particular saw their wealth and fortunedwindle with Emancipation

The resultis, that we have more than three times as many convicts in the State prisonas there were before the war.

less

First,antebellum Georgia was extremely wealthy and, by extension, fis-cally healthy.

Precisely because Southern whites were committed to upholdwhite supremacy and dwarf notions of equality, governmentsremained reluctant to expand taxation capacity and, thus,remained cash-strapped and burdened by debt throughoutmuch of second half of the nineteenth century.

Southern prisonpopulations would likely not have outgrown the existing prisoninfrastructure as fast as they did—a development that forced statesto look for alternatives to penitentiary imprisonment in the firstplace.

leasing outconvicts appeared to be a cost-effective short-term alternative tothe more resource-intensive penitentiary model.

he South cohered as a low-wage, undereducated, and underdeveloped sec-tion in part because the commitments of its representatives to racial hier-archy and regional autonomy dramatically limited their ability to securefederal support on terms they could accept or to block fiscal policiesthat disproportionately burdened the South.

that leasing initiallyseemed to be a response to growing prisoner numbers but overtime became a driving force of incarceration in the postbellumSouth.

were predomi-nantly employed in emerging industries of the New South, grad-ing railroad beds or laboring in mining camps and lumberproduction.

ystem of sharecrop-ping contracts and debt peonage

especially in the South wherebureaucratic and fiscal capacities remained limited

Consequently, illness and diseases resulting from poor hygieneand malnutrition were rampant. In many states, the penitentiaryphysicians reported regular outbreaks of dysentery and typhoidfever. A large share of prisoners ended up in the hospital wardsat some point or another, especially as leasing camps becamemore and more crowded.

Prisoners no longer worked withinprison walls, and while contracts with lessees typically specifiedthe type of labor convicts were expected to perform, the statehad very little control over working conditions in the camps.

he state also gave up its custodial responsibility as lesseeswere to hire overseers and guards to ensure order in the campsand prevent prison escapes

First, by leasing prisoners to private com-panies or individuals, the state was absolved of the task of housingand caring for them.

What is more, the penitentiary movement introduced penallabor in addition to carceral confinement as reformers consideredhard labor within prison walls an opportunity to teach trade skillsand instill Protestant work ethic in prisoners