“The Word Democrat Is All That . . . People Need in Order to Vote Republican”: Southern Conservatism, Cold War Nationalism, and Party Realignment

The postwar order proved for the South to be both apocalypse and opportunity. While the region’s civil rights vanguard steadily eroded the segregationist order, southern conservatives seized at the chance to establish themselves as true patriots through strident anticommunism, manifested in both militarism and nationalism. Beginning with the Korean War, southern conservatives, as well as conservatives nationally, propagandized alleged American defeats in international affairs and wielded the perception of declining national prestige as a political weapon against postwar liberal leadership. Even as national and international critics castigated the South for its backwardness on race relations, Dixie’s conservatives found ready allies in an emergent national conservative movement headed by Barry Goldwater and found common ground in a “strong,” military-first foreign policy. Nationalism, disguised as patriotic fervor, became the favored strategy for disarming liberal domestic policy and savagely attacking liberal foreign policy. Southern conservative conduct in the Vietnam War was emblematic of this strategy.

For all their apprehensions about a land war in Asia (namely, in lost tax dollars and manpower), southern conservatives jumped at the opportunity to apply their militarist foreign policy to Vietnam, expecting that total commitment to military victory would achieve the desired result. When the war effort began going the way of Korea (limited, long-term engagements), conservatives of all stripes reacted by placing blame on liberal fifth columnists who refused to rally around the flag of US intervention. Unlike in the Korean War, when conservatives exclusively blamed the Democratic administration for its failure, southern conservatives targeted the liberal electorate itself, establishing a cult of true Americanism which excluded and vilified liberalism. The Vietnam War precipitated a political fracture, out of which emerged a Cold War conservative unity and the capture of the Republican Party.