Is There a Sunbelt After All? And Should We Care?

When scholars tell the familiar story of Rustbelt decline and Sunbelt growth during the second half of the twentieth century, it goes something like this: following World War II, massive federal disinvestment from manufacturing centers in the urban North in favor of new southern and western locales precipitated a dramatic shift in population, economic clout, and political power out of the frigid North and toward the nation’s sunnier southern states. The Sunbelt, as the region was famously dubbed by author and Republican political strategist Kevin Phillips in his The Emerging Republican Majority (1969), was the region spanning the southern half of the United States, defined by booming suburban metropolises, “centers of commerce, light industry, military preparedness, defense production and space-age technology” that were home to a rapidly growing proportion of the nation’s white middle class. He predicted that the region (and suburbs generally) would generate a new and robust conservative movement reinvigorating the Republican Party and transforming national politics. Similarly, from the left, Kirkpatrick Sale warned that the rise of what he called the “southern rim” was shifting the balance of power in the United States, in his view, for the worse. ¹

Scholars have engaged in an on-again, off-again relationship with the Sunbelt since Phillips and Sale first developed the idea. In the 1970s and 1980s, a voluminous literature explored Sunbelt places and themes. Two works set the pace: economists Bernard L. Weinstein and Robert E. Firestine argued in 1978 that the Sunbelt’s rise to economic (and hence political) power was not the result of existing firms fleeing the high-wage, high-union, high-tax North in favor of the Sunbelt’s more favorable business climate. Rather, it was a consequence of new industries emerging in the region—service sector, high technology, aerospace, oil and gas, leisure, agribusiness, real estate—along with a rapidly expanding consumer base that became increasingly dominant in the national economy. Focusing on patterns of rapid urbanization across the region, meanwhile, political scientists David C. Perry and Alfred J. Watkins identified a distinctive urban form in the Sunbelt’s sprawling and fast-growing metropolises. They linked the rise of these new cities to the same economic engines enumerated by Weinstein and Firestine and, importantly, called attention to the federal government’s role in fomenting Sunbelt growth, both by investing in crucial infrastructure throughout the region and directing military contracts and installations to the South and West. ²

By the 1990s, however, scholarly interest had waned. The very title of Raymond Mohl’s anthology Searching for the Sunbelt: Historical Perspectives on a Region (1990) suggested the new skepticism that the regional designation engendered. While some contributors still found value in the Sunbelt as an analytical concept, others contended that it was both more internally fragmented and more similar to the rest of the nation than was previously recognized. The term Sunbelt, David Goldfield and Howard N. Rabinowitz opined in the volume’s concluding essay, was a mere “public relations ploy,” too diverse and incoherent to be considered a distinct region. Older organizing principles such as North, South, and West or urban, suburban, and rural were, they argued, more useful. ³

Yet the Sunbelt has made a comeback. In the last decade, numerous publications have focused on metropolitan areas in the broad territory extending from Atlanta and Miami in the East to San Diego and Orange County in the West. Emerging alongside renewed scholarly interest in politics and policy, the history of capitalism, and metropolitan America (what some scholars have dubbed the “spatial turn”), this literature emphasizes political economy along with the physical dimensions of life in the nation’s fastest growing region. In both popular and scholarly imagination, the Sunbelt is defined by sprawling, suburban-feeling metropolises; fervent, conservative, Protestant religiosity; and zealous antigovernment sentiment. And yet, although the region has been at the center of recent American political and economic history, the precise borders, the role in shaping the nation’s political-economic trajectory, and the transformation of American politics that this ostensibly precipitated remain contested. A large and growing body of scholarship answers these questions and more, including the most fundamental questions: Is the Sunbelt really a coherent region? If so, does it in fact provide a useful analytical lens for understanding the contemporary United States and its recent past? The books under review here all argue that it does.

As the title suggests, the editors of Sunbelt Rising view the Sunbelt as a distinct region and, indeed, one of increasing importance over the second half of the twentieth century. The essays in this collection paint a rich and varied portrait of Sunbelt politics and places. What ties them together, Michelle Nickerson and Darren Dochuk argue, is a common pattern of dramatic growth and migration, economic development, and relationship with the federal government. Rather than emphasize shared environmental or geographic boundaries, they define regions as “politically and economically created spaces . . . landscapes with nebulous and constantly shifting boundaries drawn by institutional and individual actors who, over time, create patterns that mark a geography as distinct” (p. 14). For Nickerson and Dochuk, the question of whether a regionally distinctive politics can be identified, and if so, since when and on what basis, lies at the core of Sunbelt studies.

Essays answering this crucial question are arranged thematically. Part one explores the question of political realignment since World War II with essays by Elizabeth Tandy Shermer on the political-economic history of the region, Matthew Lassiter on the role of family values in shaping suburban politics, and Lyman Kellstedt and James Guth on regional politics and religion. On whether a coherent Sunbelt can really be said to exist, Joseph Crespino’s essay on Strom Thurmond is particularly compelling. Although Thurmond is typically viewed simply as a reactionary Southern racist, Crespino argues that, instead, he ought to be seen as an early and important promoter of a new Sunbelt politics in the 1950s and 1960s, grounded as much in anti-New Deal and anti-Communist ideology as in upholding white supremacy. Understanding Thurmond in this light breaks down distinctions between Western and Southern conservatism that are, Crespino contends, overstated. He favors a more holistic view of conservatism across the southern United States.

Part two examines race in the Sunbelt. Shana Bernstein and Daniel Martinez HoSang examine California from 1950 to 1970 to show both the possibilities and limitations of liberalism in the region, the very existence of which is too often ignored. While Bernstein focuses on the flowering of a multiethnic, progressive civil rights movement in Los Angeles, HoSang demonstrates the ways in which race liberalism ultimately served to reinforce the very structures of racial exclusion by elevating individual attitudes and beliefs (Gunnar Myrdal’s “hearts and minds”) over systemic change. These studies are both compelling and deeply researched, although I am less persuaded that the political formations they discuss are regionally specific. For example, Lily Geismer’s work on liberals in suburban Boston describes a remarkably similar politics at work there during the same time period, suggesting that the triumph of this particular brand of liberalism was more a suburban than a Sunbelt phenomenon. ⁴ Meanwhile, in his essay on Miami, Nathan Connolly calls attention to African Americans as political actors whose behavior and attitudes constituted not only a “black politics” but also, he reminds us, a central element of mainstream American politics and policy making. He shows how urban renewal and civil rights were, in fact, intertwined, producing an uneasy alliance between black community leaders and white businessmen that ultimately foundered. Essays in parts three and four look at connections both within the Sunbelt and between the region and other countries. Chapters on prisons, energy development, and real estate reveal how stratification took hold within the states of the southern rim, while a final set of essays links the Sunbelt to political-economic processes across the globe.

Taken together, the essays in this volume offer a picture of a Sunbelt that is diverse, globally connected, and far from peripheral to the national historical narrative. A great strength of Sunbelt Rising is in challenging the dominant image of the region as uniformly antistatist, pro-business, and religiously conservative. The contributors and editors highlight a more diverse array of Sunbelt political ideologies and actors. Nevertheless, Nickerson and Dochuk agree that an emerging conservatism has, ultimately, been the Sunbelt’s defining political form. They point to a “transregional nexus of ideology and institution building” that “did indeed transpire along the southern section of the country, preparing an overwhelmingly suburban and conservative citizenry for political action on a national scale” (p. 10). To the extent that a more progressive politics flourished, they contend, it shared important similarities with its more prominent conservative counterpart, “an all-or-nothing political discourse of ultimate consequence, and a political conviction that as the Sunbelt went, so would go the nation” (p. 4).

Elements of this story are true. More Americans now self-identify as conservative than as either moderate or liberal, compared with an earlier plurality of moderates. Moreover, today’s Republican Party is conservative to an unprecedented degree, with the Sunbelt both the most Republican and most conservative-identified part of the nation. In that sense, the narrative of conservative ascendance holds. Yet, even if we acknowledge, as the contributors to Sunbelt Rising clearly do, that alternatives to conservatism persist, this framing of Sunbelt and, hence, national history as a story of two societies colliding, one liberal and one conservative, each engaged in a zero-sum game for political and material supremacy, elides a far more complex political reality. ⁵

The early 1970s marked a moment of profound rupture in American society, as economic crises rocked the foundation of the nation’s middle-class prosperity, calling into question the tenets of Keynesian economics that underlay postwar policy, and a series of political shocks—beginning with Watergate and Vietnam but certainly not ending there—shook citizens’ faith in governing institutions and officials. The result was a moment of profound unease when, as left-wing political activist Michael Harrington wryly observed, Americans were “moving vigorously left, right, and center all at once.” ⁶ And while Kevin Phillips predicted an emerging Republican majority in the political tea leaves, others were not so sure. From the pages of scholarly journals such as Polity and the Annals of the American Academy of Political & Social Science to the New Republic, to the halls of the Nixon White House, experts worried about what they perceived as a marked increase in voter disaffection and the resultant weakening of the American party system. In The Real Majority, which came out in 1970 and was widely seen as a rebuke to Phillips, political scientists Ben Scammon and Richard Wattenberg used data from the 1968 presidential election, along with various polls, to argue that Americans were, fundamentally, centrist in their views. They contended that the party that was most successful in attracting this large and growing group of moderates would emerge victorious. Although they themselves identified as moderate Democrats, Scammon and Wattenberg’s work found a hearing across the political spectrum, even becoming fodder for intense strategy debate within the Nixon administration. ⁷

By 1972, many academic observers, journalists, and political analysts predicted an end to the two party system and the emergence of a multiparty system in its stead. And, although the Democrats and Republicans endured, fear for their future remained. As pollster Everett C. Ladd warned in a series of articles for Fortune magazine and, later, in his book Where Have All the Voters Gone? (1978), Americans were “unhappy with the performance of the principle institutions of their society” and, in the case of the Democratic and Republican parties, questioned “the responsiveness of the parties to popular interests and expectations.” ⁸

Both parties scrambled to respond to these shifting political currents. Within the Grand Old Party (GOP), while some advocated embracing Phillips’s call to tack sharply right, other influential party insiders such as pollster and senior strategist Robert Teeter urged the adoption of a more centrist platform to compete successfully with Democrats, particularly at the state and local levels where Republicans struggled to attract votes. ⁹ Among Democrats, meanwhile, the transformation was especially profound. From across the nation, including many places in the Sunbelt, a cadre of young Democrats emerged promising reform. Often dismissed as the “Watergate Babies” of 1974, who rode a wave of anti-Nixon sentiment into office, in fact, these young reformers offered a distinct political vision that was centrist and fiscally conservative, that embraced free trade, and that elevated private enterprise and markets, rather than government programs, as the solution to social problems. Politicians in this mold included Representative Dick Gephardt of Missouri, Senators Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, Al Gore of Tennessee, Tim Wirth and Gary Hart of Colorado, and, of course, Arkansas Attorney General and then Governor Bill Clinton. When, on the eve of his election, Gary Hart stood on the steps of the Colorado capitol and announced the “end of the New Deal,” it was a sentiment shared by many in this group. Over the next two decades, they remade the Democrats from the party of postwar liberalism into a “third way” party of New Democrats. ¹⁰

Far from being inevitable, then, the emergence of a strong, institutionally grounded, and ascendant conservatism was always contingent and hotly contested. This was true even in the most seemingly conservative places, as Matthew Lassiter’s contribution to Sunbelt Rising reveals. Focusing on Cobb County, Georgia, home of Newt Gingrich and often viewed as the epicenter of the GOP rise to power, Lassiter challenges the conventional teleology of liberal dysfunction and conservative ascendance in at least three important ways. First, taking on the idea of a Republican “southern strategy,” he uses census and electoral data to show that the migration of white Republicans from the Northeast and Midwest throughout the 1960s and 1970s—not strategic appeals to southern racism—made the GOP a viable and even robust party in the historically Democratic South. Second, even after Sunbelt metropolises regularly elected conservative Republicans, citizens’ political views were highly varied and frequently moderate. Last, and perhaps most significant, Lassiter reframes the political transformation of Cobb and similar places as part of a suburban realignment taking place across the country. For Lassiter, suburban values about taxes, property values, schools, and segregation—not ideological conservatism—were most salient in shaping the politics of these rapidly expanding metropolitan landscapes.

As Lassiter and others in Sunbelt Rising suggest, the Sunbelt has long been intimately linked with the nation as a whole. Treating it as exceptional or depicting it as a political landscape defined by a polarizing contest between embattled liberals and ascendant conservatives flattens our understanding of the United States in the final third of the twentieth century. The realities of tumult within the party system as a whole and the substantial transformations away from liberalism going on within the Democratic Party at this time both fall from view. At the same time, any sense of the vast middle that emerged in American politics during the 1970s and that has continued steadily growing is obscured. Political scientists are quick to dismiss independent voters as “partisan leaners” whose actual voting behavior tracks consistently with one party or the other over time. Nevertheless, in a country with a long history of strong partisan identification, the refusal of a growing plurality of voters to identify with either of the major parties speaks to an important cultural shift that must be reckoned with.

In Sunbelt Capitalism, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer argues strongly for the Sunbelt as the birthplace of the New Right. In this case study of Phoenix, Arizona, Shermer focuses on the city’s political and economic development, emphasizing its substantial role in shaping national trends. She charts the city’s transformation from agrarian backwater to high tech manufacturing center to a service sector hot spot: the “headquarters of the Southwest.” At the same time, Shermer traces the emergence of what she describes as a neoliberal governing philosophy among Phoenix’s business elite and their success at spreading that ideology nationwide.

The Phoenix “grasstops,” as Shermer dubs them, local business elites who controlled Phoenix’s politics and development throughout the postwar era via the Charter Government Committee (CGC), evolved a new form of “developmental neoliberalism” (precisely what is “developmental” about it she does not say). This ideology was not antistatist but, rather, advocated a particular vision of government that promoted growth and the interests of the business community over and against the demands of the working classes or any sort of representative democracy. While this politics was certainly antiliberal in that its adherents opposed and actively sought to repeal most aspects of the New Deal, Shermer ably demonstrates that the vision of government promoted by Phoenix leaders was in fact expansive and quite active in promoting the interests of a narrow stratum of American capital.

“Chambermen,” Shermer writes, “created an industrial and service metropole out of a colonial outpost.” Far from accidental, Phoenix’s growth

was part of a systematic effort to remake the region and the national economy, and to reorient American politics toward an underlying principle that the government and the citizenry should be working in the interest of business profitability, mobility, and expansion. (pp. 268-69)

Phoenix boosters sought to use the mechanisms of the New Deal state both to advance their own business interests and to undermine the liberalism from which they benefited. “In the process,” Shermer contends, they “completed much of the ideological groundwork for a homegrown neoliberalism that embraced government power to free industrialists from regulation and taxation” (p. 93). Shermer argues that this political ideology and practice, which she identifies as distinctly regional, ultimately transformed politics on a national scale, integrating the Sunbelt South and West into the national economy and, in the process, forcing older northern cities to adopt similarly neoliberal policies regarding taxes and service provision to compete in an increasingly postindustrial economy.

Challenging the growing literature on both the history of American conservatism and the history of capitalism, Shermer argues that scholars have been too quick to focus on the free-market, antigovernment ideology emanating from Northeast think tanks, New York headquarters, and the University of Chicago economics department as the origins of the philosophy that undergirds modern conservatism. In doing so, they pay too little attention to Sunbelt urban boosters and “good government” advocates who, she argues, should rightly be understood as central to conservatism’s post–World War II reinvention. When it comes to conservatism’s political base, Shermer contends that scholars have “misidentified” the rural South as the epicenter of this broad-based popular movement, ignoring what she sees as the ultimately more significant urban Southwest.

Shermer is at her best in explaining the amalgam of practice and ideology, both political and economic, to which she gives the moniker Sunbelt capitalism. Her astute analysis of grasstops priorities and motivations is aided by an impressive source base. In addition to her extensive research in the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce Records, Shermer is the only historian yet to have gained access to Barry Goldwater’s papers. She also draws on an impressive, albeit sometimes disorienting, array of national examples to bolster her claims. The result is one of the most important recent contributions to our understanding of the influential pro-growth, corporate politics that became central to American politics in this period.

Yet some questions about the nature and proliferation of this Sunbelt capitalism remain. Missing almost entirely from Shermer’s account is any sense of the contested nature of both local and national politics. While local grasstops politics are amply elaborated, the grassroots make hardly an appearance. Democrats who, despite their ouster from city government in 1949, nevertheless remained numerous and powerful in Arizona through at least the mid-1970s are also absent. Similarly, there is little substantive engagement with either the social or political dimensions of race and, perhaps even more surprisingly for a book with capitalism in its title, class. Sunbelt Capitalism also includes almost no actors outside Arizona or, indeed, the Phoenix city limits. The extent to which political attitudes in Phoenix and its suburbs varied throughout this period, and what impact that must have had on the form and direction of the Sunbelt capitalism that Shermer describes, remains unclear. As a result, readers are left with the impression of Phoenix business leaders setting forth virtually unopposed and bending the national economy, political institutions, and political culture to their will.

Like Shermer, Philip VanderMeer’s Desert Visions and the Making of Phoenix, 1860-2009 tells the story of Phoenix from its founding to, very nearly, the present. This is a comprehensive history of the city, divided chronologically, with attention in each period to such diverse issues as political and economic development, Phoenix’s evolving cultural and social landscape, and the ways in which local business leaders, boosters, and elected officials (a heavily overlapping group) assiduously courted federal investment to promote the city’s and metropolitan region’s economic, geographic, and population growth. His sections detailing shifting patterns of housing development, new architectural forms, and cooling technologies that made life in the Arizona desert comfortable, and the leisure culture of outdoor activity that drew people to Phoenix and became central to the city’s identity are among the book’s best. He also addresses at considerable length the shifts in Phoenix’s economic base over the twentieth century, reinforcing Phoenix’s image as a place of stark contrasts, supporting high-end, white-collar positions in corporate services alongside a vast sector of low-wage, largely un-unionized workers.

VanderMeer does not actively frame his project within Sunbelt studies (indeed, the word Sunbelt does not so much as appear in the index to Desert Visions). Nevertheless, he implicitly addresses many of the themes raised by this scholarship. Much of the new Sunbelt literature emphasizes the importance of rapidly expanding metropolises as at least a backdrop to—and often both a product of and catalyst for—the Sunbelt’s rise to political and economic prominence. For VanderMeer, growth—economic, demographic, and spatial—is central to understanding Phoenix. Throughout, VanderMeer touts the importance of federal investment in the city’s growth and the development of its economy. He highlights the way in which Phoenix business leaders, boosters, and elected officials assiduously courted federal investment to promote the city’s and metropolitan region’s economic, geographic, and population growth. At midcentury, he explains, Phoenix was not simply Arizona’s “symbolic metropolitan center” but “the dominant city in population, size, and power” (p. 173).

This new-found dominance was, he explains, the consequence of “deliberate planning and concerted efforts” by the CGC. Like Chambermen in many southern and southwestern boomtowns, members of Phoenix’s CGC exerted tremendous political influence that extended well beyond the city limits and even the state. Yet VanderMeer also argues that factors beyond CGC’s control were largely responsible for the city’s ultimate configuration. Whereas Shermer emphasizes CGC’s very intentional efforts to promote the notion of “business climate” as a means of attracting industry to Phoenix, VanderMeer downplays their involvement, attributing the region’s economic growth to the benefits for industry of the sunny and dry desert locale. Similarly, he attributes the low rates of unionization in Phoenix as a natural consequence of a dominant service sector rather than as the product of antiunion activities on the part of Phoenix’s elected and business leaders. The result is an overly sanguine picture of CGC that does not address the vast inequalities across the metropolitan landscape that Charter Government policies produced, nor the political responses of Phoenicians to these developments.

So, is there a Sunbelt? These books, and the broader literature of which they are a part, answer yes. On the whole, they are persuasive. The area that has come to be known as the Sunbelt shares a history of similar development, relationship to the federal government, reliance on defense spending, and infrastructure for its economic base, along with rapid and expansive metropolitan growth. And, indeed, it is a region in which the new conservative politics that have become so important in American politics and life hold particular sway. Yet it also seems clear that relying too heavily on the Sunbelt as an analytical category is problematic, leading to the flattening of differences within the region and the elision of similarities between the Sunbelt and the rest of the nation. In short, it can produce a tendency to view the Sunbelt as more exceptional, rather than integral, to the national narrative. It is not coincidental that so many Sunbelt studies are set in metropolitan areas. Indeed, the Sunbelt South and, especially, West contain the nation’s most rapidly urbanizing places. A renewed attention to the spatial dimensions of political change, using place and space not only as setting but as categories of analysis, would both strengthen our understanding of the Sunbelt itself and reveal a new, more robust conceptual geography of American political development.

From our vantage point today amid threats of government shut down, hand-wringing about Obamacare, and Donald Trump’s persistent popularity in the polls, pronouncements such as political analyst and pollster Everett Ladd’s 1978 quip that “there is simply no base for an anti-New Deal party” seem misguided. Indeed, the Republican Party, once all but left for dead, has emerged over the past several decades as a powerful institutional base for a robust and virulently anti-New Deal conservatism, an assessment amply supported by the writings of these authors and others within the now-large body of scholarship on American conservatism. Much of the American political spectrum has shifted rightward, with the language of markets, competition, and free choice replacing the old Keynesian axioms as the lingua franca of our political culture.

But this view is also limiting. Missing are the ways in which the conservative politics of the Sunbelt emerged concurrent with, were influenced by, and interacted with political currents nationwide. The emergence of a common set of transregional suburban political values that, although expressed differently by self-proclaimed conservatives in Georgia and proud liberals in Massachusetts, nevertheless shared striking similarities remains difficult to tease out from within a regional framework. Also missing are the ways in which liberals and Democrats themselves were remade in the twentieth century’s final decades, active participants in America’s move toward markets and the language of individualism. Bill Clinton, lest we forget, was also a Sunbelt politician, as were many of his compatriots in making the Democratic Party the party of the “third way” rather than the New Deal. To challenge the story of liberal decline and conservative ascendance at the heart of most Sunbelt studies, then, is not to deny America’s rightward shift. Rather, by moving away from such teleological narratives, we reveal the more complex and varied bases of this transformation.