The Impact of Factions

PETER: You know guys, I’ve always thought of the Dixiecrat moment as a kind of bizarre episode that didn’t really matter in the long term. They don’t create a new party, Dixiecrats, which would be the home for old, Southern Democrats. They return to the fold. So what does it matter?

BRIAN: So Peter, you could say the Dixiecrats don’t matter if you’re only looking at the election results in 1948. But here’s why they matter. They put their finger on a visceral commitment to states’ rights and the maintenance of Jim Crow segregation under those states’ rights. And frankly, what was going to become a major issue over the next 20 or 30 years.

Now, to do this, they had to walk away from some of their commitments to their allies in the Democratic Party in the North. Those allies promoted economic development, which helped the South quite a bit.

But what the Dixiecrats really did was say, you know, we’re making a pact with the devil here. Because as we accept this aid from a federal government, that federal government is going to become increasingly intrusive. What really binds us together as Southern Democrats is our commitment to states’ rights and our commitment to maintaining the social arrangements that had existed ever since Reconstruction.

PETER: So Brian, would you say then that the southern democratic electorate feels it’s not really, truly represented by the southern democracy, by the party, that it’s weak on fundamental issues. That whole notion that your party, the party that dominates the south, it’s a one-party region. But it’s not representing us. That becomes the crucial thing that is revealed by the Dixiecrat bolt.

ED: Yeah, the Dixicrates would say, you’ve made us a faction. We have no choice but to explicitly acknowledge that and defend ourselves.

BRIAN: And here’s the connection to what happens in the next 10 years. Politicians who remained in the Democratic fold, who did not go out with the Dixiecrats, found ways to show that electorate that they felt their pain, they heard their voices. But they found ways to do it within the Democratic Party.

They used the intricate rules of committees to bottle up civil rights legislation. They used the filibuster to publicly demonstrate how deeply they cared about local control and states’ rights in the cause of Jim Crow segregation. So they tried to have the best of all worlds. They tried to use the techniques of the solid south.

At the same time, show this mobilized electorate we hear you. We understand. Race is important. And all of this time, they’re being pushed by an emerging civil rights movement, Martin Luther King. They’re being pushed by Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court decision that said the schools are going to be integrated nationally.

ED: And at the same time, they’re being wooed by the Republican Party who is striking a new tone. The thing about Barry Goldwater in 1964, Brian, Peter? The whole idea is the federal government is way too big. The rights of localities, the rights of individuals have to be re-asserted.

Now, Goldwater water gets plenty of electoral votes in ’64, even though he’s not talking the same accent as the Dixiecrats. But combined with the Republicans move toward a more aggressive, anti-status position combined with the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, the culmination of the civil rights movement, the ground is prepared– isn’t it, Brian?– for a merger of these disaffected Southern Democrats and the Republican Party.

BRIAN: It is. Lyndon Johnson was well aware that in advocating that Voting Rights Act of 1965, he was giving the South to this new Republican Party that was talking in the terms of local control and states’ rights.

ED: And the great gift the Republicans gave was not the frontal attack on race the Dixiecrat had offered, but rather a more general attack on big government, of which support for African Americans was a part.

PETER: So Brian, what does this tell us about how factions work in American politics?

BRIAN: I think it tells us a lot, Peter. It first of all tells us that, quite often, they fail in their explicit goals. But they can have a huge impact by forcing politicians to deal with ideas that really might be a little bit more comfortable in the existing balance of power between the parties. They create subtle shifts that offer great opportunities down the road for opposition parties.

ED: We need to take another short break now. When we return, a radical faction of the Republican Party impeaches the president in 1868.

PETER: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in a minute.