Waiting for Liberal Democracy in the American South : Our country’s constitutional order is withering before us. In the states of the former Confederacy, democracy never fully flourished. (Alan Elrod, Mar 07, 2025, The Bulwark)
Liberal democracy has never put down deep roots in the South in the way it did across the rest of the country. The region never really abandoned its warped electoral politics and inclination to single-party cronyism, a Southern political instinct that helps explain how Democratic dominance transformed so completely into Republican one-party rule following the civil rights era. Inequality continues to define economic life in the region. […]
Bourbon rule across the South is a good starting place for understanding the challenges facing the region. The Bourbons—Southern Democrats of the planter and professional classes who opposed Reconstruction—came to dramatically shape American politics from the 1870s into the early twentieth century. For decades, this small elite fomented discord among poor whites to keep their political energies focused on their peers rather than their de facto rulers. As Reconstruction began to falter in the mid-1870s, Bourbon power brokers gained control in Southern states like Alabama and Georgia. By the 1890s, the Old South was aggressively reasserting itself. In 1896, the Supreme Court enshrined the principle of “separate but equal.”
In 1898, America’s first coup d’etat took place as the Democrats of Wilmington, North Carolina issued a “White Declaration of Independence.” They were attacking the coalition of black Republicans and white Populists that had control of the local government in the 1890s, which the old Confederates of the city found intolerable. With their resentment and rage being fueled by white Democratic powerbrokers, two thousand armed men forced out the duly elected government. None were more pleased by this result than their Bourbon backers.
V.O. Key Jr., one of America’s greatest scholars of Southern politics, blames this “banker-planter-lawyer” class for the South’s political and economic underdevelopment. Ostensibly pro-business but viciously self-interested, the Bourbons not only defended the South’s racial apartheid but also exploited the region’s poor rural whites, as the Wilmington coup attests.
The consequences of this, as of the Civil War, are still being felt. In a 2024 essay for Aeon, academic and writer Keri Leigh Meritt laid out the many ways the South as a region lags economically—pinned down by poverty, hobbled by an absence of public investments, and choked by a miasma of disillusionment and isolation:
Southerners in general are isolated and lonely, and wealth and power are heavily concentrated: there are a few thousand incredibly wealthy families – almost all of them the direct descendants of the Confederacy’s wealthiest slaveholders – a smaller-than-average middle class, and masses of poor people, working class or not. The South, with few worker protections, prevents its working classes from earning a living wage. It’s virtually impossible to exist on the meagre income of a single, low-wage, 40-hour-a-week job, especially since the US has no social healthcare benefits.
Vance’s comments on the Bourbons place them in a national frame, which brings us to another important dimension of the post-Civil War South. Historian Heather Cox Richardson and others have argued that the South’s oligarchic power structures were not dismantled following the defeat of the Confederacy. A number of modern studies have shown that, in many places in the South, the self-styled aristocrat Bourbons recovered their wealth and status in the years following the Civil War.
Always De-Nazifi.