This is Democracy – Episode 299: Southern Politics: Past and Present

[00:00:00] Intro/Outro: This is Democracy, a podcast about the people of the United States, a podcast about citizenship, about engaging with politics and the world around you. A podcast about educating yourself on today’s important issues and how to have a voice in what happens next.

[00:00:20] Jeremi: Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy.

This week we’re going to talk about southern politics, not just in their contemporary valence, which we will get to, but historically, what have been the natural, the natural issues that have divided southern politics through the last century and a half? What are the areas of. Difference the areas of conflict.

How have these areas of conflict and difference over time evolved? And how does the long history of southern politics affect the way we think about democracy, about race, about justice, about power? In our democracy today, we are very fortunate to have a friend and distinguished colleague joining us this week.

this is Professor Brian Jones from the government Department at the University of Texas at Austin. Brian, thank you for joining us. It

[00:01:15] Bryan D Jones: is a real pleasure, Jeremy.

[00:01:18] Jeremi: I, I hope many of you know, professor Jones’s work. Brian Jones holds the JJ Jake Pickle Regents Chair in Congressional Studies, and as I said, he is a professor in the Department of Government.

He’s one of the leading scholars of, decisionmaking organizations and politics in American Democratic. Politics. he’s written a number of important articles and books. I cannot name them all, or that would take up the entire time of the podcast, but I will name a few, a few of my favorites. a book that, Brian wrote in 1994, reconceiving Decision Making and Democratic Politics.

Another book in 2001, politics and the Architecture of Choice. And then most recently, the book that we will focus on today, hot Off the Presses, the Southern Fault Line, how Race, class and Region Shaped One Family’s History. And I encourage all of our listeners to, read this book. It has so much to say about the history of our democracy in the South and, of our contemporary issues, as well.

Before we get into the discussion of, Brian Jones’ new book, we have of course, our scene setting poem from Mr. Zachary Siri. Zachary, what’s the title of your poem? Today

[00:02:35] Zachary: at Mr. Evers Home.

[00:02:38] Jeremi: And Mr. Evers here is Medgar Evers. Am I correct? Yes. You want to just tell everyone before you read the poem who Medgar Evers was?

Medgar Evers

[00:02:47] Zachary: was the first field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi. he was a. Very prominent activist in the late fifties and early sixties in Mississippi, particularly around school integration and university integration. and he was shot, assassinated by a member of the KKK in, at his house in Jackson, Mississippi, which we visited a couple years ago.

[00:03:09] Jeremi: Right, right. And if I remember Zachary, his house is still in a very poor, disheveled part of Jackson, Mississippi. Is that correct? That’s correct, yes. Okay, let’s hear it.

[00:03:22] Zachary: The summer is here too at Mr. Evers home, the cicadas, bringing it in on their tapping feet, the soft sun shattering on the asphalt and the blue sky almost making his blue house disappear.

I wonder in that half beat of a moment when he turned his back on the magnolia, if you could see the same faint outlines in the driveway. Of dark shadows and a blood soil taking one last gasp of his shoes, and if he perhaps might have seen the gleam of the barrel as it glared him through the iron grating that winds its way like wisteria or like the inner workings of a human heart blown half open in a June breeze.

Or if I too, had I seen that glint in the guns of prejudice flickering at me so young, if I too would still have stood in line at the county building with my back turned or posed for that photograph with the Oxford Pioneer, smiling with my back to the world if I too would still have turned my back and held the door handle Unflinchingly as Mercury flew down from the Mississippi Sun to swing me up on the wings of his shoes.

I.

[00:04:35] Jeremi: It’s a sad poem, Zachary, isn’t it?

[00:04:38] Zachary: Yes. I think it’s, it’s really about, the sort of seeming sense of inevitability in that kind of racial violence in the South and how it almost seems to become part of the landscape, even as like the humanity of someone like Medgar Evers becomes so real when you’re at their house.

It also some, the violence sometimes seems to come out of the landscape.

[00:05:04] Jeremi: Right. Right. Brian, I, I think Zachary’s given a terrific opening for your book. you also lived through this, this is, this is actually when you enter your book, this exact period, of Medgar Evers and George Wallace. I’m curious your reactions to the poem and the relationship to your book.

I.

[00:05:21] Bryan D Jones: Well, I, I think it’s a great poem, Zachary. trust me. and the one thing you said in that poem, I wanna stress, and that is this stuff becomes background. I puzzled how people could put up with Jim Crow for so long and in a, in a situation that was so unjust. Friends of mine, my parents and others, and its background, they don’t think about it anymore.

Blacks the same way. It’s a terrible thing to be stuck into, but it doesn’t change without a push. And the books about, some of those pushes over time and how my parents or my ancestors experienced them and viewed them as much as I could show that. But it’s really a book on history and, and politics.

And I think your poem, has a little bit of that too in both cases.

[00:06:13] Jeremi: Thank you, Brian. One of the big arguments you make in your book, which, which is also a political science as well as a history argument, is about party cleavages. And you, you make the case throughout the book that there are two kinds of Alabama and, and in that sense, two kinds of south, right?

There’s a upland and a lowland. And, and, and if you would articulate for us what the differences are and why that’s so important.

[00:06:37] Bryan D Jones: It’s very important. we get used to thinking of the south as a bunch of mansions and slaves and, and slave holders, and the organization being very hierarchical, because of that.

It’s an oligarchy in parts of the South where cotton grew, but it wasn’t in uplands and to some extent, near the coast. Where poor farmers dwelled, they were, Democrats, little d, big D two for that matter. and they, really opposed many, many of the policies of the planters because it was a class interest that separated these two groups.

but the game of the, of the planters of the oligarchs was to try to make it a single south, single south in which they ruled, and the planters ruled. The hillbillies in the hill just were quiet. Go, go take care of your cheap farm, and you can read lots of editorials and writing about that from the black belt newspapers.

Just get in line. You’re above the blacks. Just be, be, satisfied with that. But they weren’t always satisfied and some of my ancestors were not satisfied and they, they, participated in the populist revolution. And let’s not think of populism as the way it’s talked about today. Back then, it was an alliance between those upland poor farmer whites and the blacks who had just been freed and were allowed to vote for a few, gener, a few, a few years before Jim Crow closed down in about 1900.

So, tried to tell that story and what happened afterwards.

[00:08:21] Jeremi: It’s, it, it’s beautifully told and it’s, it’s so powerful that you do it as a scholar and also a, as a family member, and it’s a, it’s a very personal story that you tell Zachary.

[00:08:33] Zachary: Yeah. I wanted to ask if, if the system was so clearly designed not to benefit the average white Southerner, but instead the sort of very top of the planter class, why do you think as you began your, your, your answer to the previous question, why do you think so many.

Poor whites in the South did buy into this system of, of racial inequality. Why? Why did it become second nature to so many?

[00:09:00] Bryan D Jones: That’s a question that’s relevant back then and today too, because we see over and over again. People in the, in the lower reaches of the class structure as voting against what we would think or others would think were their self-interest.

they will support, in many cases, the, the oligarchs and what they stand for. I try to make the distinction, I do make the distinction in the book between class politics in which. a a a struggle goes on for the distribution of resources. Are we to spend the collective goods on more investment funds for the planters, or making life better for the poor farmers and poor laborers later on as time went on?

Or are we to spend or do we to fall for the status politics situation in which I feel better? Than somebody else. And that’s all that matters. So you, you see that in racism. Racism is about, and white supremacy in particular, that form of racism in which the, the, whites benefit and the blacks don’t.

From the status allocations, not just class, it’s status. I’m better than you are, and that’s all that matters to me. So much of the struggles we have in the south and elsewhere is about whether we’re gonna adhere to status politics or class politics. The way the, planters in the black belt regions of the south, the cotton growing regions of the south, pull this off was threefold.

One, try to get people to think of themselves in a hierarchical system. Two to make sure that the poorer whites understood that they were better than blacks. And three, that, that, that, that if needed, there would be massive voter cheating on the part of the planners, it took all three to put down this populous revolution where the populous party put out the.

The word to the poor farmers that, look, you’re being used here. Let’s ally with the newly enfranchised blacks and try to overturn the planter oligarchy. And that’s what my, my ancestors participated in up there in North Alabama. Tried to, in the book, compare these two, Structures of society in, in the South because they had a planter ancestor and some populist ancestors.

they didn’t compete with each other because they were in different parts of the state, but they joined different factions. One, a part of the oligarchy, small time oligarchy, but still part of the planter and slave holding oligarch. He the other free farmers craftsmen. And much more willing to enter in democracy.

in the northern part of the state, there’s a vigorous democracy there in North Alabama and western North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee, Northern Georgia. these parts of the south where the Appalachians, are, are dominant. I.

[00:12:08] Jeremi: I, I have to say, Brian, that one of my favorite parts of the book was where you talked about that vibrant democracy in those areas of Northern Alabama, Western Carolina, et cetera, and, and how vibrant it truly was.

I, I, as a historian, I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know that. I didn’t really appreciate that. Could you give us some examples, give us some color from that, of, of what that vibrant democracy looked like in those upland areas.

[00:12:34] Bryan D Jones: Yeah, so we were taught, in, in so many situations that they were hillbillies, that we still think about that of the hillbillies sitting on his front porch and drinking homemade bourbon and playing his banjo.

That’s kind of the way thing of the Appalachian, isn’t it? All by himself up there, his family around. but at least in parts of this time, especially in the, in the populist era, there were just ba vast meetings, political meetings, church meetings, but the, the amount of, of religious zeal during the period of.

Of, the whole 19th century or much of it was so important, and Jacksonian democracy. And the second great awakening, which is this great religious awakening that took place in the United States. They go together. So we have this explosion of Jacksonian democracy, these, these preachers going around, all over the south to talk to people.

And that spilled over into politics. So, some of my ancestors that had peak, Preachers wandering around the south, having ’em in and having the neighbors over. so there’s much more of this, of this, group politics that took place in, in the, in the supposedly lonely hollows of, of Appalachia and North Alabama than we think of.

And we can trace some of that too. It’s just underappreciated in, in much of history right now. Although there are scholars breaking this through, and I hope I’ll be one of ’em.

[00:14:06] Jeremi: Yes, you are. I mean, I, I, I have to say again, your book is one of the most vivid accounts of this that, that I’ve read. Certainly. to what extent were there interracial alliances in these populist movements?

[00:14:20] Bryan D Jones: it was fundamental to the populist movement. They, neither the black were all Republicans. then for obvious reasons. so the alliance was cross party too. A populist party joined up with, black Republicans as an attempt to overthrow the, the hierarchies, but there were precursors of that. in, in many cases the ag there, there are agricultural movements all over the place.

The grains being the first and most important, but it was nonpartisan. The Grange, established both, they were not integrated. Uh uh. Integrated sets of people that were dealing in these, in these, these grains collectives, which is what it was, collective getting together and buying, fertilizer.

So, and tools at a lower price. But what, they learned from each other, they were black. collectives and there were white collectives, but they worked together in the sense of having to cooperate and wanting to cooperate and learn from each other. As time went on, these, these groups became more, more political and in the end ended up being a populist party in which the populist began to, to, Fuse with the, with the, with the Republicans. And there are plenty of upland Republicans in places like Georgia and Alabama too. and they, and they fused and to, to make this this a, a sort of a, a collective, collective good for, for in politics for these two groups. Unfortunately, the end of the story was sad because the, Flanders counted out all the votes, cheated the flags, mostly outta their votes as time went on.

And, upland whites were left alone. they part of it, certainly the populist, Collection of people putting together to, to do this kind of, politics, was broken up by politics, but there’s plenty of racism too in that. So the, the planters, operated on both, racism and cheating blacks out of their votes.

The populists call this, bourbon rule. And by bourbon rule, they meant Well, it’s, it’s just kind of like the French trying to put the bourbon back on their throne again. That’s what the planners wanted to do. They wanted to restore slavery or tenant farming and those kinds of things that looked like slavery.

And so they called ’em bourbons and they were the bourbon faction of the Democratic Party and the populous faction of the Democratic Party that struggled for a long period of time. In fact, did So throughout. The history of the South up until the Voting Rights Act in 1965, those two factions struggle with each other.

but, the, populous faction, are what they call the liberal labor, faction, always lost because of the lack of votes by blacks. They were outlawed in many of the southern states as people know.

[00:17:30] Jeremi: So, so this connects to, a theme I, I’ve written about and others, is, is part of the problem that in the decades after the Civil War, the planter class had too much control over the franchise, over voting and also over the, over the use of violence.

[00:17:48] Bryan D Jones: Yes. I, by the way, I enjoyed your book very much. Oh, thank you. on the, the post civil War period, it’s, it’s brilliant and I appreciate it very much. I learned from it. I had wasn’t able to use it much in this, book because you wrote it too late. You should have written a few years before.

yeah, it’s true. They, but the, the. The possibility of an integrated society, van Woodward, the historian Van Woodward and others VL Key, the political scientists thought that that was possible. They thought that that could have emerged earlier had there not been the massive cheating. and, The violence was there, but, and blacks were intimidated by it, but not as much as these guys were tough.

They wanted to be Democrats locally and they wanted to participate in society. And this idea that the, the, the slaves wanted to just hang around and, and be tenant farmers afterwards, I got much truth in it. I find the blacks, they were dynamic in their group formations as, as the, upland whites. I just haven’t studied that.

at any rate, there, there was certainly a, a desire after the period called, redemption in which the black pan planters took back the go, the governments in the southern states, to try to suppress black votes and to a great. Degree, they were successful, but hundreds of thousands of voter, of black voters still took part in the elections around 1900.

Yeah. So they were not gone. They were tough. And the alliance could have worked had they not been counted out in the, in, in Alabama and in North Carolina and other places. by the, by the planter class. And I showed that one of my own ancestors was a boat chief. Yes. Down in. So yes. I,

[00:19:42] Jeremi: I, that was very courageous for you to put that in the book, Brian.

[00:19:47] Bryan D Jones: Well, look, I don’t, I’m not responsible for somebody to lived before me. That was his, that was his stupidity, his fault, but it done. By the way, if anybody follows up on this and does another book trying to integrate history, and there have been several

[00:20:05] Jeremi: Yeah,

[00:20:06] Bryan D Jones: history in their family lines. Don’t tell, don’t, don’t feel guilty for what your ancestors did.

you feel guilty what you did and you can make up for it somehow, if you want, but, that’s your fault.

[00:20:21] Jeremi: That’s well said. Brian, one of the, one of the key, moments in your book is the Voting Rights Act, of 1965. it’s an important part of what you talk about toward the end of the book.

first of all, why was the Voting Rights Act so important?

[00:20:39] Bryan D Jones: Well, the, The, the blacks, being denied the vote. the vote was, rampant in the south up until that time, although in areas of the south, it began to break up already because of the action of blacks and, allied whites to, to break this up through legal and, and, other means including marches and.

and so forth. but that was a marking point where you really, the, the black belt blacks. could vote in some parts of Alabama in the north part of the, of the state. blacks could vote, by then, and they could vote by then, even though they had still had to do all these, going through all these hoops, I.

That white voters had too also. But things like the poll tax, disfranchised both a lot of blacks and a lot of white farmers. as a matter of fact, some studies have shown in 1940 that there are more whites disfranchised by the poll tax than there were blacks. just because there are more whites in Alabama than than blacks.

so the, the Voting Rights Act ma made a marker of when black, when, when, Jim Crow ended, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act made sure that the south could no longer use laws to segregate. Blacks from whites to keep blacks from having the same rights as whites. So these, these laws are just enormously important.

And, unfortunately, the much of the Voting Rights Act has been struck down by the Roberts Court, taking away some of the, mechanisms, that, were used to, to break out white monopolies in the voting right, in the voting rights. So you’re finding that, over since 19. or, 2011, is that right?

with the Shelby, Shelby County decision in Alabama, again, that struck down part of the Voting Rights Act. there has been another, fall off in black voting because of the actions of whites passing laws and ordinances that gets in the way of, black voting. So, the, the then, but the,

[00:23:03] Jeremi: like, ID laws, right, like laws that require certain forms of identification, for example, that’s a, well, yeah, the ID laws,

[00:23:09] Bryan D Jones: that’s not the worst thing, but most of the problems are in registration.

you file up your registration form or something like that, or you move and people forget to reach. It’s, there’s a lot of what some of my colleagues call, Bureaucratic burdens, administrative burdens that are put in the way that then affect blacks more than they do whites. And that’s the key for to this

[00:23:34] Jeremi: is is Zachary.

[00:23:36] Zachary: Yeah, I, I wanted to ask that, do you think is, is part of the point of your book then that we should think of the development of Jim Crow and the racial restrictions on voting and participation, in civil society as not just a system designed. To keep a certain race down, but also a certain class as a sort of a way of embedding the sort of planter oligarchy into, into the fabric of the south.

[00:24:03] Bryan D Jones: Oh, that’s absolutely right. Exactly. I mean, what you do is you use the two techniques if you’re in the planter class, you want people to stay in their place, whether they’re black or white. and because if you get challenged by the, the, less fortunate classes, you get class politics if, and the worst extent if the, if they’re black and white or.

minorities plus white voters, unified on, on the class issue, then you’re gonna have to fight classes. class politics and oligarchs don’t like to do that because they generally lose. So what you do is you try to keep this oligarchy together through these status based systems, the bourbon rule, as the populists call it.

So you’re absolutely right. This is, is absolutely. Deeply about that form of government and how Jim Crow kept that in place legally for 75 years, at the end of the, of the period of populist revolution to, to, 19, 65. And we know a lot about the, the, Civil rights movement and how it got, how that got broken up.

And I write about that in the book. We know very little about the populist period in which we almost broke it up. We almost got a, an interracial, political class, division back then in which the oligarchs had to contend with both whites and blacks. It scared the crap outta ’em too, by the way. they immediately called constitutional conventions and, and, legislative sessions to try to figure out ways to keep blacks out of politics.

And in the, in the Alabama constitution, they said, look, we’ve been doing it illegally. Through violence and through vote cheating, we wanna pass laws that make sure we get it done legally. The whole Jim Crow, system was built on putting together oppression in a legal manner where it was, between the, the Civil War and the populist era, it was done through illegal means.

whether they’re enforced or not is a different matter, but spoken fundamentally about this kind of, or much about this kind of, of, bourbon rule that that just caused the South to be a a back Warner for so long.

[00:26:32] Jeremi: And, and, and Brian, one of the fascinating parts of the book for me, and it’s maybe another take on Zachary’s, excellent question is then what happens with the Voting Rights Act?

where you enter the book very, very directly. I. As you say, the Voting Rights Act is this breakthrough That doesn’t quite happen, with populist politics. but now African Americans in Alabama and elsewhere are able to vote. We see a rise in their voting. Back to numbers, that we saw in the decade after the Civil War.

I. but then, it doesn’t all go the way that you expected it would at the time. I wanted to read a, a passage that I underlined as I was going through your book, just ’cause it, it spoke to me. you talk about, George Wallace, governor George Wallace, who is a populist. And, and himself a Democrat, but but becomes someone who defends, obviously segregation.

And you talk about this moment in March, 1966 at the University of Alabama where you were a student. Foster auditorium, I think is where this occurs, where there’s, where both George Wallace and Robert Kennedy come and, you say you skipped George Wallace’s, speech, his keynote speech, but then you attended RFKs.

I just wanted to read this section, the auditorium. Was filled with RFK enthusiasts, including me. Including you when Kennedy said that Negroes must be as free as other Americans, not because it is economically advantageous, not because the law says so, but because it is, right. I. We, and I think you mean all the students who were there at the University of Alabama.

We cheered Lustily as he left the auditorium. Students reached out to grasp his hand. I did so as well. It really felt like a chapter was closing in Alabama with the state joining the nation in unity. Boy was I wrong. Wh why were you wrong then?

[00:28:26] Bryan D Jones: It’s called Backlash, and we’re all familiar with it now.

But what looked like a problem solved ended up being a stimulus for George Wallace and his ilk. And, I helped in a campaign of a decent man running against Wallace. And, I was, I cover this in the book. I was sent by the, his, His campaign managers to a audit, to a, to talk as a substitute in a football stadium.

And I was selling as my candidate was, moderation. We can do this moderately. It’ll work. There isn’t any reason for us. To not to play what I would call today, class politics and make everybody’s life better, collective good, as others would call it. And I got smattering of applause. And then up comes George Wallace’s, spoke spokesperson, and he says a few things.

Same old, racist crap. in code words and the audience goes crazy, half full football stadium. And I said, we are dead ducks. And sure enough, we were, because there was more white backlash than black voters, and that’s what happened in Alabama. The white, the white South became more unified. Unlike the dual south, I wrote about, through most of the history, it became unified around the race issue, and George Wallace did it.

[00:30:05] Jeremi: And, and why, why didn’t the populist Civil Rights Coalition of poorer people, poorer white people and African Americans, why didn’t it hold together?

[00:30:15] Bryan D Jones: Yeah. This is the question that so many of us are trying to answer and can’t finally, can’t really come to conclusion. Why did status politics went out over class politics so thoroughly in the Appalachian?

Regions and, and why didn’t it come up before if it was there? And, and frankly we just don’t have an answer to that. There are lots of partial answers, like the resentment politics that, we, some have written about Kerry Merit, for example, in the South. the resentment politics has led to more difficulties than we had imagined.

and it stuck with us today because the resentment politics has spread all over the country. Starting with George Wallace, who may have been president had he not been shot. but Trump plays the same sort of bourbon politics that George Wallace played. They, except he’s not nearly as good a demagogue as.

George Wallace was, ’cause George Wallace never felt sorry for himself and, and socked, he didn’t. He was out there, dynamically, talking, and, and stuff that most of us wouldn’t agree with to listening to this podcast, I suspect, I certainly don’t, that, cracked up class politics and. Put it, jammed it back in the status politics area.

It’s a white supremacist presidency we have right now, and George Wallace was a white supremacist and unfortunately that seems to work at least in the short run.

[00:31:47] Jeremi: So, so you see our current moment as part of a long backlash that in a sense began, in, in Alabama and elsewhere in the late 1960s.

[00:31:55] Bryan D Jones: I think you can put it that way, but maybe we ought think of it as something that, that, dwells within all of us and, it, it could be brought out or not.

I, you know what, what the religion Manism talks about, there’s the devil in the, in the, in, in the, in the good and by all of us. And sometimes it, it, the, the right leader or the wrong leader lets out that worst part of us and people like George Wallace and other demagogues in the south. and the people and, presidents like, well, we never have another president like this, but, Donald Trump allows us to feel sorry for ourselves rather than look forward to a better future.

and the resentment comes out. And who is a resentment directed at these days? It’s blacks, brows, immigrants in particular. we find somebody to hate, and George Wallace found that. And the other demagogues of the South George Wallace. Spread it nationally. and I think that was the start of our troubles.

But we, we, we have to remember there’s more people who, who, these days, not like Alabama in 1966, but these days I think there’s more people that object to that system, than support it. but you know. Coalition, the interracial coalition that failed in the populous period that we thought one in 1965.

We just have to be honest with ourselves and said we didn’t, but if it doesn’t get organized again, we’re stuck with that kind of white supremacist or regime for a while, and I don’t want that to happen.

[00:33:32] Jeremi: So, so your, your remedy in a sense is more organization by the interracial alliance of various people who are not oligarchs.

[00:33:43] Bryan D Jones: Absolutely. That’s absolutely right. And I think we, because of the way in which our electoral college and, and the senate system works, we tend to cater more to the white working class. Not because they’re not important. They are. but though we kind of forget the, the basis of support of that interracial, interracial regime was not just those white working class folks, but the blacks and the black belt, and we have to appeal to interracial situation.

I think we’re, we’re in much more, much better shape to do that now than before. But we, again, we had some splitting off of racial groups. Because of the status politics issue that, that I’ve been talking about. and especially in the last, in the last, election, I suspect we’ll have more class politics, but not if we don’t get better organized on this and show just how, or I think, Trump is pure bourbon rule.

He wants a white, white working class to have hate and racism, and he wants the. The immigrants and minorities have nothing, because they’ve gotta be the people you’re directing hate at. and it’s a white supremacist set of ideas that are spewing out of his mouth. And more and more over time, just take a look at the, at the South Africans that just showed up on our shores.

so that’s what we’re, we’re looking at and, and if you look back in the past, like I hope I did in my book, you can see those elements of it back then. And if you bring it forward, you can think about American politics much broader than I think most people have before I.

[00:35:26] Jeremi: I, I think you, you succeed wonderfully with that.

Brian Zachary, does this resonate with you as you think about politics, particularly as a younger voter today, that it’s a problem of resentment and status, in, in the way, in the, the long history that Brian has given us here?

[00:35:42] Zachary: Yeah. I, I think so. I think it’s particularly helpful in trying to think about what it means to.

Create a politics that, or, or to, to create a political movement or a political message that can be interracial, and can cut across class lines. I, I think a lot of our political polarization is driven, these days either by racial or class distinctions, and it’s really hard to break through one or the other.

I think that this. Provides a, a vision of what a sort of interracial class solidarity politics can look like. and also maybe provides a, a more nuanced way of thinking about the politics of racism and of hate as. A manifestation of deeper structural inequality, as opposed to a sort of, hatred that one is born with, or a sort of natural quality of the American South as it’s convenient for people who don’t live in the south often to think right, as, as racist or as inherently, more concerned with race.

[00:36:47] Jeremi: But, but do you see in your generation, Zachary, do you see in your generation alliances forming in this, in the way Brian describes in earlier periods between those who are university educated and those who are not university educated, those who have, you know, different, different racial and cultural backgrounds or, or do you see more fragmentation?

[00:37:10] Zachary: I, I think, I think I see more fragmentation. I think that’s why this is particularly important history to look at now.

[00:37:18] Bryan D Jones: One of the interesting things that’s happening today, and we see it at the University of Texas, is just how diverse of a student body we have now. It wasn’t that diverse even 15 years ago.

and, the, they, the white, black brown. coalitions or people just talking to each other on campus, they don’t seem to be race structured particularly. and I find that more and more as I observe over time. I had a, student from the LBJ school, who came from the University of Alabama for, did her, undergraduate work there and she just commented herself, and she’s of Asian background.

That, it was so much easier here, the, the interracial kind of communications and so forth. It was so much easier here than back in Alabama where we’re still pretty segregated groups got together that way. Maybe I’m being overly optimistic, but that’s what I’m seeing right now. and I think that, that bodes well, for our future, but we can’t let them do it on their own.

[00:38:31] Jeremi: Right. I I think that’s very well said Brian. And I agree 100%. I think that also explains why Trump and others like George Wallace are attacking DEI and attacking institutions like the University of Texas that do just what you said, right. This is threatening to the oligarchs. Correct.

[00:38:49] Bryan D Jones: And, that’s one of the things I have spent some time on in my other self studying, information processing in political institutions.

And there’s no doubt that, that democracies in, we know diversity, diverse decision. groups make better decisions. And the reason’s clear, they point out different aspects of problems that, that, those of us that have different characteristics might not see. it, we do better at problem definition when we are diverse.

My other work shows that pretty clearly. But the second thing that happens is we build institutions that help. Find those problems and they’re diverse institutions through ideas and, and, backgrounds and so forth, and, congressional committees and how they work. As an example of that, you don’t find that in auto autocratic regime committee.

We make fun of congressional committees, but enormous amounts of information and understanding come out of those things and other areas in which there’s these diversities built into our. Very structure of doing things of political institutions, of economic institutions. So the DEI, approach could have been a little overly excessive and formalistic in some ways, but it was critical to building that kind of interracial democracy.

And to see it cut off hurts my, hurts my heart and hurts my head too, because I think better decision would be made in, in that kind of a situation. our military would be much worse off with the Clint guys that are running it now, all white, than with a mixed, absolutely a mixed leadership.

[00:40:33] Jeremi: Well, it’s, it’s, it’s wonderful. You, you closed on that point, Brian. and, and you know, this, and, and many of our, our, listeners do, Ulysses Grant himself came to that conclusion at the end of the Civil War. That, that actually the, the, the 125,000 former slaves, former enslaved people who joined the Union Army were, huge plus to the Union Army.

Not just in numbers, but in what they brought in skill sets. And, that’s always the

[00:40:56] Bryan D Jones: case. One other thing that, I would like to close with, and it’s a funny thing to close on. I was taught growing up, this lost cause stuff that I write about in the book, A bunch of myths that were just wrong. one of which was that, that, the Yankees, deserted in ways that the Southerners did absolutely wrong.

Who would you think from listening to this talk tonight, who de who deserted more? Well, of course, it was the up planters. They weren’t gonna fight for those planters anymore than they had to, and when they realized what they were doing, they went home. So the great desertions occurred from the mountains in Alabama and Georgia and, North Carolina and so forth, not among the Midwestern farmers, in Kentucky and, and, Indiana and Ohio.

[00:41:45] Jeremi: I, I, I think this discussion, Brian has brought out so much that it. colorful, insightful, and deeply relevant, maybe urgent, relevant in your, your long history and your really vivid history of, of the Southern Fault Line. That’s the title of your book, and it’s a, a title that’s spot on. I, I encourage all of our.

listeners to pick up a copy The Southern Fault Line, how Race, class and Regions Shaped One family’s history. It’s a model for using a family history to paint a broader picture of political change and political stagnation at the same time. o over time. thank you Brian so much, for joining us.

[00:42:28] Bryan D Jones: I’ve enjoyed it tremendously and thank you so much Jeremy. And you too, Zachary, for your points and poem.

[00:42:34] Jeremi: Thank you. Yes, Zachary. Thank you. Thank you Zachary, for your, insightful comments and your thoughtful poem. As always, thank you most of all to our loyal listeners and loyal subscribers to our substack for joining us for this our 299th episode of, this Is Democracy.

We will join you with a special 300th episode soon, but for now, thank you for joining us for This Is Democracy.

[00:43:03] Intro/Outro: This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts ITS Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Scott Holmes. Stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find This is Democracy on Apple Podcast, Spotify and YouTube. See you next time.