Left Behind Twice: Economic Transformation and Political Interpretation in the Rural South.

• In Event: Political Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Comparative Conservatism (Table 2)

Abstract

This paper argues that the rural South was never fully integrated into the Keynesian consensus, and that the macroeconomic transformations that produced deindustrialization were experienced differently in the South. It happened later, unfolded over decades, and reshaped employment, spatial organization, and the moral and social foundations of communal life.
Importantly, these transformations are interpreted through both an economized and racialized lens. White residents simultaneously understand union busting, regulatory burdens, communal decay, and decline through economic interpretations, and racial interpretations. Thus this paper argues that we should think about an overlapping simultaneously deployed race-class relationship that emerges from the relationship of material and interpretive histories as prompting the increasing appeal of right wing populist candidates rather than purely economic grievances, or purely white revanchism

Author

• Dominick Rosse, University of Chicago