You can't understand American politics unless you understand the politics of the South. And, as Maxwell and Shields prove, you can't understand Southern politics until you understand the racist, evangelical, and gender elements of the GOP's Long Southern Strategy-which spread far beyond the South and helped make Donald Trump our first Confederate president.
Angie Maxwell is the Director of the Diane D. Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society, an associate professor of political science, and holder of the Diane D. Blair Endowed Professorship in Southern Studies at the University of Arkansas. She is the co-editor of several volumes and the author of the The Indicted South: Public Criticism, Southern Inferiority, and the Politics of Whiteness, which won the Southern Political Science
Association's 2015 V. O. Key Award for best book in Southern Politics.
Todd Shields is the Dean of the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences and a professor of political science at the University of Arkansas. He is the co-author or co-editor of several books, including The Persuadable Voter: Wedge Issues in Presidential Campaigns, which won the American Political Science Association's 2009 Robert E. Lane Award for the best book in Political Psychology.