I have been writing to my local government to find out what our environmental emergency plans and civilian war plans are. My questions are getting referred to the proper departments. In the meantime, the news here is really the attempts to form a government and we are waiting to see if the Bundesrat approves the new law that overrides the debt brake that the Bundestag just approved. Without money nothing is happening. I will write about this when more is known about what our government will be. Funding is key, and without this funding approval I don't think much will be happening. It is not clear that it will get through the Bundesrat, which is the government of the individual states. Each of them has to approve it too. If they don't have enough votes from the state governments then they will have to renegotiate the bill, and time is of the essence.
An interesting occurrence is that Bündnis Sarah Wagenknecht, which is a new political party, which everyone was saying was a "democratic" party, but which broke off from the Left, sounding to me just like the AfD, did not get enough votes to get any seats in the Bundestag. It got just under the 5% needed, and did not get enough local majorities. Now she is more clearly being an AfD like party and is willing to work with them. To me these fascist women leaders are full of contradictions. Sarah's father is from Iran, so her anti-immigrant stance is to some extent self loathing. While she broke off from the Left to form her own party, they are actually doing much better than her party with their clear pro-immigrant stance. Also, Sarah is on the side of Putin in the war, whereas at first it was more like she was just anti-war. She is doing better in some former East German states though and along with the AfD, die Linke will be against our arming Ukraine and rearming Germany.
Bob thank you. If you read the book I will love to hear what your thoughts are. My friend who is in the book club was saying today that she is going to also read his book Stayin’ Alive
The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, which I think I will read too.
We are inviting Jefferson Cowie to speak to Democrats Abroad. I hope we can make this work. He has said he thinks he can fit it in. We are going to ask him to focus his talk more on what we can do now.
It was super helpful to understand that:
1) Voting Rights are of primary importance and we need to be fighting this all together. In Democrats Abroad, which is primarily a voting support organization because we help people to register and understand better how to more effectively vote from Abroad which would include Republicans too. We are very interested in Stopping the SAVE bill. That is in part a bill that would disenfranchise Democrats Abroad. So, on initiatives like this, we get requests to call our elected officials and what we want to tell them on bills.
2) We have to develop a populist message of what we are offering people. I think this agrees with what Anat Shenker Osorio has been saying when I have seen her talking on Anand Giridharadas's Substack The INK podcasts. She is saying you have to create a story for people about what things will be like. My group here is working on collecting health care narratives from Americans living under all sorts of health care systems and sharing them with people working on American health care policy in Congress, and in the states.
3) Having Cowie point out that 2/3 of Americans do not have a college degree was also important, because the stories have to fit in the people who live in America.
I like, too, the anecdotes -- such as the one of the woman asleep taking up two seats on the bus.
Please, in future, more details on those you say are rising up against illiberal governments in Hungary, Romania, and Georgia. (Also Greece, England, and Serbia -- other European locales you cite here which you could further represent.)
Note, too, in your para six you refer to Andrew Jackson as if he were yet alive and active during the era of post-Civil War Freedmen and Black Republicans.
Phil, Thank you so much for catching the Andrew Johnson as Andrew Jackson error. Andrew Jackson had done the same thing earlier in protecting the Native Americans from the White Southerners who were violating the government's treaties with the Native Americans. While at first they tried to stop these Whites from taking the land that the Whites were stealing, they ended up giving up for a variety of reasons detailed in Cowie's book Freedom's Dominion.
I did not put in details on the other countries that are uprising because the article was not really about them. I have some articles on these uprisings linked below. I will try to talk more about European politics, but I think that Cowie is very instructive for us right now, because he is defining the role of populism in the presidency, and that with a population who is 2/3 without college degrees if it does not address their needs, it is not going to be successful.
I read European news each day, and uprisings in other countries are regular news here. My husband speaks Greek so he watches Greek news each day and has been keeping me apprised of what is going on there with the rioting. I assume that in the US people and press are more preoccupied with what is going on in the US since so much is going on. It is hopeful that citizens are having peaceful protests, and South Korea certainly was an example of a successful one. I like looking at both, to see why the successful ones are successful, and the unsuccessful ones are unsuccessful. I think one thing is that one has to act fast before an illiberal government gets entrenched in their systems, and destroy all the pillars of democracy.
Hi Linda, Thank you for this very elucidating article. I live in India and have for the past fifteen years, when I retired from public service in the City University of New York (CUNY). I married a man from India in 1994 and we moved here full time in 2009-10. I do not speak Hindi well, and my community in Maharashtra speaks Marathi, which I know not at all. Aside from that challenge (people DO speak some or a lot of English), I am not Indian and the history of this subcontinent is extremely complex. I have learned a lot over the years, but it is only a little compared to knowing all the threads of politics in this vast land. I consider Modi an autocrat and his BJP a Hindu nationalist party, much like the US’s white Christian movement, known as MAGA. TikTok, wildly popular everywhere, is banned here, for example. The Congress Party, led by Nehru when India gained liberation from the British, has not succeeded in galvanizing the population, now over 1.4 billion citizens (who DO vote, btw) to elect a more populist and liberal government. The 450 million (!) Indians who live on the streets and byways of this country, suffer daily from lack of anything we would call a “civilized” society and the very intelligent commentators like Arundhati Roy and journalists on the “left” are threatened by the BJP and have been arrested and sometimes assassinated when they speak too loudly against the terrible policies of Modi and others in power. I was recently in the US for six months (August 2024-February 2025) on a work project. I left just before the Tesla outrage exploded and cars and dealerships were trashed by ordinary citizens, feeling no other outlet for their frustration. I hope April 5 will turn out millions of ordinary Americans to protest the complete insanity and chaos going on there. My first cousins are Trumpers, and though they are decent on a micro level, they think tramp is great. I can’t bear to even ask them what they think currently. So that’s my two cents for now. Thanks for your writing and educating me. Love, from India.
I am glad you found what Cowie is saying interesting. I follow Indian politics some, and noted that Musk and Modi seemed to hit it off well. I know that Musk's babymom and several of his youngest children were with them at the meeting, which was odd. I wonder what Indians make of that. Did you hear it discussed? Now Musk is going to be expanding into India, which is good for him, because he has alienated a lot of Europe.
It grew up in a community in Chicago that had a lot of Indian and other immigrants. My German mother, who has a degree in graphic design, and also was a calligrapher, used to make posters for the India Association of the University of Chicago when they had events. So, as payment for her work, she and I could go to the event on the poster. I had a lot of great Indian food that way, and also went to see a lot of Indian movies, music and dance. The school where I taught had an Indian dance activity which would always have a couple of performances a year, which we enjoyed school wide. Our community had a lot of people from India and their families.
Now I live in a community in Germany where there are quite a few students on the bus line I take home who are from India and live in my neighborhood.They tend to get off at my stop and the stop before. However, there are no Indian restaurants in my neighborhood. We go to other areas of the city for Indian food. India sends the second largest number of foreign students to Germany after China. I think India's population has surpassed China's now.
Do you connect in India with other Americans? Are you in any of the Democrats Abroad groups in India? I do see that there is a chapter in Mumbai. https://www.democratsabroad.org/in_chapters
My Democrats Abroad group in Germany is working on a project about health care, that when we get our website going, it would be great if we could hear about health care in India from your experience. We are going to gather stories, and share them with people working in the US on health care, so that they can develop a populist health care plan for Americans. Right now, we are also trying to fight for our voting rights from Abroad, and to protest the shutting down of US embassies in our region. Thank you for sharing about your life in India. It would be great if Indians would see their way to electing a populist president that is not a Hindu Nationalist, but Democratic. Do you think that students going to study in so many democratic countries will help to change things? Also, have you heard stories of people from India being harassed by ICE when they enter the US? Or, would this sort of story not be reported?
Thank you. Such a thoughtful and wide ranging summary of the book. I learned alot and it all makes sense. I appreciate the time and effort you took to write this.
Hi Linda. From the sampling you shared about Cowie, I wholeheartedly concur. He has more on the ball than most. I also have to admit that I can't afford to become a paid subscriber, although having chatted with you in the past in other forums, you would be well deserved to be paid. My sole income for my spouse / household is SS disability and that is sole subsistence dollars only. I would tell you more privately if that were possible and I'm certain that you would understand. Great article.. keep it up !
Thank you D4N. A populist government of the type Cowie is talking about would make sure that you would not have to worry about paying for health care or a roof over your head. This is what European countries are grappling with now. Thanks to Putin they are going to be putting more of their money into defense spending so of course there will be less for social welfare, and the switch to environmental infrastructure. The trick will be to make sure there is enough in each. We shall see. With a multiparty system no one can just afford to get complacent and rubber stamp the executive's actions because the people have other options.
After we finish Freedom's Dominion a friend and I are going to read Cowie's book Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class.
In the list of musts, what about education which seems to be sorely lacking in the US right now.
It's said that 54% of us read at or below a 6th grade level. Isn't somehow raising that bar a critic part of this? Or do we just figure out how to cater to that domesticated farm animal mentality of much of the populace? Perhaps it's too long term a project, so does our populist just treat that populace like pigs at the trough and find a path that makes them grunt contentedly to get in office and then hopefully start to plug in their currently all but vapid minds?
Ralph, my daughter has been disparaging my use of the term "educated elite" because I have said we are included in this. She does not like to think so. I don't like the term, but I get what is being said by this, and it is used against Democrats. It cannot just be about what the big donor elite wants from the Democratic leadership.
She has read my article on Cowie's talk and did not like his U metaphor with the educated elite on the top of one end, and multicultural rights on the other end. I understood his inverted bell curve though. He is saying that one should be taking on populist issues and recognize that 2/3 of the population does not have a college degree and does not care about groups protected by civil rights, even if it includes them.
Having read Project 2025 in my political book club, I suspect that parents will be hue and crying about the severe cutbacks all schools are facing with the cuts to the Department of Education and the disappearance of funding. In fact, there are competing interests for the funding, and I am betting that we all know which interest will win out.
In the Project 2025 document they talk about giving the cost of funding a child in a school building to each parent to do with as they wish to educate their child. I believe they said something like $23,000 per pupil, though we know that varies from state to state. When I read that, I could see all of the Christian Nationalist parents like the Duggers who have 18 children, looking at breeding children and homeschooling as a way to earn their living. I am sure this is the group that the Heritage Foundation was thinking about while drafting it.
People who cannot stay home to teach their children send them to schools which will be even more deprived of money. Of course, this money is probably going to just go to cut taxes for the billionaires, and circularly, they will be funding Trump, so a portion will go back to him. Maybe even the lions share.
So, I think the public has to be as upset about schooling, as they are about the price of eggs before that can be a campaign issue. And, hopefully someone is prepared to jump on that. While that is not a concern that most people think they have, it will become that. Just watch extracurricular sports be gone from public schools. No more football team, or baseball, or basketball team, and people will get upset. As Cowie tells us in his book, Freedom's Dominion, George Wallace said that the reason he did not want to integrate the schools is that the whole social life of many communities took place at the school. The whole community would come out for the sports game, particularly in more rural areas. He did not want to have integrated socializing.
I am a lifelong teacher, so I am fully aware of what parents might be expecting to experience, but people who do not have roofs over their heads, or enough food, or child care, are not going to take on something that up until now, thanks the unionization of teachers who have taken on many fights to improve schooling, is working fairly well for people.
So, if the elected officials are serving the people, and not always "knowing it better," than they will be reflecting what they are hearing as concerns, and addressing them. I do think that education will come up, even for home schooling parents when there is reduced funding for special education. I do not think most parents think that Tommy Tuberville's just use "the belt to" address children with ADHD and other behavioral concerns, is an okay way to support their children. Let us see what comes up the road.
Does Cowie really think that the Democrats lost the working class white man in the last decade? That goes back at least to Nixon's "southern strategy," which was a reaction to the Democratic-led passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the mid-1960s. Then came the gutting of unions in general during the Reagan administration. Does he address racism at all?
Susanna, I have ordered his book called Stayin' Alive to read next. I am almost done with Freedom's Dominion. We see some switching of the Dems in the South during the Goldwater-Johnson campaign in this book. So, he does see it as a Southern reaction to what they felt was federal overreach. He is trying in his book to tie the two things, racism and anti-federal government beliefs together. At the bottom of my article I have a link to his talk, which you have to scroll down to the bottom to see.
I see Germany’s gearing up their Armed Forces again. Wish you would write about that!🙂
I have been writing to my local government to find out what our environmental emergency plans and civilian war plans are. My questions are getting referred to the proper departments. In the meantime, the news here is really the attempts to form a government and we are waiting to see if the Bundesrat approves the new law that overrides the debt brake that the Bundestag just approved. Without money nothing is happening. I will write about this when more is known about what our government will be. Funding is key, and without this funding approval I don't think much will be happening. It is not clear that it will get through the Bundesrat, which is the government of the individual states. Each of them has to approve it too. If they don't have enough votes from the state governments then they will have to renegotiate the bill, and time is of the essence.
An interesting occurrence is that Bündnis Sarah Wagenknecht, which is a new political party, which everyone was saying was a "democratic" party, but which broke off from the Left, sounding to me just like the AfD, did not get enough votes to get any seats in the Bundestag. It got just under the 5% needed, and did not get enough local majorities. Now she is more clearly being an AfD like party and is willing to work with them. To me these fascist women leaders are full of contradictions. Sarah's father is from Iran, so her anti-immigrant stance is to some extent self loathing. While she broke off from the Left to form her own party, they are actually doing much better than her party with their clear pro-immigrant stance. Also, Sarah is on the side of Putin in the war, whereas at first it was more like she was just anti-war. She is doing better in some former East German states though and along with the AfD, die Linke will be against our arming Ukraine and rearming Germany.
Wow Linda, what a great piece. And a timely topic; Populism.
I need to read this book. Thanks for this wonderfully written article.
Bob thank you. If you read the book I will love to hear what your thoughts are. My friend who is in the book club was saying today that she is going to also read his book Stayin’ Alive
The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, which I think I will read too.
https://thenewpress.com/books/stayin%E2%80%99-alive
We are inviting Jefferson Cowie to speak to Democrats Abroad. I hope we can make this work. He has said he thinks he can fit it in. We are going to ask him to focus his talk more on what we can do now.
It was super helpful to understand that:
1) Voting Rights are of primary importance and we need to be fighting this all together. In Democrats Abroad, which is primarily a voting support organization because we help people to register and understand better how to more effectively vote from Abroad which would include Republicans too. We are very interested in Stopping the SAVE bill. That is in part a bill that would disenfranchise Democrats Abroad. So, on initiatives like this, we get requests to call our elected officials and what we want to tell them on bills.
2) We have to develop a populist message of what we are offering people. I think this agrees with what Anat Shenker Osorio has been saying when I have seen her talking on Anand Giridharadas's Substack The INK podcasts. She is saying you have to create a story for people about what things will be like. My group here is working on collecting health care narratives from Americans living under all sorts of health care systems and sharing them with people working on American health care policy in Congress, and in the states.
3) Having Cowie point out that 2/3 of Americans do not have a college degree was also important, because the stories have to fit in the people who live in America.
The book should be here in a couple of days. looking forward to it.
I would love to hear the author speak. let me know if that happens.
Lots of good things you cite here, Linda.
I like, too, the anecdotes -- such as the one of the woman asleep taking up two seats on the bus.
Please, in future, more details on those you say are rising up against illiberal governments in Hungary, Romania, and Georgia. (Also Greece, England, and Serbia -- other European locales you cite here which you could further represent.)
Note, too, in your para six you refer to Andrew Jackson as if he were yet alive and active during the era of post-Civil War Freedmen and Black Republicans.
Phil, Thank you so much for catching the Andrew Johnson as Andrew Jackson error. Andrew Jackson had done the same thing earlier in protecting the Native Americans from the White Southerners who were violating the government's treaties with the Native Americans. While at first they tried to stop these Whites from taking the land that the Whites were stealing, they ended up giving up for a variety of reasons detailed in Cowie's book Freedom's Dominion.
I did not put in details on the other countries that are uprising because the article was not really about them. I have some articles on these uprisings linked below. I will try to talk more about European politics, but I think that Cowie is very instructive for us right now, because he is defining the role of populism in the presidency, and that with a population who is 2/3 without college degrees if it does not address their needs, it is not going to be successful.
I read European news each day, and uprisings in other countries are regular news here. My husband speaks Greek so he watches Greek news each day and has been keeping me apprised of what is going on there with the rioting. I assume that in the US people and press are more preoccupied with what is going on in the US since so much is going on. It is hopeful that citizens are having peaceful protests, and South Korea certainly was an example of a successful one. I like looking at both, to see why the successful ones are successful, and the unsuccessful ones are unsuccessful. I think one thing is that one has to act fast before an illiberal government gets entrenched in their systems, and destroy all the pillars of democracy.
Hi Linda, Thank you for this very elucidating article. I live in India and have for the past fifteen years, when I retired from public service in the City University of New York (CUNY). I married a man from India in 1994 and we moved here full time in 2009-10. I do not speak Hindi well, and my community in Maharashtra speaks Marathi, which I know not at all. Aside from that challenge (people DO speak some or a lot of English), I am not Indian and the history of this subcontinent is extremely complex. I have learned a lot over the years, but it is only a little compared to knowing all the threads of politics in this vast land. I consider Modi an autocrat and his BJP a Hindu nationalist party, much like the US’s white Christian movement, known as MAGA. TikTok, wildly popular everywhere, is banned here, for example. The Congress Party, led by Nehru when India gained liberation from the British, has not succeeded in galvanizing the population, now over 1.4 billion citizens (who DO vote, btw) to elect a more populist and liberal government. The 450 million (!) Indians who live on the streets and byways of this country, suffer daily from lack of anything we would call a “civilized” society and the very intelligent commentators like Arundhati Roy and journalists on the “left” are threatened by the BJP and have been arrested and sometimes assassinated when they speak too loudly against the terrible policies of Modi and others in power. I was recently in the US for six months (August 2024-February 2025) on a work project. I left just before the Tesla outrage exploded and cars and dealerships were trashed by ordinary citizens, feeling no other outlet for their frustration. I hope April 5 will turn out millions of ordinary Americans to protest the complete insanity and chaos going on there. My first cousins are Trumpers, and though they are decent on a micro level, they think tramp is great. I can’t bear to even ask them what they think currently. So that’s my two cents for now. Thanks for your writing and educating me. Love, from India.
Hi Elizabeth,
I am glad you found what Cowie is saying interesting. I follow Indian politics some, and noted that Musk and Modi seemed to hit it off well. I know that Musk's babymom and several of his youngest children were with them at the meeting, which was odd. I wonder what Indians make of that. Did you hear it discussed? Now Musk is going to be expanding into India, which is good for him, because he has alienated a lot of Europe.
It grew up in a community in Chicago that had a lot of Indian and other immigrants. My German mother, who has a degree in graphic design, and also was a calligrapher, used to make posters for the India Association of the University of Chicago when they had events. So, as payment for her work, she and I could go to the event on the poster. I had a lot of great Indian food that way, and also went to see a lot of Indian movies, music and dance. The school where I taught had an Indian dance activity which would always have a couple of performances a year, which we enjoyed school wide. Our community had a lot of people from India and their families.
Now I live in a community in Germany where there are quite a few students on the bus line I take home who are from India and live in my neighborhood.They tend to get off at my stop and the stop before. However, there are no Indian restaurants in my neighborhood. We go to other areas of the city for Indian food. India sends the second largest number of foreign students to Germany after China. I think India's population has surpassed China's now.
Do you connect in India with other Americans? Are you in any of the Democrats Abroad groups in India? I do see that there is a chapter in Mumbai. https://www.democratsabroad.org/in_chapters
My Democrats Abroad group in Germany is working on a project about health care, that when we get our website going, it would be great if we could hear about health care in India from your experience. We are going to gather stories, and share them with people working in the US on health care, so that they can develop a populist health care plan for Americans. Right now, we are also trying to fight for our voting rights from Abroad, and to protest the shutting down of US embassies in our region. Thank you for sharing about your life in India. It would be great if Indians would see their way to electing a populist president that is not a Hindu Nationalist, but Democratic. Do you think that students going to study in so many democratic countries will help to change things? Also, have you heard stories of people from India being harassed by ICE when they enter the US? Or, would this sort of story not be reported?
Thank you. Such a thoughtful and wide ranging summary of the book. I learned alot and it all makes sense. I appreciate the time and effort you took to write this.
I am glad it was of interest. I have just ordered Cowie's book Stayin' Alive.
https://thenewpress.com/books/stayin%E2%80%99-alive
We are organizing for him to talk to Democrats Abroad. I hope that my copy comes in time for me to read it before he speaks to us.
Hi Linda. From the sampling you shared about Cowie, I wholeheartedly concur. He has more on the ball than most. I also have to admit that I can't afford to become a paid subscriber, although having chatted with you in the past in other forums, you would be well deserved to be paid. My sole income for my spouse / household is SS disability and that is sole subsistence dollars only. I would tell you more privately if that were possible and I'm certain that you would understand. Great article.. keep it up !
Thank you D4N. A populist government of the type Cowie is talking about would make sure that you would not have to worry about paying for health care or a roof over your head. This is what European countries are grappling with now. Thanks to Putin they are going to be putting more of their money into defense spending so of course there will be less for social welfare, and the switch to environmental infrastructure. The trick will be to make sure there is enough in each. We shall see. With a multiparty system no one can just afford to get complacent and rubber stamp the executive's actions because the people have other options.
After we finish Freedom's Dominion a friend and I are going to read Cowie's book Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class.
https://thenewpress.com/books/stayin%E2%80%99-alive
We are trying to work out a date for Cowie to come and talk to Democrats Abroad and livestream it world wide.
In the list of musts, what about education which seems to be sorely lacking in the US right now.
It's said that 54% of us read at or below a 6th grade level. Isn't somehow raising that bar a critic part of this? Or do we just figure out how to cater to that domesticated farm animal mentality of much of the populace? Perhaps it's too long term a project, so does our populist just treat that populace like pigs at the trough and find a path that makes them grunt contentedly to get in office and then hopefully start to plug in their currently all but vapid minds?
Ralph, my daughter has been disparaging my use of the term "educated elite" because I have said we are included in this. She does not like to think so. I don't like the term, but I get what is being said by this, and it is used against Democrats. It cannot just be about what the big donor elite wants from the Democratic leadership.
She has read my article on Cowie's talk and did not like his U metaphor with the educated elite on the top of one end, and multicultural rights on the other end. I understood his inverted bell curve though. He is saying that one should be taking on populist issues and recognize that 2/3 of the population does not have a college degree and does not care about groups protected by civil rights, even if it includes them.
Having read Project 2025 in my political book club, I suspect that parents will be hue and crying about the severe cutbacks all schools are facing with the cuts to the Department of Education and the disappearance of funding. In fact, there are competing interests for the funding, and I am betting that we all know which interest will win out.
In the Project 2025 document they talk about giving the cost of funding a child in a school building to each parent to do with as they wish to educate their child. I believe they said something like $23,000 per pupil, though we know that varies from state to state. When I read that, I could see all of the Christian Nationalist parents like the Duggers who have 18 children, looking at breeding children and homeschooling as a way to earn their living. I am sure this is the group that the Heritage Foundation was thinking about while drafting it.
People who cannot stay home to teach their children send them to schools which will be even more deprived of money. Of course, this money is probably going to just go to cut taxes for the billionaires, and circularly, they will be funding Trump, so a portion will go back to him. Maybe even the lions share.
So, I think the public has to be as upset about schooling, as they are about the price of eggs before that can be a campaign issue. And, hopefully someone is prepared to jump on that. While that is not a concern that most people think they have, it will become that. Just watch extracurricular sports be gone from public schools. No more football team, or baseball, or basketball team, and people will get upset. As Cowie tells us in his book, Freedom's Dominion, George Wallace said that the reason he did not want to integrate the schools is that the whole social life of many communities took place at the school. The whole community would come out for the sports game, particularly in more rural areas. He did not want to have integrated socializing.
I am a lifelong teacher, so I am fully aware of what parents might be expecting to experience, but people who do not have roofs over their heads, or enough food, or child care, are not going to take on something that up until now, thanks the unionization of teachers who have taken on many fights to improve schooling, is working fairly well for people.
So, if the elected officials are serving the people, and not always "knowing it better," than they will be reflecting what they are hearing as concerns, and addressing them. I do think that education will come up, even for home schooling parents when there is reduced funding for special education. I do not think most parents think that Tommy Tuberville's just use "the belt to" address children with ADHD and other behavioral concerns, is an okay way to support their children. Let us see what comes up the road.
Does Cowie really think that the Democrats lost the working class white man in the last decade? That goes back at least to Nixon's "southern strategy," which was a reaction to the Democratic-led passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the mid-1960s. Then came the gutting of unions in general during the Reagan administration. Does he address racism at all?
Susanna, I have ordered his book called Stayin' Alive to read next. I am almost done with Freedom's Dominion. We see some switching of the Dems in the South during the Goldwater-Johnson campaign in this book. So, he does see it as a Southern reaction to what they felt was federal overreach. He is trying in his book to tie the two things, racism and anti-federal government beliefs together. At the bottom of my article I have a link to his talk, which you have to scroll down to the bottom to see.