ABSTRACT
Democrats were a model of such a party in their New Deal days, but the last quarter-century has undone that party system and left national Democrats struggling, like Humpty Dumpty, to put the pieces together again. Since the Civil War, the coalition of north and south has been a growing burden on the ambitions of national Democrats, for whom the “positive” state replaced the Jeffersonian maxim as the definition of political liberalism. In 1948, Democrats adopted a civil rights plank for their national platform, prompting a number of Deep South delegates to walk out of the party convention and into the arms of Strom Thurmond’s third-party Dixiecrat challenge to liberal democracy. As the north declines, the far west gains in the new geography of national power. The decline in support for democracy in the Deep South has its parallel in the Midsouth from Virginia and North Carolina west to Arkansas, but the pattern of defection differs.
