For much of America’s history, the South has been a laggard, a poor region weighed down by intense racism and reactionary politics, lacking both industry and newcomers, foreign or domestic, to imbue it with dynamism and energy. But that’s changing — big time. Far from singing romantic paeans to Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy’s president, or celebrating his (blessedly) “lost cause,” the South increasingly embraces the very attitudes and policies that once made the North dominant.
Progressives like Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson complain that America looks the way it would “if the Confederacy” had won. Yet the South’s triumph today is one the old rebels would barely recognize. The region, to be sure, still has more than its share of Blimpish nativists and religious fanatics. Even so, more people, including African-Americans, led by those with college degrees, now flock there in search of opportunity.
This marks a huge historical turnaround. Well into the Twenties and Thirties, the South was lagging and losing migrants to the North and the West. Slavery, and then segregation, notes historian Gavin Wright, kept down labor costs and, with them, the incentive for innovation and labor-saving technology. The South was almost its “own country,” as Wright says, a poor appendage to a much richer, more dynamic nation.
But now, the South is capturing cutting-edge industries, drawing in capital as well as a swelling tide of migrants from within the country and abroad. Overall, the southeast quadrant of the country is now the most dominant economic region, and since 2018 has produced almost all the country’s population growth and half its new jobs, according to the Texas Stock Exchange.
By contrast, it’s the Northern and Pacific cities that are pursuing John C. Calhoun-style nullification to resist Washington. And the Trump administration has taken note of this. Recently, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared that “we want the US to be more like Florida and less like New York.” With Gotham about to embrace socialism and a globalized intifada, things look good for Trump Central in Palm Beach, the new favored boomtown for millionaires and billionaires.
Of course, inertia still works for the North and California after decades of dominance. Even today, per-capita incomes remain higher in the Northeast and California, but this likely reflects fewer families and higher costs, which often wipe out income gains, particularly for minorities and the working class. The income disparity has been receding since the Forties, as the South grows in power and influence and shifts to sophisticated businesses like aerospace, software, and finance — once unthinkable for the agrarian region.
One key factor to the Southern ascendency has been investment in education, which has long been a critical weak spot, with average expenditures half the national average well into the Forties. With an economy built around labor-intensive farming and light manufacturing, generations of ambitious Southerners sought opportunities elsewhere. Many headed to colleges in the Northeast and West Coast. But today, that flow has reversed, with ever more college students choosing to attend schools in the South.
Read the rest of this piece at: Unherd.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Homepage photo: SpaceX via Flickr under under CC 2.0 License.
