The Unwanted Southern Conservatives
This chapter assesses Southern conservatism, its history, and its relationship to the American conservative movement. It particularly looks at the fate of Southern regionalists within a now-transformed American conservative movement. The chapter considers the deliberate removal of the Southern traditionalists from this establishment, a process that was greatly accelerated once the neoconservatives became a force to be reckoned with. This displacement represented a major reorientation of the conservative movement, given that Southern Agrarians and, more generally, Southern traditionalists had been significant cultural and social critics in the post-World War II Right. The loss of a Southern conservative presence was so total that any memory of this influence has been shoved down a memory hole and/or bleached out of authorized histories of the conservative movement.