Forbes seems to get it. They use the term “Southern conservatives” but outside of university towns and retirement communities or other areas which are packed full of non-Southern transplants and foreigners we display incredible ethnic loyalty at the ballot box. That is how Trump was able to win States such as Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana and Georgia despite their very large Black or Mexican Democratic populations. The native White people of Dixie are an enduring nation trapped within a political system which makes them a permanent minority.
Chris Ladd writes:
All the while, an unacknowledged and unofficial third party has survived inside these alignments. A party of Southern conservatives, aligned originally with Democrats, has remained a distinct political entity, complete with their own institutions, practices and values. Elsewhere in America, Democrats and Republicans dueled their way through a two-party democracy. By contrast, Southern states never tolerated partisan competition. Southern states have always been governed by a single, distinct local party, an arrangement that continues today.
Read the whole article. Ladd makes excellent points about our cultural conservatism and antipathy towards globalism and unrestrained capitalism:
Southern conservatism finds freedom and equality, by its unique definitions, through adherence to a social hierarchy based on race, Christianity, a male duty to protect women, and a commodity-driven economy. Though they have always been intensely hostile to government intervention in markets, this should never be interpreted as an affinity for capitalism, which they have always found to be grubby and low. Few forces are more disruptive of a perfect social order than the constant, churning creative destruction that accompanies capitalism.