Trump’s bizarre and abrasive style, to be sure, couldn’t be more different than that of the Bush dynasty. And his idiosyncratic tariff policy is a genuine break with what went before. But in most areas, Trumpism is simply Bushism gilded by a tacky coat of paint. In political terms, Donald Trump is the brother-by-a-different-mother of Dubya and Jeb!  

Pop quiz: which of the three last Republican presidents has launched a major war of choice against a populous Persian Gulf country — George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, or Donald Trump? If you answered all three, you are right. Republican presidents began all three Gulf Wars: the First Gulf War of 1991, the Second Gulf War of 2003-2011, and the Third Gulf War of 2026-?.

Second question: which of the last three Republican presidents had, as his major legislative accomplishment, a tax cut that disproportionately benefited the rich and corporations? If you answered all three — the two Bushes and Trump — you are, again, correct.  

Third question: which of the last three Republican presidents successfully promoted the expansion of legal guest-worker programs for cheap-labor industries like agriculture and hospitality? Once again, the answer is both Bushes and Trump.  

Fourth and final question: which of the last three Republican presidents signed laws or authorized regulations to boost the number of rich foreigners who could buy green cards, as a ticket to American citizenship? You guessed it, both Bushes and Trump. In politics as well as policies, the Trump administration increasingly looks like a continuation of the post-2000 Republican norm: pro-war, pro-business.

To see why, it helps to examine the electorate. Over the past decade, much has been made of a supposed “realignment” between the two parties and Trump’s success in attracting a formerly Democratic-leaning working class into the Republican column. Yet this was always overstated. In reality, Trump didn’t create a party realignment, and he hasn’t significantly reshaped one.  He has inherited the Bush Republican Party — a new American political party that coalesced in the Nineties and 2000s.

In 2024, the only two religious groups that viewed Trump favorably were white evangelical Protestants (67%) and white Catholics (51%). Trump won four-fifths of the white evangelical vote in 2016, 2020, and 2024. But his margin was only a slight improvement over Mitt Romney in 2012 (who won 78% of the same group), John McCain in 2008 (74%), and George W. Bush in 2004 (78%). History, then, shows a gradually expanding share of white-evangelical votes for any and all Republican presidential nominees, not a sudden surge under Trump in 2016. 

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With the white working class as a whole, Trump — who won 62% in 2016, 59% in 2020, and 66% in 2024 — did only marginally better than GOP nominees since 1980, from highs under Ronald Reagan (56% in 1984) and Romney (56%) to a low of 45% with McCain. That this reflects the evolution of the GOP, rather than the unique charisma of Trump, is evident from the fact that in the 2022 midterms, Republican congressional hopefuls won 66% of the working class, the same rate as Trump in 2024.  

The Republican share of the white working class is boosted by ultra-Republican white evangelicals. As the University of Pennsylvania’s John J. Diulio points out, “in 2016 and 2020, Trump won a majority of white evangelical working-class voters, but he lost a majority of white non-evangelical working-class voters. He lost them again in 2024.” White, working-class Americans who were not evangelical Protestants preferred Harris to Trump by a margin of 52 to 45.

Add regional dynamics, and it becomes even clearer that the Trump party is simply the Bush party, only with vulgar rhetoric. The Bush GOP is based in the former territory of New Deal and Jacksonian Democrats — the Confederacy and Appalachia. Its constituents, like small-business owners and working-class evangelicals, are those who formed the base of the Democratic Party for most of its history.

Eight out of 10 white Southerners were Democrats in 1950s, and as recently as 1992, Republicans had only a two-point advantage in the white South. By 2020, two-in-three white Southerners identified with the Republican Party.

Opposition to the civil-rights movement was a factor, but if racism were the only one then white Southerners should have completely abandoned the Democrats by 1968 or 1972. Instead, cultural conservatism with respect to religion, sex, and censorship, along with a distinctively martial version of Southern patriotism, combined with the increasing progressivism of national Democrats, gradually drove many white Southern Democrats into the Republican Party between the Seventies and the 2000s.

Today Republicans from the South hold more than 50% of the seats of the Republican House majority. In the Senate, the Republican majority leader and the Republican majority whip are from South Dakota and Wyoming, respectively, while the Republican conference chair is from Arkansas, the Republican policy boss is from West Virginia, and the Republican senatorial committee chair is from South Carolina.  

In hindsight, John McCain’s 2008 candidacy was a link in the soft transition of the party of Bush into the party of Trump. Having co-sponsored a bill providing amnesty for illegal immigrants with Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy in 2005, in 2008 McCain opposed any amnesty. And to bolster his pseudo-populist bona fides, McCain chose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate.  

In foreign policy, McCain — a Vietnam veteran and former POW and the descendant of military officers whose extended family owned a Mississippi plantation until after World War II — was one of the most consistently bellicose members of the hawkish wing of the GOP. During his presidential campaign, to the tune of the Beach Boys song “Barbara Ann”, McCain sang “Bomb bomb bomb Iran.” Had McCain been elected president, America might have waged all-out war against Iran a decade and a half ago.

Constituent interests, not the theories of Curtis Yarvin or Patrick Deneen, explain the policies of the post-Nineties GOP, under Trump and the Bushes alike. In terms of counties rather than states, the American red-county economy is predominantly exurban and rural and dominated by three kinds of industries: extractive resource industries like oil and gas and coal; the federally funded defense industries and the local businesses and jobs that military spending supports; and low-wage industries, most notably agriculture and services. Republican economic policy reflects the economic interests of employers and investors in red counties across America.

In 2019, 55% of all primary energy — chiefly oil, natural gas, and coal — was produced in the United States came from six mostly red states: Texas, Pennsylvania, Wyoming, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and North Dakota, with the Lone Star State accounting for 41% of all US crude production. Naturally, the Republican Party supports the mantra “drill, baby, drill” (and “mine, baby, mine”) and opposes the Green New Deal, with its goal of phasing out all fossil-fuel use in the United States and the world in favor of renewables.

By far the most important social base of the Bush-to-Trump Republican Party, and the greatest influence on Republican economic policy, is made up of small-business owners who, according to the Stanford Business Review, “represent a distinct, Republican-leaning constituency.”

Business owners are a minority of Republican voters; the majority of voters in both parties are mostly wage earners. But they are overrepresented among GOP primary voters, lobbyists, staffers, and politicians. Apart from professional and technical services, small businesses are concentrated in construction, natural resources and mining, trade, transportation and utilities, manufacturing, and leisure and hospitality. Republican-leaning billionaires and mega-corporations draw the ire of progressives and some conservative populists, but the party’s center of gravity is found among provincial Republican millionaires. Small and regional capital, not big business, forms the social power base of the Trump party and that of the Bushes before him.

You don’t have to be a Marxist to understand that mainstream Republican economic policy reflects the economic interests of this sector of capital. Compliance with federal, state, and local regulations is a bigger challenge for small-business owners than for large, managerial corporations, so it isn’t surprising that Trump 2.0 would hire Elon Musk and Russell Vought to theatrically cut regulations, fire federal bureaucrats, and dismantle government agencies. 

For most small businesses, wages plus benefits and payroll taxes are the greatest cost. Mainstream Republican policies toward American workers under Trump and the two Bushes form a consistent policy designed to minimize the bargaining power of workers in wage negotiations and to make workers so economically desperate they will be compelled to take jobs with poor pay and bad working conditions.  

Some of these policies — such as unremitting hostility to organized labor — have obvious benefits for cheap-labor small businesses. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump pretended to show respect for unionized workers by inviting Teamsters President Sean O’Brien to speak at the Republican National Convention. Less than a month later, in a social media conversation with Elon Musk, Trump told Musk: “You’re the greatest cutter. I look at what you do. You walk in and say, ‘You want to quit?’ I won’t mention the name of the company but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK. You’re all gone.’ ”

Trump was evidently unaware that federal law prohibits the firing of striking workers. The United Auto Workers union immediately filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, a New Deal-created agency that Musk is suing on the specious claim that it has been unconstitutional from the beginning. In January 2025, having returned to the White House, Trump crippled the NLRB by illegally firing a board member, removing the board’s quorum.

Crushing unions and dismantling the NLRB are only two of the strategies used by mainstream Republicans, including Trump, to shift the balance of power in wage negotiations from workers to employers. Tight labor markets that result from low immigration and low workforce participation by mothers of young children can create a seller’s market in labor that strengthens the power of workers, male and female, to demand higher wages. To this end, employer lobbies dominated by Republican-leaning small-business owners for decades have supported mass low-wage immigration and promoted the employment of mothers of young children.  

The US Chamber of Commerce, the National Small Business Association, and the National Federation of Independent Business all support expanding guest worker programs, whose workers, unlike green card holders (legal permanent residents), don’t qualify for a path to citizenship and voting. According to an NFIB spokesperson, “our members support an enforceable guest worker program and expanding H-2B visas for economic need.” 

The US Chamber of Commerce advocates doubling the number of immigrants. According to the NSBA, meanwhile, more than a third of small businesses employ workers who belong to one of three categories: green-card holders, temporary foreign workers, or visa holders. The NSBA advocates lifting country caps on employment-related visas, allowing unlimited numbers of non-citizen foreigners to work in the homeland. 

This is one of the surprising and little-noticed threads that tie the Bushes to Trump. As United Farm Workers comms director Antonio de Loera-Brust has noted in these pages, the Trump II administration has moved to increase the number of agricultural guest workers. This, notwithstanding its showy enforcement actions in blue cities. Far from being a radical break with Bush-era Republican immigration policy, Trump’s actual immigration policy has been a continuation of employer-first policies in substance, though not in rhetoric. 

In a cabinet meeting on 11 April, 2025, Trump said that “we have to take care of our farmers, the hotels and, you know, the various places where they tend to, where they tend to NEED people.” The second Trump administration has used a variety of methods, including extreme vetting of applications and travel bans, to reduce legal immigration to the United States by an estimated 35% and 50%, if the present rate continues over four years.  

While blockading legal immigration overall, the Trump administration has exempted the low-wage H-2 visa categories from obstructionist delays. And the administration has doubled the number of H-2 visas for low-wage workers for 2026. 

All of this shows that Trumpism is merely the higher stage of Bushism. It was George Herbert Walker Bush who signed the Immigration Act of 1990, which in hindsight was the foundation for the mass immigration of the last half century. The 1990 Act simultaneously created the EB-5 visa selling green cards to the foreign bourgeoisie, created the H1-B guest-worker visa, expanded existing guest-worker programs, and created new guest-worker categories. It also created the Temporary Protected Status program, under which President Joe Biden granted legal status to nearly a million otherwise ineligible foreign nationals.

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Republican foreign policy, like tax and labor policy, can be explained in terms of Republican voters and donors. Republican policy towards the Middle East is influenced but not wholly determined by support for Israel’s annexationist hard Right among evangelical Christian Zionists and Right-wing Jews, who, however, are a minority of America’s mostly Democratic Jewish voters. In 2020, after moving the US embassy, Trump declared, “and we moved the capital of Israel to Jerusalem. That’s for the evangelicals.”

And Republican policy towards Latin America is influenced by anti-communist Cuban-Americans, a crucial Florida voting bloc, who nurtured Marco Rubio. In Trump’s second term, the former senator from the Sunshine State, long associated with the hawkish wing of the GOP, has magnified his influence by holding multiple foreign policy jobs simultaneously at times — Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, and acting administrator of USAID.

The underlying divide in GOP foreign policy is among three schools of thought: global hegemonists who favor American military hegemony in every major region; balance-of-power realists or “prioritizers” who want to focus America’s limited military resources on the Chinese challenge in Asia; and neo-isolationist “restrainers.” The global-hegemony strategy’s major supporters since the end of the Cold War have disproportionately been Southern conservative hawks like South Carolina’s Sen. Lindsay Graham and Arkansas’s Senator Tom Cotton. The armed-services committees in the Senate and House are led by two Republican Southern hawks — Mississippi’s Senator Roger Wicker and Alabama’s Representative Mike D. Rogers. 

Their militarism is unusual by national standards but typical of the martial tradition of the American South. Nearly half of new military recruits are from the South, even though it contains only about a third of young adult Americans. 

The hawks whom Southern voters send to Congress ensure that the region profits from defense spending. The list of states that derive more than 3.5% of their GDP from defense contracts is dominated by states in the South and Southwest: Texas, Virginia, Arizona, Maryland, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, and Missouri (Connecticut and Maine make the list because of their Navy bases and shipyards). Meanwhile, the importance of defense spending to California’s economy has declined, as military investment in Florida has increased.

Under the two Bushes and Trump, congressional Republicans in Washington, among other things, have been subsidizing the folks back home by increasing defense spending while further ballooning deficits enlarged by their tax cuts for the rich and business. 

Under Trump as under the Bushes, the Republican Party, based in the former Confederate states, is the party of unnecessary wars, tax cuts for the rich, and anti-worker, low-wage labor-market policy. Anti-interventionist realists and restrainers and economic populists on the Right who dreamed that Trump would favor their causes may not want to hear the truth. And the truth will be resisted as well by Democrats and Never Trump Republicans who idealized the two Bushes while demonizing Trump. But the fact is that, apart from his colorful personality, Trump has been a relatively conventional post-Cold War Republican president. 

The Third Gulf War is the latest reminder that there is no Trump party and never has been, only the Bush party under new management.

Yet five years after Katrina smashed into this fabled city, President Barack Obama’s respected education secretary hailed the storm as “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans”. Arne Duncan’s words were crass. But — as we can see clearly two decades later — they were true. For the winds and rain that lashed the city also shattered the systemic inertia and stifling bureaucracy that had betrayed generations of children, unleashing a schools revolution unmatched anywhere for its radicalism and scale.

New Orleans had one of the worst-performing public school systems in America before Katrina. Young lives were being betrayed by low expectations, dreadful teaching, incompetent officials, crumbling infrastructure and corruption.

Today it is still a struggling city in one of the nation’s poorest states. It is shedding jobs in its biggest industries including tourism, despite the throngs of visitors out partying on Bourbon Street or munching beignets in the French Quarter, and its population is shrinking. Yet it offers important lessons about education involving parental choice, school autonomy and accountability that extend far beyond the Big Easy.

The breaking of those levees smashed a mindset that sanctioned failure. Surveying the devastation that left just 16 out of 128 schools intact, and about a third of school buildings destroyed, state legislators took a massive gamble: they sacked all 7,000 teachers, side-lined unions, invited ambitious all-comers in to run their schools, and offered parents almost total freedom over where to send their children. This drastic move was backed by rigorous assessment of their performance, resulting in at least 50 of the remaining 75 schools being shut down or handed to new operators over the following years.

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Now, a new report by experts at Tulane University has analyzed scores of studies conducted over more than a decade into this bold experiment. And it concludes this daring act of liberation from local bureaucrats, converting all New Orleans schools into charter schools — publicly-funded, but with freedom and flexibility to set curriculums in line with contractually-agreed goals — was a huge success. “It’s the largest, broadest and most sustained improvement we’ve ever seen in a US school district with substantial improvement everywhere we have looked from test scores and parental satisfaction through to college access and reduced involvement in crime,” says Doug Harris, professor of economics and director of the Education Research Alliance.

That sounds pretty definitive. Yet Harris admits that when he started to study the reforms and track their outcomes with colleagues, back in 2012, he was a skeptic. But the data — which includes the value-added metrics vital for a city where almost one-third of children grow up in poverty — was persuasive. Before Katrina, New Orleans sat at the foot of most key rankings in Louisiana, the second worst US state for education. Almost two-thirds of its schools were judged failing. And the city ranked near bottom nationally in reading and math, with 19 out of every 20 high school seniors testing in school exit exams below basic proficiency in English and math.

Yet things quickly changed. New Orleans has gone from being one of the country’s worst school districts — with graduation rates 18% below the national average — to middle of the pack with graduation rates rising nearly 20 points in the scheme’s first decade. Improvements have plateaued, but they have been sustained, dipping in Covid amid school closures before recovering sharply. “We’ve leapfrogged thousands of school districts,” Harris says, “which has never been seen before.”

As the professor points out, the reforms were courageous, controversial, and “ugly” at times — imposed, as they were, by legislators in the state capital Baton Rouge. “It was not pretty to see them put in place on a majority-black city in a majority-white state,” says Harris, pointing to the history of voting disenfranchisement in the Jim Crow South. There was a decline in the number of African-American teachers — who fell from 71% of the workforce to fewer than half a decade later, before rebounding slightly — while the number and pay of managers soared. Rehired teachers faced longer hours and lower salaries.

Initially, critics on the Left said “the rhetoric of reform often fails to match the reality” with advances coming at expense of disadvantaged students. Then they claimed the city’s undeniable improvements resulted largely from extra cash pouring into the system. The Tulane report accepts money was a factor, but argues the reforms fueled public support for higher spending on education, since local people could see the results at last. It adds that, before 2005, when the system was infamously dysfunctional, schools were “ineffective in converting school resources into improvement” — meaning that increasing education spending without the post-Katrina reforms would likely have failed.

Among those watching the horrific Katrina news footage was a former corporate financier with Boeing who was planning to move into education. Ben Kleban told me five years later how he moved to Louisiana from New York at the age of 26 to set up a school, starting out in a refurbished building with 120 pupils aged between 11-15. His venture grew fast, took over a nearby failing school, improved proficiency tests, and won a national medal in recognition of its successes. “For too long,” he said, “the public school system found excuses rather than being properly accountable to parents,” explaining how he relied on “basic business practices” with a daily flow of data on attendance, discipline and classroom performance.

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Kleban was far from alone. After Katrina, New Orleans became a magnet for ambitious educationalists, innovative entrepreneurs and idealistic philanthropists seeking to improve lives of disadvantaged children. And many of those teachers who lost out in the post-hurricane purge ended up being offered options to return.

Among them was Deanna Reddick, a single mother starting out on her teaching career when Katrina struck, resulting in evacuation with her daughter to Baton Rouge followed by closure of her school. Today, she is the school leader in charge of almost 1,000 pupils at KIPP Morial — one of nine campuses in the city under the umbrella of the Knowledge is Power Program, a network of 278 public schools in 21 states. When first hired there in 2006, the algebra teacher was struck by the transformed educational atmosphere, vastly different from her previous school.

“You could tell when you walked in that everybody was on the same mission,” she says. “Everybody was working towards the same thing for every single student in that building. My lens expanded — I wasn’t just concerned with what was happening in my own classroom. There was a team dynamic. We are only as strong as our weakest classroom.”

Reddick admits she feels under constant pressure to deliver, knowing her school, which has a strong emphasis on creative arts, might close or be handed to a new provider if she stumbles. Yet she says she never wants to rest on her laurels. “I want to feel that sense of urgency when I walk in the building every day. We have no time to waste.” And her emphasis on results and the pressure to perform on pupils does deliver change. The Tulane report found that enrollment of non-white pupils increased in higher-performing schools, while — against expectations — there was also an increase in the diversity of school options available for parents and pupils.

Kleban left his three-school group in 2016, after winning an election to join the city’s school board. Seven years later, it wound down operations after their charters were withdrawn. Curiously — and despite often-strong cultural ties to communities — such rapid churn in schools isn’t having the deleterious impact one might expect, suggesting that the closure of bad institutions can be a wise move. “In America — and probably in Britain too — there is often strong local attachment to schools, yet if they’re not working they need to be replaced,” argues Professor Paul Hill, founder of the Center on Reinventing Public Education. “Sometimes even parents stay loyal to a school failing their kids. But a school district has a duty to provide the best schools by whatever means it can.”

Harris and Hill — having both followed the New Orleans experiment closely — believe it shows why the Left should be much less in hock to demands of teaching unions and the Right far more cautious about the idea that vouchers alone can lift school standards with their absolutist faith in the market. Indeed, the Tulane report suggests Louisiana’s embrace of vouchers actually had a “negative effect on school outcomes”. It argues that they may have drawn students out of the city’s publicly run charter schools, now a proven success story, and into private schools that may be less good than generally thought with “positive outcomes driven by the demographics of those who can usually afford them”.

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Given the successes, should the NOLA experiment be replicated elsewhere? Even before Katrina, there were thousands of charter schools across America, including five in New Orleans. But no other district has been desperate enough to push the idea quite as far (although an elected school board was given back overall control again in 2018). There have been sporadic attempts to mimic the New Orleans revolution in places such as New York, Chicago and Indianapolis, but most efforts were either experimental, pusillanimous or petered out after the ouster of their political patrons. A similar — if much less drastic — approach based on choice, autonomy and accountability, with academies and free schools, was adopted successfully to drive up standards in Britain. Sadly, though, Labour’s education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, seems determined to undo 30 years of political consensus, which has again shown the benefits of devolving decision-making to schools, in a bid to suck up to the unions.

Local politics remains messy, to say the least, in New Orleans with the mayor LaToya Cantrell indicted last week over wire fraud, obstruction of justice and lying to a grand jury after an investigation into her alleged affair with a former police officer. And the city has some of the worst urban poverty rates in America. But its radical and largely unique school experiment does offer hope for the future. As Reddick puts it, “‘I am a true believer that every one of my students — no matter where they come from, no matter where they live, no matter what trauma they might have suffered — that they can be successful.’” And since Katrina, she says, there has been a new urgency around education. Then Reddick echoes the infamous words of Arne Duncan all those years ago. “When I think about education — and it sounds horrible to say — Katrina was one of the best things that happened to New Orleans.”

Yet if the South was crushed back in 1865, it now holds America’s destiny in its hands. Certainly, that’s clear enough politically: Donald Trump is expected to win every former Confederate state, with erstwhile battlegrounds such as Georgia and North Carolina now tilting to the Republicans. Even Virginia, increasingly dominated by liberal Washington suburbs, could go red too. It’s a similar story at the local level. Except for Richmond, the GOP controls every state house beyond the Mason-Dixon Line. In South Carolina’s General Assembly, the Republicans hold more than twice as many seats as the Democrats.

And if the South is now crucial to the country’s immediate electoral future, broader demographic trends are on its side too. Based on the last census, Texas gained two seats, while Florida and North Carolina each gained one. Accompanied by losses in places such as New York and California, the South is rapidly becoming the most powerful region in the land. Add to that its burgeoning economic strength, and it could soon be more influential than it has been for generations — a shift likely to transform politics, and political culture, right across the nation.

Through the 18th century, the South was central to the American economy. Charleston, an epicentre of the slave trade, was the most prosperous town south of Philadelphia, while South Carolina was among the richest colonial provinces. That wealth allowed the region’s white population to be the wealthiest of the pre-revolutionary era; and self-proclaimed cotton kings to become Old World aristocrats in the swamps and plantations of the New. Stroll the streets of Charleston and you can still see this legacy today. There are elegant mansions, decorated with art, and with silverware imported from Britain. Yet somewhere nearby, their slaves huddled in windowless rooms, forced to suffer the heat and humidity of the South in chains.

It’s ironic that the war the rebels started at Fort Sumter would ultimately destroy the South. That shot heard around the world, courtesy of the Charleston militia in April 1861, would prove no match for the emerging industrial might of the free states in the North. Under blockade from the vastly superior US Navy, buoyant cities like Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans all shrivelled, as the cotton routes to England slammed shut. In 1865, Charleston fell, alongside Fort Sumter. Columbia, the state capital, was razed.

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Not that things would improve once the guns fell silent. The Civil War left the South in deplorable shape, becoming in the memorable words of one author the “problem child” of America. Deprived of their slaves, the cotton kings were ruined. Meanwhile many normal Southerners, particularly after Reconstruction, worshipped the memory of the Confederacy while embracing its racist ideology. Across the South, Confederate memorials dotted the landscape; as recently as a few decades ago, Stars and Bars flags were common. All the while, Southerners worshipped Robert E. Lee and the “lost cause” while the beneficiaries of Ulysses S. Grant’s victory dominated the country’s economy, cultural and political life from New England to Oregon.

Here’s another irony: it would be the federal government, and the New Deal it promulgated, that ultimately started the South’s recovery. Roosevelt’s funding of roads, bridges and ports finally prodded the region into the 20th century. Often backed by Southern Democrat politicians, the scale of this assistance was monumental: in South Carolina alone, New Dealers created the state park system, hung telephone lines, and worked with farmers on soil conservation. The industrial boom of the Second World War also brought bases and vast manufacturing facilities. In Louisiana, to give one example, upwards of 30,000 New Orleanians worked at the Higgins boatyard, producing the thousands of landing craft needed to start the liberation of Europe on D-Day.

Through the Fifties and Sixties, meanwhile, industry began relocating to the South, where unions were weak and costs lower. An influx of go-getting outsiders helped too, remote as they were from the Old South and its neuroses. One good example is John Paul Rousakis, Savannah’s Greek-American mayor for five terms from 1970. Rousakis played a critical role in reviving Savannah’s waterfront, helping preserve what may well be the most beautiful urban landscape in America. Houston, for its part, enjoyed the services of Bob Lanier, a product of blue collar Baytown. Embracing progressive, pro-business policies, Lanier took full advantage of the city’s burgeoning oil industry.

Another newcomer would transform Charleston. An Irish Catholic, Joseph P. Riley was mayor of the city for four decades. Cultivating the support of newly enfranchised African-Americans, as well as local business elites, he turned a declining, crime-infested city into a model of urban renaissance. Riley improved law and order by appointing Reuben Greenberg as police chief in 1982. Another riposte to the South’s racial cliches — he was a half Jewish, half black Houstonian — Greenberg both reclaimed the streets and beclowned Charleston’s remaining substrate of white nationalists. After personally leading the protection of a Ku Klux Klan march, the men in white pillow cases were sure never to return.

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Change happened at the state level too. From Texas to Florida, many belatedly began mimicking their Northern rivals: bringing minorities into leadership positions; financing the growth of major universities; building first-class industrial parks. “The development model has turned on its head,” noted Christopher Lloyd, president of the Site Selection Guild, adding that they’re borrowing the same Californian model that proved so successful in the second half of the last century.

No less important, this legacy has continued into our own time. From manufacturing to professional services, sectors long centred in California and New York have ventured south. According to a recent analysis by Zen Business, indeed, Texas and Florida are now the country’s high-growth hotspots, while they also attract the most tech workers. That’s unsurprising: from HP Enterprise to Oracle to SpaceX, many of America’s biggest firms have relocated to Texas.

Even finance, practically synonymous with Manhattan, is drifting south. Attracted by hot weather and sandy beaches, many bankers have made their home in Miami, even as Dallas lately dethroned Chicago as the second financial centre in the country. Entrepreneurs have even started raising funds to build a new stock exchange in Texas. Their goal? Replacing Wall Street with Y’all Street.

Beyond the South’s own pro-business policies, the relative decline of places like Chicago is telling in other ways. Between soaring taxes and draconian climate change rules, Democratic strongholds in the North seem desperate to bankrupt themselves. No wonder one recent study found that the best states for industry are generally found in the southeast, even as America’s fastest growing ports are places like Corpus Christi (Texas) and Mobile (Alabama).

Not that Dixie’s economic revival can only be traced through industrial output. For just as Rousakis and Riley reshaped and modernised their cities, millions of other Americans found their land of opportunity in the once-distressed South. In 1861, when Fort Sumter was attacked, the South was home to barely nine million of the country’s 31 million residents, and even that included 3.5 million slaves. Today, though, the former Confederacy boasts 40% of the US population, up from less than a third in 1950. This trend has accelerated since the pandemic. By 2023, population growth across just five Southern states, exceeded that of the other 44 combined.

Once again, the North slumps as the South soars. New Jersey, Illinois and New York have since all lost people since 2000, even as Texas gained three million. This isn’t just a function of internal migration either: three Southern cities — Miami, Dallas and Houston — have seen their foreign-born populations rise more than anywhere else. No less striking, these trends seem set to continue over the years ahead. In a recent survey identifying the five best regions for young job seekers, four were in the South, even as Southerners are more likely to have children than their Northern peers.

Apart from anything else, these demographic shifts are exploding old stereotypes. What started with Reuben Greenberg is just as true today: by some accounts Houston is the most diverse city in the country, while African-Americans are returning to the region their grandparents fled during the Great Migration. Overall, minorities generally enjoy higher incomes and home ownership levels here than elsewhere. And whatever Brooklyn liberals might imagine, the South is now among the least segregated parts of the country. To be sure, class divides exist. But in Charleston, successful African-Americans can be found eating at some of the swankiest restaurants, often with white friends. Like low country cuisine, encompassing African, English and Caribbean influences, this is a city that feels more racially harmonious than Northern towns from Milwaukee to Buffalo.

More to the point, these comings and goings are conjuring a political storm. More people means more representation in Congress, and more electoral votes. And if current trends continue — and the South continues to rise and places like Illinois keep falling — Dixie will have 30 more seats in the House of Representatives than it did in the Seventies. Once that happens, it will again emerge as the country’s strongest political region, a role it hasn’t enjoyed since that long-lost world of frock coats and slave markets.

Not that we need to wait for redistricting to spot the South’s political heft. After all, a second Trump administration would surely draw strength from the region’s ascendancy. Trump himself is now a typical Floridian — from Queens — and J.D. Vance hails from the essentially Southern culture of Appalachia. More to the point, likely boosts in defence and space spending under a Republican president would supercharge the region yet further, as would pro-manufacturing policies using tariffs and tough trade deals to replace foreign products with domestic alternatives. There’ll also be pressure to develop policies that help the less successful Southern states such as Louisiana and Mississippi, not least given they’re such Republican strongholds.

Given her probable plans to bailout profligate Northern states, a Harris presidency would probably be less good for Dixie. Then again, the region’s demographic fortunes offer opportunities to Democrats too: as both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton so vividly proved. In this New South, a dynamic, multicultural region with ample hope for the future, liberals could gain much by opposing strict bans on abortion, especially if they dump unpopular virtue-signalling around things like migration. To put it differently, then, the South’s revival may yet dovetail with a much-needed return to the political centre. Given the region’s turbulent past, that would be the most welcome irony of all.

But Ty Pinkins, a slim and energetic African-American lawyer, decided to challenge the GOP incumbent for a US Senate seat anyway. As the 50-year-old told me of his decision to take on Roger Wicker, “Don’t be afraid to walk in the tall grass. That’s how I started.”

Born to an unwed 15-year-old mother, Pinkins chopped cotton as a boy to help feed his family, a fate David Rushing, chair of the Sunflower County Democratic Party, says is typical of poor boys from the Mississippi Delta. “We don’t have many gutters in Mississippi,” explains Rushing, “but we have a lot of ditches.” For Pinkins, then, the tall grass was the only route out of that Delta ditch.

The first in his family to graduate high school, he struggled to pay for college. So, Pinkins left Mississippi for the tall grass of the US Army.

A 21-year military career gave him a passport full of stamps, three combat tours, a Bronze Star, and a job in the White House. After retirement, Pinkins earned not one but two law degrees from Georgetown University. He turned down the big money of a Washington law firm for the Delta. 

Back in his hometown, Rolling Fork, Mississippi, Pinkins published a memoir, 23 Miles and Running, and litigated hundreds of civil cases for the underprivileged. In 2021, he made national news by filing a federal lawsuit on behalf of fired black farm labourers, who had been replaced by white South Africans. Filing suit and testifying before Congress on the issue, he forced a settlement. 

Taking note was Mississippi’s lone Democratic Congressman, Bennie Thompson. The chair of the January 6 Select Committee tapped Pinkins to run for the local school board. By the time Pinkins learned of Thompson’s desire, he had already publicly declared his candidacy for the senate seat. “The biggest problems are federal issues,” he tells me. “That’s what I’m interested in. Our state is last in everything that is good and first in everything that is bad.”

In theory, Thompson and state Democratic chair Cheikh Taylor promised Pinkins, the only Democrat to announce for the race, their party’s full support. But though he knew the contest would be an uphill struggle, Pinkins never expected a major hurdle would be Bennie Thompson — his own Congressman and the very politician to first have noticed his talents.

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At first, his phone calls asking for endorsements went unanswered. Then, when his phone did ring, respondents attacked, apparently upset that Pinkins’ hadn’t followed Thompson’s advice and run for his local school board. As Will Colom, a prominent black Mississippi attorney and party donor allegedly told him: “You will lose. You are a loser. And you will always be a loser.” A young Mississippi state representative also phoned. “Who the hell do you think you are, getting your name on the ballot?” they yelled. “You need to go through us gatekeepers.”

Gatekeeper. The term shocked Pinkins. Party insiders refused to support him simply because, as he tells me, “I didn’t ask anyone, ‘can I please run?’” The candidate’s astonishment went beyond personal ambition. With its pungent whiff of machine politics, what Pinkins calls Mississippi’s “Gatekeeper Syndrome” is the very problem “preventing our democracy at the state level from blossoming.”  

Not that everyone is surprised. When I asked Ralph Eubanks about gatekeeping he laughed. As the academic and writer puts it: “Welcome to poor ole beat down Mississippi.” To Eubanks, Gatekeeper Syndrome reflects the “way the Democrats think about their own state. It is learned helplessness. There are so many things that are broken that can’t be fixed that many just give up.” 

“Giving up” would oblige Democratic elites to abandon their prerogatives in favour of building a competitive party. So to safeguard their position, Bennie Thompson and his colleagues have adapted the strategy of that classic wheeler-dealer: Richard Daley. Just like Chicago, Eubanks tells me, Mississippi is a place where you “have to work your way up through the system or you are jumping the line.” He adds: “It’s not healthy at all because it stops someone who has talent and drive with an inspiring backstory. You’d think ‘let’s get behind the brother and help him out’ but that’s not happening.”  

From the outside, Mississippi is ruby red. Outsiders assume that Democrats like Pinkins have zero chance. But with an African-American population of 40%, it’s the blackest state in the union. A reliable Democratic bloc, the African-American vote means Democrats can win with high black turnout and a quarter of white ballots. In 2023, Brandon Presley used that formula to come within 26,619 votes of the governor’s mansion.  

White and black Mississippi Democrats can, and have, run competitive statewide races. But the problem isn’t at the top of the ballot. The issue, as Pinkins and others point out, are those gatekeepers, those machine politicians who think Mississippi’s Democratic Party belongs to them and them alone. No less important, gatekeeping means the bottom of the ballot stays empty. 

In the same cycle as Presley’s 2023 near-miss, there were contests for all 122 of Mississippi’s statehouse seats. Yet in nearly half of contests, Democrats failed to field a candidate, a phenomenon that affects up-ticket races too. As Michele Hornish, the executive director of the Every State Blue campaign group explains, simply fielding a state representative candidate gives the top of the ticket a 1.5% vote boost. Running candidates across the ballot is also a barometer of a party’s grassroots health. As Scott Kleeb, a lead organiser with Rural Americans for Harris-Walz, admits: “For the last several decades Democrats have not been building at the local, county, and state level,” especially in rural states like Mississippi. Of the nation’s 3,143 counties, Kleeb says that Democrats have a chair in just 300. 

To be fair, an increasing number of Democrats are prodding the system to change.

One example is Rickey Cole, a two-time Mississippi Democratic state chair and Pinkins’ campaign manager. Cole always intended to run a senate race while also re-building the state party’s grassroots. 

Cole’s strategy was to organise Mississippi’s 82 counties and appoint a campaign leader in all 1,762 precincts. From there, Cole says, it’s “just math.” In 2020, after all, some 400,000 registered Mississippi Democrats failed to vote. This year, Cole needs to mobilise around 178,000. Once the party got organised, the path to higher Democratic turnout was easy. “In rural Mississippi,” Cole explains, “if you provide the matriarch of the family a list of folks who are sporadic voters, they can get to them.” 

As Kleeb warns, moreover, this comprehensive approach is the only viable path to a Democratic revival in conservative redoubts like Mississippi. “Institutions matter,” he says. “We can’t go from candidate to candidate. Every campaign can’t build an airplane from scratch every four years.” 

But instead of endorsements and campaign cash, all Pinkins got was a cold shoulder. Mississippi’s African-American leaders — notably Mike Espy — refused even to meet, much less endorse. Appeals to the Congressional Black Caucus, Black Economic Alliance, BlackPAC, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and Dirt Road Democrats all went unanswered too. 

Behind it all was Pinkins’ former admirer: Bennie Thompson. 

Mississippi’s lone Democratic Congressman is the political kingpin of the Delta, and the state’s black political establishment. Thompson earned national attention as chair of the January 6 Select Committee, but at home he squelches democracy as Mississippi’s lead gatekeeper. Pinkins tells me that “fear of Bennie Thompson” has resulted in only three of Mississippi’s African-American state senators and representatives endorsing him. Others supposedly tell him: “I can’t host a fundraiser for you because of Bennie Thompson.” 

All the same, Pinkins persevered, and nearly two years on from his initial snub finally bagged a meeting with Thompson in May 2024. Much like their earlier interaction, Thompson was kind, heaping praise on Pinkins and promising his full support. “I commit to you,” he apparently said. “I will make a sizeable contribution to your campaign.” 

Yet once again, Pinkins would soon find this apparent warmth vanish, like dew in the Delta sun.  

Just days after their apparent reconciliation, the duo attended the Democratic State Convention. In an auditorium full of the state’s leading liberals, Pinkins awaited his promised endorsement. Instead, Thompson praised the white Brandon Presley as his “brother” and then promptly sat down. Audience members turned to Pinkins in astonishment. In July this year, at another Democratic gala, Thompson pulled the same stunt. Pinkins understood “that my own Congressman was clearly refusing to publicly support my candidacy.” 

And in late August, at the Democratic National Convention, Bennie Thompson took his gatekeeping public. At a Mississippi state delegation breakfast, Thompson supposedly told 100-or-so party leaders that “we need to support our candidates but some of them need to earn it. He needs to work for the support. He doesn’t get to walk up to the head of the table and think he’s going to get our support.” The Congressman never mentioned Pinkins by name — but then again he didn’t need to.

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Pinkins, for his part, has endured Thompson’s slights with grace, describing them as “the Congressman’s prerogative.”  Not that he’s sat on his hands either, instead throwing himself into grassroots campaigning. Gradually, perhaps, Mississippians have understood he’s a different sort of candidate from the gatekeeper stereotype, not least in terms of race. 

In the Deep South, most African-Americans run in majority-minority districts, developing little experience wooing white voters. Pinkins, by contrast, had spent two decades in the military, meeting civilians and leading soldiers from every walk of life. And like Georgia or North Carolina, Mississippi’s demography is changing. Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s scandal-plagued GOP nominee for governor, won his race for lieutenant governor on the backs of white votes. He may bring pizza to a porn shop, but he also reveals that white voters in 2024 are not what they were in 1965. He also shows that Southern whites are more open to voting for black candidates. For their part, Cole and Pinkins have eyed white Yankee transplants to Mississippi’s Memphis suburbs, as well as snowbirds, soldiers, and shipbuilders in towns like Pascagoula. In soliciting white votes, alongside the African-American base, Pinkins says he’s learnt that most voters crave the same thing. “They want someone they can trust,” he says. “They are so tired of politicians doing the same old things. We end that by meeting voters face-to-face.” Pinkins adds that Mississippians of all races are interested in a Delta boy like him “doing something unorthodox.”

More than that, meanwhile, Pinkins feels a moral obligation to take on people like Bennie Thompson. “Walking in the tall grass,” he says, “is doing what the average Mississippian can’t afford to do,People want politicians to have moral courage. They wonder: ‘Do you have the courage to the hard right or the easy wrong?’” 

By going public about Thompson’s behaviour, Pinkins believes he is doing that hard right. Perhaps. But there’s still a way to go until the gatekeepers are vanquished. As Pinkins explains, one issue are those black Mississippian Democrats still unwilling to cause civil rights legend John Lewis called “good trouble”.

“There are a select few black men who, because of Gatekeeper Syndrome, are stopping progress in Mississippi at the federal and state level,” he says, after a heavy sigh. “Their reluctance to go against Bennie Thompson is holding back black Mississippians. We have a lot of officeholders who prioritise their personal power over the people’s interest.

At this point, Pinkins stops and exhales, before starting again. “We need to have the conversation. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” 

All the while, Cole and Pinkins believe their efforts will boost Democratic changes in a 2026 senate race against a weak GOP incumbent. They’re also looking ahead to Brandon Presley’s widely anticipated 2027 race for governor. But those efforts will be undone if Mississippi’s gatekeepers shoo talented candidates like Ty Pinkins from the ballot.

As for the former cotton chopper, David Rushing is clear. “He has my unequivocal support. He’s the real deal. He is not blowing smoke. I just admire him. He’s a bright star, and the future of the party if he doesn’t get frustrated by all this mess.”

But the tall grass is where Pinkins feels most comfortable. Like his own life, he sees it as the only way for Mississippi to move forward.