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playing the role of sharecroppers. 1
    For the oligarchs the greatest challenge has been getting Greater Appalachia into their coalition and keeping it there. Appalachia has relatively few African Americans, a demographic fact that undermined the alleged economic and sexual “threat” raised by black empowerment. Borderlanders have always prized egalitarianism and freedom (at least for white individuals) and detested aristocracy in all its forms (except its homegrown elite, who generally have the good sense not to act as if they’re better than anyone else). There was—and still is—a powerful populist tradition in Appalachia that runs counter to the Deep Southern oligarchs’ wishes. Most of the great Southern populists have been self-made men from the borderlands, including Lyndon Johnson (from Texas Hill Country), Ross Perot (Texarkana), Sam Rayburn (eastern Tennessee), Ralph Yarborough (born in Northeast Texas, based near Austin), Mike Huckabee (Hope, Arkansas), or Zell Miller (of the North Georgia mountains) in the first half of his political career. Appalachia also gave Dixie many of its most successful progressives, including Bill Clinton (also from Hope), Al Gore (from an elite Nashville-area Scots-Irish family), and Cordell Hull (born in a log cabin in north-central Tennessee). Further complicating the oligarchy’s strategy, much of Appalachia fought against the Confederacy in the Civil War, which always made the Lost Cause story line a bit harder to sell. 2
    Two factors worked in the oligarchs’ favor, however: racism and religion. During the Civil War, Borderlanders fought to maintain the Union, not to help African Americans, and they were deeply offended by the Yankee drive to liberate and enfranchise blacks during Reconstruction. (“It is hard to say who they hate the most,” Tennessee governor William Brownlow said of his fellow Appalachian Unionists in 1865, “the rebels or the Negroes.”) 3 Second, Borderlanders and poor whites in Tidewater and the Deep South shared a common religious tradition: a form of Private Protestantism that rejected social reform, found biblical justification for slavery, and denounced secularism, feminism, environmentalism, and many key discoveries of modern science as contrary to God’s will. After 1877 this suite of “social issues” bonded together ordinary people across the Dixie bloc. It’s much the same dynamic that Thomas Frank described in What’s the Matter with Kansas? which revealed how the oligarchs of his native state used social and “moral” issues to rally ordinary people to support the architects of their economic destruction. “The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off,” Frank writes:
    Vote to stop abortion, receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining. 4
    Mr. Frank was writing about developments over the past forty years in a state straddling the Midlands and Far West, but the strategy he describes was originally developed a century earlier in Greater Appalachia and used to great effect.
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    For the first few decades after 1877, the federal government was in the hands of the Yankee–Left Coast axis. During that time Dixie-bloc representatives voted en masse against nineteenth-century Yankee tariffs and pensions, African American voting rights, and Senator Lodge’s Force Bill. Dixie arguments