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Yankee-bred) George H. W. Bush. Appalachia also defected to Clinton in 1996 (over Midlander Bob Dole) and was divided by the candidacies of liberal Borderlander Al Gore (against the younger Bush) and Carter (against Reagan).
    Dixie-bloc voters back ultraconservatives with remarkable consistency. As of 2009 eighteen serving U.S. senators had earned a lifetime rating of 90 or above (out of 100) from the American Conservative Society. Every single one came from the Far West or the Dixie bloc. White representatives in the Dixie coalition voted en masse against the civil rights and voting acts of the 1960s; for the removal of bans on union shop contracts in the 1970s; for lowering taxes on the wealthy and eliminating taxes on inherited wealth in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s; for invading Iraq in 2003; and for blocking health care and financial regulatory reform and increases in minimum wages in 2010.
    Dixie’s congressional leadership has consistently advocated policies and positions that are often shocking to public opinion in the Northern alliance. The 1984 Republican Party platform, Deep Southern senator Trent Lott declared, was a good document because it was full of “things that Jefferson Davis and his people believed in.” Tidewater senator Jesse Helms tried to block the creation of the Martin Luther King holiday on the grounds that the civil rights leader had been a “Marxist-Leninist” who associated with “Communists and sex perverts.” Deep Southern House majority leader Tom DeLay proclaimed in the early 2000s, “The causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills.” “Nothing,” DeLay told bankers in 2003, “is more important in the face of war than cutting taxes.” As the U.S. economy unraveled in 2008, former Deep Southern senator and Swiss bank vice chairman Phil Gramm told the Washington Times the country was in “a mental recession” and that its people had “become a nation of whiners . . . complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline.” After the 2010 BP oil spill, Representative Joe Barton (from Deep Southern Texas) publicly apologized to the company for having been pressured to create a fund to compensate its victims, calling the initiative—but not the spill—“a tragedy of the first proportion.” 7
    From the 1990s, the Dixie bloc’s influence over the federal government has been enormous. In 1994 the Dixie-led Republican Party took control of both houses of Congress for the first time in forty years. The Republicans maintained their majority in the U.S. House until 2008 and controlled the Senate for many of those years as well. While perhaps disappointed with the progressivism of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, Deep Southern oligarchs finally got one of their own in the White House in 2000, for the first time since 1850. George W. Bush may have been the son of a Yankee president and raised in far western Texas, but he was a creature of east Texas, where he lived, built his political career, found God, and cultivated his business interests and political alliances. His domestic policy priorities as president were those of the Deep Southern oligarchy: cut taxes for the wealthy, privatize Social Security, deregulate energy markets (to benefit family allies at Houston-based Enron), stop enforcing environmental and safety regulations for offshore drilling rigs (like BP’s Deepwater Horizon ), turn a blind eye to offshore tax havens, block the regulation of carbon emissions or tougher fuel efficiency standards for automobiles, block health care benefits for low-income children, open protected areas to oil exploration, appoint industry executives to run the federal agencies meant to regulate their industries, and inaugurate a massive new foreign guest-worker program to ensure a low-wage