Why the South Is Winning

For much of America’s history, the South has been a laggard, a poor region weighed down by intense racism and reactionary politics, lacking both industry and newcomers, foreign or domestic, to imbue it with dynamism and energy. But that’s changing — big time. Far from singing romantic paeans to Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy’s president, or celebrating his (blessedly) “lost cause,” the South increasingly embraces the very attitudes and policies that once made the North dominant.

Progressives like Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson complain that America looks the way it would “if the Confederacy” had won. Yet the South’s triumph today is one the old rebels would barely recognize. The region, to be sure, still has more than its share of Blimpish nativists and religious fanatics. Even so, more people, including African-Americans, led by those with college degrees, now flock there in search of opportunity.

This marks a huge historical turnaround. Well into the Twenties and Thirties, the South was lagging and losing migrants to the North and the West. Slavery, and then segregation, notes historian Gavin Wright, kept down labor costs and, with them, the incentive for innovation and labor-saving technology. The South was almost its “own country,” as Wright says, a poor appendage to a much richer, more dynamic nation.

But now, the South is capturing cutting-edge industries, drawing in capital as well as a swelling tide of migrants from within the country and abroad. Overall, the southeast quadrant of the country is now the most dominant economic region, and since 2018 has produced almost all the country’s population growth and half its new jobs, according to the Texas Stock Exchange.