I hope we can do that. I am not knowledgeable about what else 1930s southern conservatives (democrats) would care about but we can find some things that do not include racism or compromising our efforts to steal voters away from the SPA. I know I keep saying this but I think no matter how the war goes, we will see localized violence in regions that are part of the Federalists, SPA and AFP. The kind that is too small to be represented in Hearts of Iron.
In this idealized scenario where my plan somehow works flawlessly, we work on keeping the southern democrats with us. We keep them happy with other issues they care about while we continue to whittle away at the AFP. When the civil war happens they are seen as a group of extremists instead of vanguards of Dixie or whatever. After the war, the AFP and their ideology gets highly stigmatized. The south experiences a backlash against sentiments like that. While it depends on how the dominoes fall, I am confident we can get rid of Jim Crow after the civil war at the least.
The worst case scenario for the south is if we ignore it or pour gasoline on the fire. Our coalition shrinks further. In the case of the south, more whites are radicalized. The AFP swells in membership and is emboldened. further. Wide scale atrocities are carried out against black southerners. We end up with a civil war as bad or worse than the first civil war in terms of lives lost and property damage. White southerners are even more embittered from losing family members, property and suffering reprisals from losing. Reconstruction no matter how we do it gets very ugly because they will feel validated. As it gets ugly, racist whites in the other parts of the country start to side with them. The south becomes our balkans or a wasteland. I do not know if it can actually get that bad but that is why I said "worst case scenario".
The worst case scenario in general to me involves alienating more than southern democrats. That translates to more states lost through joining the SPA, AFP, seceding or getting annexed. Even if we win that we would spend most of the quest trying to unfuck the country instead of making America the next superpower.
We have already lost the South electorally. I say this as a
fact. It was hard to say that we ever had it in the first place.
Take a moment and think about what the AFP actually
is. Long is essentially an embodiment of recurrent Southern populism that has come in waves since the time of Andrew Jackson in one dictatorial power hungry package. In the 1950s and 1960s, it is tempting to think of the South as a monolithic bloc and on the issue of segregation it
was but on other issues particularly in Johnson's Great Society programs, there was a severe divide between Southern politicians that were actually extremely supportive of these programs or at least tolerant of them like J. Lister Hill of Alabama, William Fulbright of Arkansas who's name some people might recognize as associated with Fulbright scholarships, W. Kerr Scott of North Carolina, etc.(Note that I am not necessarily referring to these specific politicians, few were in office at this time, but rather more the ideological tendencies they represented)
What we need to understand is that
Long has already co-opted those populist elements into the AFP. What we have
left are the worst of the Southern Democrats. We have the Richard Russells, the James O. Eastlands and the Harry F. Byrds. Or at least we
did.
Nevertheless, the point I am trying to make is that we never had a chance of making meaningful change in the South that doesn't alienate the political establishment. Worse, we didn't even get the less shitty half of the political establishment. We got the half of the political establishment that thought the New Deal after 1937 was too much.
There flat out
is not room for compromise with the Southern Democrats that would be even remotely acceptable, and even if there were, why would we do so? We would be gluing ourselves to the most morally bankrupt part of the New Deal Coalition, so we could have worse than even odds on a collection of border states that are collectively worth about the same as New York alone?
The first time America ever tried to implement universal healthcare in a modern form was in Truman's Fair Deal in 1948-1949. It never even got off the
ground because the South was too busy controlling all of the Senate and House Committees that were needed to even bring legislation to the floor, let alone voting on it or trying to break the filibuster, and any power we manage to claw back out of the South by patronizing and accommodating them is absolutely marginal compared to how much potential they have to fuck shit up.
Even then, they don't have much power to offer anymore! On their home turf, running presumably a knock down drag out segregationist campaign, Long still carried the overwhelming majority of the South! The fact is that Long now has control of the machines, the courthouse cliques, and the political organizations that give you control of the South now and there is no way we could contest it by meeting the remaining conservative Southern Democrats halfway, thereby poisoning our message in the rest of the country for minuscule benefit.
I can promise you we would not have tied NYC(minus the skullduggery we committed) if we went with a more moderate platform, and no amount of moderation is going to let us meaningfully compete in the South beyond the vestiges.
To put it another way, when given the choice between JFK and Nixon in 1960, much of the South stayed in line by sub-5% margins. Even with LBJ, at the time flagbearer of the South on the ticket, Texas stayed in line by 2%, South Carolina by 2.5%, and North Carolina by 4%. Tennessee didn't stay in line at all.
Even with how lukewarm JFK ended up being on Civil Rights, Byrd still bolted and beat out JFK in Mississippi and Alabama just straight up cast half its electoral votes to Byrd anyways.
In 1964 against Barry Goldwater, riding on the back of a tremendous wave of popularity with approval ratings in the 70% range and perceived as fulfilling a legacy of JFK with the 1964 Civil Rights Act(in part a narrative set by his own actions), LBJ straight up was not put on the ticket in Alabama and was stomped throughout the deep South with Barry Goldwater, carrying Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, and Georgia by tremendous margins in addition to barely carrying his home state of Arizona despite Goldwater's constant campaigning gaffes.
As it stands, until the South's current political environment is totally and fundamentally altered, there is very little to gain by accommodating them and almost everything to lose.
