When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America by Ira Katznelson ( W.W. Norton, 238 pages, $25.95 ) The White House Looks South by William E. Leuchtenburg ( Louisiana State University Press, 668 pages, $45.00 ) White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism by ( Kevin M. Kruse Princeton University Press, 325 pages, $35.00 ) The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South by Byron E. Shafer and Richard Johnston ( Harvard University Press, 240 pages, $39.95 ) Nothing has contributed more to the conservative ascendancy in American politics than the realignment of the South from solidly Democratic to reliably Republican. The South now furnishes the decisive votes for Republican control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House. Outside the South, Democrats still hold the advantage in the competition on all three fronts. But the Republican dominance of the...

What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America By Thomas Frank • Metropolitan Books • 320 PAGES• $24.00 Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts From the Heart of America By Garrison Keillor • Viking • 237 PAGES • $19.95 Few developments have changed American politics more in the past generation than the Republican breakthrough into blue-collar America. White working-class voters were a pillar of the New Deal coalition that allowed Democrats to dominate national politics for the generation after Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But those voters began turning away from Democrats amid the cultural tumult of the 1960s, and the party has never entirely regained their allegiance. From the “silent majority” of Richard Nixon's era to the “Reagan Democrats” who flocked to Ronald Reagan, the angry white men of the 1990s, and the churchgoing legions who backed George W. Bush in 2000, voters of modest means have become central to the Republican political strategy. This...