The Big Lie Is the South’s New Lost Cause

In the three years since armed insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol, Donald Trump and his allies have rewritten history to portray the rioters as patriots seeking to prevent an illegitimate government from taking power.

The Jan. 6 attack was supported by 147 Republican members of Congress, 70 of them from Southern states, a geographical sorting with echoes of the Civil War.

There’s no mistaking which part of the country has the most vested in the ongoing resistance to President Joe Biden’s legitimacy. “Southern Republicans are the sun around which the other planets revolve,” says Bill Galston, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. He explains how the old segregationist Democrats of the South switched parties beginning in the late 1960s after Lyndon Johnson signed civil rights legislation.