The coming of competition [Book Review]

In his classic Southern Politics in State and Nation (1949), V. O. Key, Jr, charged that the no-party polity that was then beginning to effect a gradual metamorphosis in the American South tended to produce demagogic, irresponsible and reactionary politicians and to splinter the restricted electorate into evanescent groupings of local court-house cliques and their dependants and followers. Because it discouraged competition between state-wide parties, he argued, the southern political system inhibited the "natural" emergence of class divisions in politics and therefore enabled the privileged to block nearly every attempt by those sympathetic to the poor of either race to employ politics to lessen socioeconomic inequalities.