Cold War anticommunism and the defence of white supremacy in the southern United States

The thesis of this research is that anticommunism in the Cold War was centrally a hegemonic project which, through defining a largely conservative and exclusionary form of Americanism, secured, for most of the period covered, the unity of a broad ‘historical bloc’ including fractions of capital with diverse modalities of surplus extraction, trade unions and state apparatuses. In so doing, it cemented the role of the Jim Crow South within American nationhood, provided its dominant classes with techniques of violence and consent through which to suppresses challenges to segregation, and supplied an invaluable element of a complex ideological nexus in which Southern white supremacy could be understood and valued. The breakdown of the anticommunist consensus exposed great strategic and ideological fractures over the necessity and merits of Jim Crow, both within the dominant and dominated classes, and facilitated its overthrow.