“Lyndon Johnson was probably right to fret about the political consequences of civil rights. And even he, who knew more about the intricacies of Southern politics than any 20th-century president, could not have known how complicated the future would be.” By way of Cliopatria, Jefferson Decker, a former managing editor of Boston Review and one of my friends and colleagues here at Columbia, takes a look at two new books on the rise of the Republican Party in the South: Kevin Kruse’s White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism and Matthew Lassiter’s The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South.