Modern Conservatism

Adrian Rodriguez
Professor Christopher Staaf
HIST 2112-17
17 November 2015

Kruse Paper
White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism by author Kevin Kruse is a brilliantly written book which simply put enough argues the idea that white flight was nothing more than a migration of whites to the suburbs, but this book makes solid arguments that it represented a more important transformation in the political ideology of those involved. In regards to that previous statement I agree with Kruse’s argument and thesis that the white flight movement was very important to the transformation of the political ideology of modern conservatism. Kruse supports this argument by analyzing a series of causes and effects of white flight, and

In 1961, after the desegregation of Atlanta 's public schools, the forms of segregation that protected Atlanta 's elite class of moderates were inevitably attacked. Elite whites eventually joined in on the fight against desegregation when African Americans pursued towards the integration of private facilities such as private schools, hotels, restaurants, and country clubs. With the support of the Civil Rights Act, the black protest movement successfully desegregated a number of privately owned establishments within the city. The success of desegregating publicly and privately owned establishments that had upset both the majority white working class and the white elite class led to the formation of two major elements of suburban conservatism: the tax revolt and privatization. Essentially the whites fled to these desegregated spaces and created private alternatives instead. As they did they also fought to take their finances with them, which led to an often overlooked tax revolt. This tax revolt consequently led to a rebellion against the use of their taxes to support public spaces and services they no longer used thanks to the successful desegregation of publicly and privately owned

Although the white flight movement was the last major strategy of resistance to desegregation, it proved to be a successful strategy for sustaining racial separation and the molding of the modern conservatives of the future. The rise of the conservative political movement in southern cities such as Atlanta imitated the same migration and political transformations that remodeled urban settings across the country. According to Kruse, white flight marked a national migration and ideological movement to the suburbs that spread uphill from lower class protests to eventually reach white Atlanta residents of all class backgrounds. White Flight reiterates on the idea that the most fundamental element to the growth of the white suburbs and the political conservatism that grew out of it was an exceeding desire for whites to exclude themselves from African