Recommended reading from a few days ago: Angie Maxwell, the director of the Diane Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society at the University of Arkansas, distills into a Washington Post column the core argument of her new book, “The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics” (Oxford University Press). Maxwell co-wrote “The Long Southern Strategy” with Todd Shields, dead of the UA’s J. William Fulbright College of Arts & Sciences and a political science professor. She also recently wrote for the Times.

For the Post, Maxwell writes: Republicans didn’t win the South solely by capitalizing on white racial angst. That decision was but one in a series of decisions the party made not just on race but on feminism and religion as well. The GOP successfully fused ideas about the role of government in the economy, women’s place in society, white evangelical Christianity and white racial grievance, in what became a “long Southern strategy” that extended well past the days of Goldwater and Nixon.

She goes on to describe coded, racist appeals; the resonance of Phyllis Schlafly’s campaign against the ERA amendment for women trying to live up to the ideal of “Southern white womanhood”; and the GOP’s successful efforts to connect a raft of policy positions to Christian values.

Understanding that long strategy, it’s not hard to understand Trump’s hold on the South, Maxwell writes.