Me, I'm curious about the "Sun Belt" in general, especially the politics of it. IMO, the boom of the Sun Belt was "the South's revenge", playing a huge part in the right-wing Reagan coalition; both the Christian Right base and the "law and order" wing of the party had deep roots in the South.
I'd suggest rather that the South rose in power due to other factors, factors that exist ITTL as well--though certainly the old Dixiecrat Solid South was very important OTL; it meant that whatever largesse the Federal government had to spread around, Southern bailiwicks got a lot of it--out of proportion to both their population and their net contribution to GNP hence to tax revenues. That factor certainly won't carry over because of the many-party situation in the early 20th century--had the South, minus of course SC, been "solid" as per OTL, then not only would Dixiecratic Southerners have dominated the Democratic party, but the Democrats would have wound up the largest single party. I rarely question the plausibility of Jonathan's vision, and the reported ATL "fact" that this did not happen went down smoothly enough, but now that I think of it we ought to be clear on why it did not happen--I believe Jonathan did address the salient points since they do demand an explanation. IIRC it boiled down to the competitiveness of many parties applying in the South as well--indeed, while it is relatively easy for the Democrats to monopolize office in a timeline like OTL where there is only one alternative and that alternative is associated with enmity to the region, supposing just one other party with no such baggage has national significance, it will attract all the voters disgruntled for any reason with the Democratic hegemony. So it makes perfect sense the South is not a Democratic monopoly, and by breaking the continuity of office-holding (much of Southern Democratic power related to their seniority, being re-elected for decades in a non-competitive seat; I'm not sure seniority doesn't accumulate from discontinuous terms, but even if it does that dimension is weakened if every now and then a Congressman is turned out and has to fight to get elected again a couple years later) both the Southerners and the Democratic party as a whole are less powerful, now strictly in proportion to the votes they get rather than these esoteric multipliers.
The Democrats did become ITTL pretty much a Southern regional party, and the strongest single one there--but had they not done a later merger with the conservative wing of the Republicans to regain national standing they probably would have withered and died.
But even without Dixiecrat patronage, the South would still for instance attract a fair share of what military spending there is, particularly Naval. On the Atlantic coast, the shoreline to be defended is pretty evenly divided above and below the Mason-Dixon line--to be sure, SC doesn't really count as Dixie, while a rational distribution of force would be line with New England's traditional Naval orientation, since NE is the nearest region of the USA to Europe, which is where most of the plausible potential threats are.
Still, I'd expect some small approach to balancing a north-eastern concentration of naval ports and squadrons at the south tip of Florida too, since it commands the strait with Cuba and the most direct approach to the Gulf Coast.
Then, tipping the balance, or anyway offsetting the weight of the distinctly non-Dixie Pacific coast, the Gulf Coast also needs to be defended and it is all Southern. On one hand the likely threat level is lower since the immediate neighbors are friendlier and assuming their help or at least neutrality, the waters of the Gulf are easier to close at chokepoints. But for the very reason they are semi-sheltered coasts, the Gulf shores are good places to put infrastructural bases.
Therefore, the possibility that any or all of Pensacola, Mobile, Biloxi, New Orleans or other Louisiana coast towns, or various Texan ports from Beaumont to Corpus Christi are major naval bases should not be dismissed! If they are all or mostly serving that function I guess each must be smaller, if any are as heavily developed as OTL there must be fewer others, since the USN I think (not to everyone here's agreement) must be a lot smaller overall than OTL--half its size or less.
Similarly for air defense--I'd expect a concentration in Maine, again closest to potential attackers from Europe, and the Pacific Northwest (I believe the USA has Alaska since Lincoln would have retained Seward and the Russians would have been largely unbutterflied in the 1860s, but maybe not?) against threats from Russia or China. But the coasts have to be covered against carrier assaults or very long range aircraft that might come from any direction conceivably. Again the Gulf coast is somewhat sheltered but again for that very reason the deep South is a good place to put reserve and infrastructural bases.
OK, so much for strategic considerations--the Sunbelt developed OTL in part because of the inherent attractions of the region, including the very fact of relative backwardness. A region with a poorer, less developed workforce has its attractions for capitalists trying to get away from strong labor organization in the developed regions after all--a workforce that can be paid less and expected to make less trouble for its bosses in general can offset quite a bit of impaired efficiency in production. The climatic factor is a bit of a wash--heating in winter is much reduced but there are hurricanes to worry about, or earthquakes in California, and the cost of air conditioning in summer is a consideration too, whereas in the desert southwest the lack of water is a cost as well. But certainly air conditioning negates a lot of the drawback of trying to locate in the southern tier of the nation, at least if it is available to management.
So the South rose not solely because of Dixiecrat power but for deeper reasons; had those reasons not been in place the region would have limited power to influence the larger nation no matter how solid or fanatical it was. The nature of Dixiecrat hegemony OTL did tend to foster the southward movement and suited the motives of many investors as well to be sure!
Here, however, you've got a number of factors that may prevent the South from becoming both so powerful and, especially, so right-wing. For one, TTL's America has a long, deep pacifist streak and is hardly a superpower with global or even regional hegemony, which means that a lot of OTL's military investment in the South has been butterflied away, while (based on the discussions in earlier pages) the space industry is likely to be smaller than OTL's NASA, affecting not only Florida but also Alabama. Also, without World War II and the Cold War lighting a fire under its ass, there's less pressure to drag the South into the 20th century (developmentally speaking) with the sort of massive infrastructure projects like OTL's Tennessee Valley Authority, which shrinks another key pillar in the Sun Belt's post-war boom. And with Cuba stable, democratic, and non-communist, Miami likely won't be replacing Havana as the center of Caribbean trade any time soon; even if some city is bound to develop there, it's likely to be a minor one.
I agree with most of this, except that while there has not apparently been a New Deal 1930s concentrating a huge burst of infrastructural development, there has, as Jonathan responded, been a lot of piecemeal local development spread out over the whole half-century--the multi-party system includes various kinds of progressive movements and the conservatives have to compete with that.
Anyway, all of that speaks more against its being a rightist bastion than against the region developing at all; much of it does suggest a slower pace of development, but then...
On the other hand, there are the Afro-Atlantic networks that didn't exist IOTL. Even if their impact is focused on the East Coast -- the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida -- it's a large and growing impact that will likely be responsible for the boom in those states. Air conditioning will also have an effect, so there's certainly going to be a housing boom in many Southern cities, while Florida is still likely to develop some kind of tourist industry on the strength of its climate. Finally, a more pacifist government may, in lieu of military bases and defense contractors, fund peaceful infrastructure investment to raise the standard of living... like the TVA and the universities.
Likewise, the politics of Confederate apologia and post-Civil Rights resentment are, ITTL, dead, and have been since the 1930s.
Oh, I doubt they are totally dead, but they are a lot less hegemonic, we have good reason to believe. Even Confederate nostalgia is likely to be less coherent, more particularlist and somewhat less fictional.
African Americans are not an underclass any more, but wield significant political and economic power and can slap down any threats to such. Likewise, the Right ITTL doesn't have a monopoly on religious devotion -- left-wing religious ideas developed in the Old World, from Catholic Liberalism (likely the de facto political affiliation of most American Catholics in a nation that's still suspicious of them after the Papal Legion) to the narodniks (coming in through the large Eastern European communities) to Abacarism (known to be influential among even those African Americans who aren't Muslim), have likely trickled to the US. This makes it harder for the conservative evangelicals to build a nationwide Christian coalition, as there are still strong, non-fundamentalist strains of religious thought. Even in the South, the black trading interests on the Afro-Atlantic network will likely introduce a more Northern-style "Rockefeller Republican" conservatism to the South, one that's more focused on free trade and capitalism while being moderate-to-progressive on social issues (especially race).
The South will still develop economically. Texas and the Gulf Coast are likely to be the areas that most resemble OTL, as the oil isn't going anywhere, and in Texas neither is the cattle. Elsewhere, however, it will probably look little like OTL's South outside the weather and the food, and even that last one is likely to have some West African flair.
I agree with most of that too. What I expect is that the development of the South after the Civil War, and especially after the multi-party explosion of the Great War era and in reaction to the Lodge Administration's unpopular Mexican-Central American war, was very patchy and regional. In specific areas, a more progressive coalition would come to power, and between self-development and attracting northern (and foreign) capital (and patronage, for military bases or nationally fostered projects) and immigrants, these regions surged ahead. Sometimes I imagine a socio-political two-step--the progressives take over, make their region attractive, and then the influx of capital might tip the political balance rightward again.
But actually in OTL I see the trend working more the other way--some region develops as a "haven" for capital from pesky "interference" by working-class politics--only to foster a working class, which then asserts itself!
So it isn't clear to me whether regional leaders in other regions would be inspired to emulate the progressive areas or abhor them. I'd expect some deep pockets of reactionary backwardness too--although if any of these are too extreme, the nation's skeptical and even hostile scrutiny would be turned on them; there are after all laws as well as customs protecting civil rights.
...You're pretty close to the mark, although with the Farmer-Labor Party's emphasis on rural development, I expect there would be TVA-type projects starting early in the twentieth century, and Miami would still rival Havana simply because it provides a gateway from the Caribbean to American markets. I expect there will still be a Southern boom after air conditioning comes in, with businesses and individuals looking for better weather. On the other hand, as you say, the South will be less military and more African, and might have more and earlier Research Triangle-type complexes.
Religious politics might be less right-wing even among evangelicals, BTW. The current identification of American evangelical Christianity with the hard right is only about a generation old, and to some extent it followed the changing political preferences of Southern whites rather than driving the changes. TTL, I suspect, will have quite a few more Jimmy Carters.
What I think happened OTL regarding the formation of the modern "evangelical"-corporate Right is:
A hegemonic and almost purely secular dominant society formed in the USA after the Civil War, especially in the 20th century, based on acquiescence to corporate oligopoly tempered by the Progressive spirit--that is, the ruling classes of the USA included a lot of intelligent supporters who recognized that the discontents of the ruled masses had to be addressed, and in a flattering way, to maintain the mythos of the USA as a nation of for and by the people, while these unwashed ignorant naive people actually had little say. They wouldn't mind that though if their grievances were addressed with some generous concern. The motto of the era might be summarized in John Kennedy's slogan "a rising tide lifts all boats!" If the people would get with the corporate-imperialist program, the USA would by its sheer magnitude rise to the hegemonic world power and there would be plenty of largesse to keep them happy.
In this context, the American people remained rather God-struck in the sense that even the highest classes were expected to go to "the church of their choice" on Sunday and profess a generic Christian belief (or grudgingly, perhaps a Jewish one
) but on the other hand it did not do, in the higher circles, to make too much of it either--this was an age of science, of progress, of routine practices that might not bear too much ethical scrutiny practiced against the weak. Godly high-mindedness was good for summoning the will for crusading wars and repelling the Godless insinuations of Communists and other degenerates. But sectarianism would get in the way of the program. So religion remained, but on the back burner.
Not everyone could get with the global corporate program of course (as Michael Harrington responded to JFK in
The Other America, rising tides do no good and much harm to boats with holes in them); such people tended to radicalism of some kind or other, most of them to a more conservative world view wherein religion was a serious business indeed. They stayed on the fringes of power, in their own "backward" world while the great American corporate steamroller was assembled and set into operation. In the generation of global hegemony after WWII, when the threat of Communism was the organizing cry, some of these fringe thinkers--notably the most reactionary of the lot (not just in Christendom but in Islam as well, the Muslim Brotherhood having got some support from US circles in the 1950s--but that's overseas of course) began to get aid and comfort from the right wing of the corporate hegemony.
This hegemony--did not crash, in the sense of being wrecked and toppled from power, but did run into a reef in the later 60s and 70s, when the post-WWII boom era ended in stagflation, and adrift and rudderless, the Keynesian steersmen had no formula for distributing failure the way they knew how to distribute the loot of success.
Meanwhile, as a belated fruit of the prior spreading and modest sharing of wealth, the OTL Civil Rights era finally started to yield solid results for African-Americans; Jim Crow structures were dismantled and, just as the mighty ship of US corporate hegemony was approaching shipwreck, its elite navigators not being the hotshot pilots of the reefs of global economy they believed themselves to be, its leaders declared racism at an end.
Much of the growth of the organized evangelical right in the USA had to do with resistance to Civil Rights after all. When the order was given to integrate public schools with "all deliberate speed," after first resisting integration for a decade in the South, the next response was to withdraw white children from the public system and create a parallel system of private "Christian academies" which black families could hardly afford and anyway admission to them was at private discretion. This was a key first step in the creation of a whole parallel charity-based infrastructure of social services, under the direction of right-wing ideolouges. With the old quasi-Christian, quasi-secularist order in disarray in the 70s, the rise of the modern Christian Right as we know it today was well underway, aided by the right wing of the old corporate hegemony.
----
Thus, I don't see any grounds for something a lot like that happening in the USA of TTL. The American corporate structure never managed to set the nation on the imperialist course of OTL (except abortively under Lodge). The working-class public therefore could not be fully brought under control of top-down Progressivism (in the OTL sense) and remained an active, self-directed political force, creating a multi-party system in which people could gravitate toward whatever political creed made the most sense to them. Religion as such was never ghettoized as per OTL The United States could not flatter itself ruler of the world so shocks cascading from decisions made by independent actors overseas would routinely wash over the nation, checking the general national hubris. The timeline's earlier Civil Rights crisis would appear far different, a many-sided struggle and not the arrogant largesse of a ruling elite leading to the final outcome; doubtless quite a few whites withdrew their children from newly integrated public schools, but perhaps others who had taken theirs out long before because the segregated schools were unGodly in their unChristian message of human division now would put theirs back in, since they were reformed.
The American corporate system as a whole then is more what it is supposed to be in OTL pro-corporate ideology--businessmen trying to make a profit by filling public needs that they manifestly do not control or manipulate--because they are prevented from doing so by the jealous diligence of politics and press more multilateral and skeptical than OTL. The public is politically awake and active on its own diverse and contradictory behalf.
And so I don't expect what reactionary politics there will be to be as strongly based on Southern people and views--the Southern reactionaries may be many and strong but offset by other Southerners who are not reactionary, but will find perhaps a few more openly reactionary Northerners to ally with.
