Missing in Rick Perlstein’s piece on the South is an inescapable fact: As unique as the South is — and no other part of the country has such a separate identity — the region is becoming more like the rest of the country. Are there vestiges of racism and backwardness? Sure, but to take a trip through the South nowadays is to find a place that is becoming as suburbanized and homogenized as anywhere else in America. Yes, there are areas in the region that have not yet been touched by this growth. But to visit a Raleigh, Charlotte, Atlanta, or Nashville is to find a place that looks and feels increasingly like any burgeoning ‘burg. Even less booming places like Memphis and Birmingham are growing and changing, if more slowly.

The downside of this diminished regional identity, of course, is found in an increasingly vanilla culture. Transplants from other parts of the country seek, even demand, the sort of reassuring landmarks that scream cosmopolitanism (hello Starbucks, goodbye BBQ joint). Yet these “come-here’s” also come to their new homes, and voting precincts, unencumbered by the racial politics that have dominated Dixie for so long. Yes, they frequently back the GOP. But they do so not because of any real or imagined Southern Strategy, but for the same reasons that millions of their demographic contemporaries do around the country.

There are bigots in the region who support Republicans because, admittedly, the GOP simply isn’t “the black party.” But one only has to look at county election results to see where it is that Republicans are piling up their margins and winning elections in the region — in those fast-growing suburbs and exurbs with the fewest native-born voters.

The political strength of the GOP in the South is not in Selma, but in Brentwood. But to get that would be to understand what, or even where, Brentwood is. And, let’s face it, it’s much easier to just focus on Selma.