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The thing about "white supremacy" and "economic causes" is that they are compatible and complementary explanations, in many cases like in Louisiana for instance, the populist Longist policy regime was built around benefitting white workers and the middle class,
many of his closest allies became fervent segregationists in the 1950s and 1960s, and when the oil revenues dried up and there were attempts to "reform" the old patronage system of state jobs for lower middle whites, white supremacist politics had a resurgence
the civil rights act also forced the government to employ minority contractors, which caused a lot of bitterness in the trades and a sense that they were being excluded
the regime was built around white interests because they were really the only fully enfranchised group when it was institutionalized, it sometimes made space for other groups, but it was mostly *for them*
the combination of economic decline and the political assertion of black and other minority interests for the first time created an opening for the explicitly white supremacist politics of Duke
But what Louisiana had post-civil rights was a kind of functioning bargaining system where different ethnic groups could get *something* out of the state legislature and cooperated, Duke succeeded for a time in polarizing the chamber on racial grounds
which seemed to propagandize for his position that *every* benefit for blacks was to the detriment of whites, and that politics was a zero-sum struggle between pre-ordained racial interests
Black politicians very quickly understood what he was doing, and called for more comity and cooperation between the parties and factions, white politicians fell into his schemes and started to behave in vindictive ways against the black caucus when votes didnt go there way
In fact, he managed to make black and white the most important political issue, splitting groups that had once been allies on many issues, like Cajuns and the black caucus
