The Washington Post yesterday profiled a woman in Hendersonville, Tennessee, shutting down the Romney campaign office – and still in shock that her guy lost. The recurring theme is “what’s happened to this country?” – and then, about halfway through the article, you get to the throwaway line that her children aren’t allowed to read Harry Potter or Twilight. One of those being much more reasonable than the other, but still.
This didn’t use to be how things were down South. Sure, there were holy rollers out on the fringes, who gave you tracts instead of candy on Halloween, and your parents rolled their eyes and walked you on to the next house. Because you were out trick-or-treating in your Darth Vader costume, not at your church’s “Fall Festival” for kids whose parents had bought into the idea that anything remotely supernatural was the work of the devil. Ordinary parents didn’t object to sitting up and watching Cosmos on PBS, because it was educational.
Fred Clark has spent the last month or so on his blog driving home the point that in the early- to mid-1970s, the Southern Baptists weren’t all that het up about abortion. Indeed, the fixation on abortion was considered a Catholic obsession, and the Baptists explicitly considered a fetus less than a person, based on scripture. Books on Biblical ethics from the 1970s were re-published over a decade later and were suddenly horribly controversial and yanked from Baptist bookstore shelves – without having changed a word of the original text.
Something happened, all right. It happened to a Republican party that sold its soul to own the Confederate vote and get over the top nationally. It let itself adopt positions in 2012 that it would have dismissed as hopelessly backward in 1976. And now the choice is whether to reach beyond the base, knowing that the mere act of reaching out to Latino voters, of abjuring the culture wars, of admitting the reality of climate change – doing those things will alienate their existing base. But is that base actually going anywhere? They might not turn out, but in twenty years they won’t be turning out anywhere except parts of Chicago and at the Legion Field box.
And now the usual suspects come down out of the woods to shoot the wounded. Mitt Romney wasn’t a true believer. Mitt Romney was screwed by the liberal media (ooooh, that Fox News!). The GOP spent too long trying to get a nominee and should have picked somebody quicker. (Like in 2008, when John McCain fell ass-backward into the spot.) The primaries went on too long and gave too much exposure to the carnival sideshow of Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann and Donald Trump. And most deliciously – the campaign knew they were dead with a week to go, but had to push the “shellshock” meme because if donors knew that Team GOP knew they were about to take an ass-kicking, they would start wondering why they were giving so much money to a lost cause that its operators knew was lost. Plus, naturally, nobody could have expected big turnout among black voters, among Latinos, among women, because obviously the Democrats are cheating by running up numbers with minorities.
Right now I don’t take the secession talk seriously, because half the names on the petitions are Californians who would slice off a finger to kick Texas and Alabama out of the country. The psycho libertarian types are fun to point and laugh at, but I think for the time being it’s going to be more nullification than secession – shocker, the governor of Alabama is already refusing to set up a health care exchange. Here comes an attempt to create a viable marketplace for health insurance, to expand the range of consumer choice, as Republican an ideal as possible, but since that ni(CLANG!!!!) passed it…well, I guess we’ll see how that works. Just remember what Earl K. Long warned Leander Perez back in the 1950s…the Feds have got the hydrogen bomb.