Maybe I haven’t explained why the Southernization of politics is a bad thing. I’ll thumbnail it real quick just in case somebody hasn’t read the whole damn blog.
In 1877, the Democrats – who had won the popular vote in the 1876 Presidential election, but saw the electoral vote split between contested states in the South – made a deal where they would concede the election to Rutherford B. Hayes and the Republicans in exchange for the end of Federal occupation of the postwar South. Aided by paramilitary violence by assorted Redeemer groups (look it up), the result was the end of Reconstruction and the institution of Jim Crow laws – not to mention the whitewashing of the voter rolls. By the mid-1880s, the old Confederacy was essentially a one-party zone; the Democrats owned the whole thing. (For an interesting comparison, match the electoral map of the 1896 election to that of 2004.) They would continue to own the whole thing until the 1960s, when the national Democratic embrace of the civil rights movement paved the way for George Wallace and ultimately a switch to Republican voting for President, which trickled down to the Congress by the mid-1990s.
But for that period of almost eighty years, the Democratic primary was, for all intents and purposes, the general election. Republicans were negligible – if not outright nonexistent. One-party rule meant that except for the occasional populist appeal to rise up against the big mules of industry or finance, campaigns were fought between candidates whose actual policy differences could be patched over with a postage stamp.
So what happens if candidates all believe the same things and pursue the same policy?
What you get is the Southern style of politics. Elections that are fought on the basis of personality, hyperbole, and the constant appeal to vigilance against the great Other over the hill – whether that be the Negro menace or the Yankee menace or the Red Agitator menace. Candidates competed to be the most outspoken defender of Southern womanhood, to pay the greatest tribute to the gallant fallen of the Lost Cause, to whip crowds of working-class white men into a mad frenzy that would drive them to go out and elect the kind of people who would then continue to leach money out of the South while keeping its poorest “below the salt in the pickle barrel,” in Wayne Flynt’s immortal phrase.
Southern-style politics doesn’t care about policy differences. Hell, it doesn’t care about policy at all. The Southern style of politics gets you the “Suppose a state trooper pulls your wife over one night. He turns out to be black. Think about it. Elect George Wallace” radio spots of 1970, or the “white hands” ad for Jesse Helms in 1990. That constant threat that the boogeyman is coming to get you, and only (INSERT WHITE CANDIDATE HERE) can stand firm against the assault of the forces of evil. Southern politics is about scaring the shit out of you until you pull that lever.
You know…Teabaggers. The hysterical cries of socialism, the dark warnings about the President’s real origins and nationality, the impending doom of a radical Muslim takeover or a radical feminist takeover or a Godless homosexual takeover – the “Tea Party” movement and its amen corner in the national broadcast media are the inevitable final product of the cult of Southern conservative populism that had its origins in the Redeemers and its apotheosis in George Wallace.
For almost eighty years, these forces were allied with the Democrats, at a time when both parties had their liberal and conservative wings. Then, for almost forty years, they were allied nationally with Republicans, until the South was as monolithically Republican in federal government as it had been Democratic thirty years prior. Since 1994, they have held the reins of power in the Republican party – Gingrich, DeLay, Lott, McConnell, and of course Bush; John Boehner of Ohio is the first non-Southerner to occupy a non-figurehead leadership position among national Republican officeholders since Bob Dole left to run for President in 1996. And in the past twenty years, the effective result has been to make the GOP the party of the South. California – a state that went GOP in six straight elections from 1968 to 1988 – is generally regarded as unobtainable for Republicans in a national election. New England – the traditional heartland of the Republican party for generations, the home base of Dewey and Rockefeller and Lodge, of rock-ribbed New Hampshire conservatism – has not a single Republican in the House of Representatives. Look again at that 1896 map, and then at 2004 and 2008 – the South is still solid; it’s just switched sides.
The polling numbers tell the tale. Presidential support, belief that the President is in fact an American citizen by birth, pretty much all aspects of approval of Obama in particular and the Democrats in general – the numbers are fairly consistent from the East to the Midwest to the Pacific, but skew wildly in the South. It’s not a coincidence. The South, after a couple of ascendant decades, is losing the Civil War again. That’s why you see the hysteria. When Medicare Part D passed in 2003, it was a half-trillion dollars worth of unfunded entitlement giveaway, which passed literally in the dead of night when the Speaker held a fifteen minute vote open for three hours (with the cameras turned off) until they could threaten, browbeat, and twist enough arms to get over 218. And nary a peep from the very people who have now decided that implementing a Nixon plan from 1974 amounts to the breaking of the seventh seal and the unleashing of the Antichrist.
That’s the politics of the South. And it will be the end of us all – if we let it.