The Dems can win without the South - and maybe the South is all the Republicans will end up with (a new civil war, anyone?)

Southern Comfort -- by digby/hullabaloo/http://digbysblog.blogspot.com

Many of you probably read Tom Schaller's postings throughout the blogosphere on TAPPED, The Gadflyer and Daily Kos. He has also written a book called "Whistling Past Dixie" where he makes the case for a non southern strategy. It's a very interesting thesis that makes a basic point, which nobody wants to admit, but which is undoubtedly true: the conservative majority in the south is much more conservative than the rest of the country and the Democrats simply cannot win by trying to accomodate it. And by conservative, I'm not talking about what we used to think of as conservative, I'm talking about the special regional conservatism that's dominated the GOP since it gelled as a southern dominated party in the early 90's.

This election marks the end of the GOP behemoth for any number of reasons, corruption and incoherence not the least of them. But I think there is also a new awareness that southern conservatism, which leans heavily on cultural indicators and the religious right is not working for most people. The vast majority of gains for the Democrats in this election came from outside the south.

As I wrote yesterday, the Democrats elected everything from socialists in the Northeast to crew-cutted farmers in the west (and even pulled out a win in Virginia with a military hero, a swing state mostly due to its northern, suburban immigrants!) The Democratic party is more culturally diverse and less strictly defined by a particular tribal identifier these days, no matter how much they beat the dead hippie. This is a big country and the Democratic tent much more accurately reflects the mainstream of America than the Republicans do.

I'll be writing more about Schaller's book in the coming weeks because I think it's something we need to think about. It does not, as people seem to think, write off the south. But he recognizes that Democrats kow-towing to a conservative southern minority has perverted our politics and sold short our own vision of individual liberty and the common good.

Meanwhile, on this day when we find that the Democrats are back in the majority in both houses since the 1994 Republican takeover, here's a little trip down memory lane for you all. Back in 1998, Weekly Standard editor Christopher Caldwell wrote an article on this subject in The Atlantic that caused an amazing amount of consternation among the DC cognoscenti. It was politically incorrect in the extreme by today's conservative PC standards. And it was wrong in some important respects. But it was prescient in one in particular and I think it would have been proven so much earlier had it not been for the voting shenanigans in 2000 and then 9/11. The fundamentals of his argument have been correct ever since he wrote them:

“The Republican Party is increasingly a party of the South and the mountains. The southernness of its congressional leaders Speaker Newt Gingrich, of Georgia; House Majority Leader Dick Armey and House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, of Texas; Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, of Mississippi; Senate Majority Whip Don Nickles, of Oklahoma only heightens the identification. There is a big problem with having a southern, as opposed to a midwestern or a California, base. Southern interests diverge from those of the rest of the country, and the southern presence in the Republican Party has passed a tipping point, at which it began to alienate voters from other regions.

“As southern control over the Republican agenda grows, the party alienates even conservative voters in other regions. The prevalence of right-to-work laws in southern states may be depriving Republicans of the socially conservative midwestern trade unionists whom they managed to split in the Reagan years, and sending Reagan Democrats back to their ancestral party in the process. Anti-government sentiment makes little sense in New England, where government, as even those who hate it will concede, is neither remote nor unresponsive.

“The most profound clash between the South and everyone else, of course, is a cultural one. It arises from the southern tradition of putting values particularly Christian values at the center of politics. This is not the same as saying that the Republican Party is too far right; Americans consistently tell pollsters that they are conservative on values issues. It is, rather, that the Republicans have narrowly defined values as the folkways of one regional subculture, and have urged their imposition on the rest of the country. Again, the nonsoutherners who object to this style of politics may be just as conservative as those who practice it. But they are put off to see that traditional values are now defined by the majority party as the values of the U-Haul-renting denizens of two-year-old churches and three-year-old shopping malls.

“Southerners now wag the Republican dog. How did the party let that happen?” ( The Atlantic Monthly June, 1998)


They let it happen because the politicians believed their own hype and the think tank Straussians hold the voters in such low estemm they figured they could impose extremely conservative regional values on the entire country when they can't even impose them on the minority of decent, hardworking progressives who fight them everyday in their own southern backyard. And then they figured they could keep the rubes dazzled with goose stepping and flag waving while they raided the treasury on their own behalf and experimented on the global stage with stoned-freshman, bullsession experiments. What hubris. This election is the first indication that the nation is righting itself to its natural state since the crazy events of 1998-9/11. And it's natural state is not to be dominated by a conservative southern minority.

Now to my way of thinking, the 50 state strategy remains important in this argument to the extent that we commit to developing active state parties in the south and give support to people who are willing to get out there and make the progressive argument in hostile territory. You can't ever convince anyone to change unless you talk to them. And there is something in the idea that forcing the Republicans to pay attention to their home country makes them spend money they'd rather spend elsewhere. But really, the idea is to win and it's reached a point at which it's a zero sum game. If we continue to sell our souls because we think that people who vote for Trent Lott and Jeff Sessions will finally see the light we are crazy. The south is solid conservative Republican and until there is an historically unprecedented sea change in southern politics it's going to remain that way.

Yet, for the last 20 years Democratic strategists have been convinced that they needed to move their agenda ever closer to conservative southern thinking in order to win nationally and that formulation is wrong. Respect and engagement yes. Capitulation no. It hasn't worked and it isn't good for the country to enable the most regressive forces in the nation. Conservative southerners haven't just been wagging the Republican Party's dog, it's been wagging the whole country's dog and its time is over.

I'll look forward to discussing Schaller's belief that the Democrats do not need to win in the south in order to win the country, in future posts. He writes:

“Democrats should forget about recapturing the South in the near term and begin building a national majority that ends, not begins, with restoring their lost southern glory. Most of the South is already beyond the Democrats' reach, and much of the rest continues to move steadily into the Republican column. White southerners used to be among the most economically liberal voters in America but are now among the most conservative. The South is America's most militaristic and least unionized region, and the powerful combination of race and religion create a socially conservative, electorally hostile environment for most statewide Democratic candidates and almost all Democratic presidential nominees.

“Meanwhile, there are growing opportunities for Democrats to improve their electoral fortunes in other parts of the country, where demographic changes and political attitudes are more favorable to Democratic messages and messengers. Citizens in the Midwest have been decimated by globalization and are looking for economic salvation. In the Southwest where white and, most especially, Hispanic populations are booming, a strong platform on immigration reform and enforcement could divide the Republicans and put the region up for grabs. In parts of the Mountain West, Democrats can pair the lessons learned from Ross Perot's fiscal reform campaigns with an emphasis on land and water conservation to establish traction among disaffected libertarians and the millions of coastal transplants who either moved westward or bounced back eastward from California in search of open spaces and more affordable suburban lifestyles. If the Democrats can simultaneously expand and solidify their existing margins of control in the Northeast and Pacific Coast states -- specifically by targeting moderate Republicans for defeat, just as moderate Democrats in the South have been systematically terminated by the GOP -- the Democrats can build a national majority with no help from the South in presidential elections and little help from southern votes elsewhere down the ballot.

“That's a pretty big checklist, no doubt. But these tasks are far more doable than trying to rewind history to re-create a pre-civil rights era Democratic South in post-civil rights America.

“The South has long been America's regional political outlier. When the Republicans dominated national politics for seven decades between the Civil War and the New Deal, they did so with almost no support from the South. Thanks to the significant African-American population base in the South, the Democrats will never be so handicapped from the outset because there will always be a minimum degree of Democratic support and number of Democratic elected officials in the region. Building a non-southern majority, therefore, should be much easier for Democrats today than it was for the Republicans a century ago. Anyone who claims otherwise is willfully ignoring partisan history, not to mention contemporary demography.

“As Democrats expand their non-southern support, the South will continue to assimilate into the national political culture from which it had mostly divorced itself until recent decades. Then and only then can Democrats begin to rebrand themselves in Dixie. In the interim, the Democrats' near-term goal should be to isolate the Republicans as a regional party that owns most of the South, but little else.”

Schaller also suggests that it is still a winning formula to have two southerners on a national ticket, just not for the purpose of winning the deep south in a presidential election. After all, the rest of the country likes southerners just fine; it's southern conservatism we don't care for. You can't be all things to all people and the Democratic coalition that increasingly encompasses the rest of the nation cannot continue to try to accomodate rightwing southern conservatism in its national message. The country has spoken and they don't like what the southern Republican Party has been selling so they sure as hell aren't going to buy the same thing from a bunch of Democrats running around in hunting caps and speaking in tongues.

I keep hearing that this isn't an endorsement of Democrats, it's a repudiation of Republicans. Ok fine. I hope the Democratic strategists are listening. If the country has repudiated the Republicans maybe that's a signal that we should stop trying to be like them.

Update: Sidney Blumenthal makes the same point in this piece in The Guardian.

“After the mid-term elections, the GOP has become a regional party of the South. And, in the future, Republicans can only hold their base by asserting their conservatism, which alienates the rest of the country. More than ever, the Republicans are dependent upon white evangelical voters in the South and sparsely populated Rocky Mountain states. The Republican coalition, its much-touted "big tent," has nearly collapsed.

[...]

“The Democratic Party that has advanced from the 2006 elections reasserts the Solid North, with inroads in the metropolitan states of the West, and, like the GOP of the past, challenges in the states of the peripheral South such as Arkansas, Tennessee and Virginia. This Democratic Party has never existed before. It is a center-left party with wings that can flap together. The party's opposition to the Republicans on economic equity and social tolerance are its defining characteristics. “

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