Posted on 11/30/2006 6:11:53 AM PST by .cnI redruM
In the days after the 2004 election, the same CNN exit poll was on every pundit's lips: Asked about their most important issue, a plurality of voters cited "moral values." Eighty percent of that plurality voted for George W. Bush--no matter that cooler heads soon demonstrated these findings to be statistically meaningless. For "most of the last 100 years, politics has been defined by economic interests," Bill Clinton's former press secretary, Dee Dee Myers, pronounced on MSNBC. "That's no longer true." And so, a refrain developed: Without making significant inroads among churchgoing Southerners, Democrats could never hope to win a governing majority.
But this month's election yielded data that, unlike CNN's exit poll, was irrefutable: For the first time since 1953, the party that dominates the South is the minority party in Congress. November 7, 2006, may well go down in history as the day the modern Republican Party became a mere Southern faction. There's only one problem: No one's talking about it on TV. Instead, Heath Shuler became the cable news bookers' new favorite guest, as if the election of a pro-life Democrat from North Carolina was the election's most important trend: As Bob Schieffer announced, "These Democrats that were elected last night are conservative Democrats." Meanwhile, the one man whose book predicted the election's actual revelation--that the South and its conservative ways were irrelevant to the Democrats' victory--has been shut out. "I managed to squeeze onto Chris Matthews once," says Thomas F. Schaller, a professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, "but we didn't even talk about the book."
Schaller's book is Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South. Published this October, it argues, "The South is likely to become more Republican in the decades ahead," that Democrats can make and keep the Republicans a mere regional party, and that the best shot at a Democratic majority "in the immediate term is to consolidate electoral control over the Northeast and Pacific Coast blue states, expand the party's Midwestern margins, and cultivate the new-growth areas of the interior West." That's exactly how it went down November 7. The last prognosticator of structural shifts in American politics this accurate--Kevin Phillips, in his 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority--became a household name. But, because he is a friend, it pains me to have to make a prognostication of my own: Tom Schaller will never become a household name. The reasons are ideological.
The people who have paid most attention to Schaller have been hysterics. Former Representative Glen Browder, a founder of the Blue Dog Democrats, was asked in the Anniston Star what he thought of Whistling Past Dixie. Browder, also a Ph.D. in political science, replied that Schaller was spouting "foolishness," but that "fortunately, most national leaders today understand that the road to the magic 218 number inevitably runs through this region." He said this oblivious to the fact that Schaller's "foolishness" had, in fact, just come true.
Still, Browder will always have an easier time winning a seat alongside Schieffer on Face the Nation than Schaller. TV punditry is not a meritocracy. Points aren't awarded for being right. (If they were, how many talking heads who saw only rosy things ahead in Iraq would still be on air?) It is an ideological system, with perverse ideological rules. And Browder has just honored one of them: Glorify what the French call l'Amerique profunde--the "heartland," of which the South is the sacred center.
Schaller speaks ill of the South. The very heart of his argument is a taboo notion: that the South votes Republican because the Republicans have perfected their appeal to Southern racism, and that Democrats simply can't (and shouldn't) compete.
But, among scholars, this is hardly news. Schaller builds this conclusion on one of the most impressive papers in recent political science, "Old Times There Are Not Forgotten: Race and Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South," by Nicholas Valentino and David Sears. Running regressions on a massive data set of ideological opinions, Sears and Valentino demonstrate with precision that, for example, a white Southern man who calls himself a "conservative," controlling for racial attitudes, is no less likely to chance a vote for a Democratic presidential candidate than a Northerner who calls himself a conservative. Likewise, a pro-life or hawkish Southern white man is no less likely--again controlling for racial attitudes--than a pro-life or hawkish Northerner to vote for the Democrat. But, on the other hand, when the relevant identifier is anti-black answers to survey questions (such as whether one agrees "If blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites," or choosing whether blacks are "lazy" or "hardworking"), an untoward result jumps out: white Southerners are twice as likely than white Northerners to refuse to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate. Schaller's writes: "Despite the best efforts of Republican spinmeisters ... the partisan impact of racial attitudes in the South is stronger today than in the past."
What's more, if Republicans have succeeded by openly baiting a region of the country not really American (the latte-swilling Northeast), Schaller says, "The Democrats need their own 'them,' and the social conservatives who are the bedrock of Southern politics provide the most obvious and burdensome stone to hang around the Republicans' neck." Democrats should cite "Southern obstructionism as a continuing impediment to the investments and progress the country must make in the coming century." There's just one problem: You can't do that on TV.
Once upon a time, of course, pundits used to say what Schaller says: The South, sometimes, is backward. Since the late '60s, however--not coincidentally, around the time Kevin Phillips rose to fame--a new, unspoken set of rules evolved.
It happened in a moment of trauma. After the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, all the top news executives sent a wire to Mayor Richard J. Daley protesting the way their employees "were repeatedly singled out by policemen and deliberately beaten." Such was their presumption of cultural authority they couldn't imagine how anyone could disagree. Then Mayor Daley went on Walter Cronkite's show and shocked the media establishment by refusing to apologize to the beaten reporters: "Many of them are hippies themselves. They're part of this movement." Polls revealed 60 percent of Americans agreed with Daley. For the press, it triggered a dark night of the soul. In an enormously influential column, the pundit Joseph Kraft, shaken, wrote, "Mayor Daley and his supporters have a point. Most of us in what is called the communication field are not rooted in the great mass of ordinary Americans--in Middle America."
That air of alienation--that helpless feeling that we have no idea what's going on out there--has structured elite discourse about the rest of the country ever since. A set of constructs about what "the great mass of ordinary Americans" supposedly believes--much more conservative things than any media elitist would believe, basically--became reified. Pundits like Kraft--a social class that spends much of their time among people like themselves, inside the Beltway--learned to bend over backward to be fair, lest they advertise their own alienation from everyone else. On subjects that chafed them--say, the relevance of certain ugly folkways of the South in electoral politics--they just had to bend harder. Or ignore the matter altogether.
It can produce in today's TV talking head a twisted kind of neurosis: an instinctual distrust of the political appeal of anything that can be categorized as liberal, even in defiance of the actual data; and an inability to call a spade a spade--say, that people shouldn't have been beaten indiscriminately in the streets of Chicago in 1968. That's why nobody on TV says Democrats can't win in the South in the short-term--and Schaller, it has to be said, is optimistic about Democrats winning Southern gains in the long term--without playing to white voters' inclinations to see blacks as lazy. It's much easier to say that Heath Shuler represents a trend. That offends nothing but the facts.
The South Shall Rise Again!...............
Do not ever make fun or downgrade my ancestors.
I think that's exactly what everyone from Fredricksburg, Va to all parts South, has to look forward to for the next two years.
Republicans need to give up the idea that there is a gentleman's agreement in redistricting. They have powerful agencies to go after the corruption, bad practices, etc in the cities, especially in schools, and they should use them.
"Self-Righteous Lefty" is redundant.
I have had the good (and mis-) fortune to work with The Republicans over the years, and they will never, ever, fugeddaboutit, get this.
Based upon my observations of several states' GOP organizations, they don't appear particularly anxious to get it, either. Take the Republican establishment in PA, particularly around Philly.(Please!) They have many a sweetheart patronage deal worked out which an overwhelming victory at the polls would wipe out, along with their Democrat cronies, with whom they have developed a very comfortable modus vivendi.
"Run tough, rock'em, sock'em campaigns? You must be joking. The ill feeling that would create could cost me my job the very next time we lose, if not sooner."
Face it, me heary buckos and buckettes, in many states, Republicanism is a feature of a rather elaborate and pleasant lifestyle enjoyed by those who are "in" with the RNC and State Party nomenklatura, which could easily be upset by an embarassing victory at the polls. Investigate the campaign of the hopeless dweeb Tom Kean Jr., in NJ and refute me. My Irish Setter could have beaten the sinister crook Menendez, and bitten him the ass while running him outa Dodge.
Please God, make me wrong.
I would just add that I think they are too professional. As such some real grassroots could rise. but here even the Freepers don't meet. I really get nothing out of it but sollicitations. I don't ever meet anyone, so what kind of party is it?
That is, that during their long years out of power,(IMHO, basically, the Republicans have been out of power asince the 1930's, despite more or less brief tenures as the majority in Congress and despite electing Eisenhower, Nixon, and Bush I & II) The Republican survivors crafted a philosophy of cooperating with the Democrats in exchange for some major concessions ... a major one being the shift in taxation away from corporations to the middle classes, which directly enabled the growth of big government.
The entire Federal Government is, fundamentally Democrat on the bureau level. Republicans come and go, but those who have day-to-day power over our lives, remain Democrats, from the Post Office, to the IRS, and the FDA!
I've got my tinfoil.
You obviously missed my last memo. Those of us in the know have switched from Tin to mU metal.
Those harmful thought rays from outer space were going through Tin like a hot knife through I Can't Believe It's Not Butter. Also make sure the protective head gear shades the eye area, and down the neck, as well.
Are we, the conservative/Constitutionist patriots, playing the same role for Pubbies as the minorities do for the 'Rats? Are we not being "bought" with all sorts of promises (lower taxes, less government, more accountability) on which Repubs never actually deliver?
Sure seems that way to me.
There is something about your post that reminds me of the lyrics of an old Simon & Garfunkel tune - "The Boxer".
Argh. Too late. I'm seeing . . . Hillary. Hillary, everywhere. Agggggghhh. My eyes.
Is the pattern for that design on the back of the Memo on the Dixie Chicks, that I still have not received??!!
The results of my research "The Use of Metal Foils in Foiling Thought Waves," will be published here before I send the dissertation to the Nobel Committee.
Where we are stuck here at the institute is in trying to ascertain whether the foil chapeau-cover can be effective, worn inside a backwards, or sideways turned ball cap, so that the wearer can you know ... look normal ... all the while blithely turning aside those harmful rays.
Dragging the Dixie Chicks into this scientific discussion does lead me to believe that some damage may have already been done to you, pinz. So please, be extra careful until we get this squared away. LS will look in from time to time. I will be at the RNC meeting.
It's a Karl Rove Roast.
Thank you for the update. And your concern is sweet. I try to listen to 3 hours of Kurt Cobaine any time the DC's names are brought up to neutralize any harmful effects.
As to hats... I have a deep fondness for straw, brimmed hats with silk flowers (preferably cabbage roses) attached. Will this cause any disruption to the protective features???
Please add me to any ping list you are creating for metal foil improvements. The voices in my head are out of new jokes and it's getting annoying!
ps. What kind of barbecue sauce do you prefer with Karl?
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