Posted on 11/30/2006 8:28:48 PM PST by Western Civ 4ever
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 Schuler 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 Schuler represents a trend. That offends nothing but the facts.
Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Politics and Culture of the American Berserk, 1965-1972, which will be published next year.
The Frisco comparison works for us because Red Staters think its residents are snotty, strange, and intellectually out to lunch. If you think, say, Ohioans will shrink being told Candidate X has "Southern conservative values," well, good luck with that.
Up here in blue state Michigan we threw out affirmative action. I thought that made us a bunch of racists.
I would point out that in mid atlantic Maryland, Democratic Operative were throwing oreo cookies at Mike Steele and using racial slurs about him.
Liberal=hippocrite
Is he the idiot that used to post here? He called me some dirty names once.....then again, maybe he was looking for a date.
Dixie ping
Articles like this just prove that the authors don't have a clue about the South. The South is no more racist than anywhere else.
I don't know.
That must be why areas of the South with relatively few blacks have also trended heavily GOP. If the writer were writing about the Memphis metro area, maybe. But the South ain't all about Memphis. Why has western Kentucky gone so heavily towards the GOP? It must be all about those blacks who don't live there. It clearly has nothing to do with the evangelical and other cultural elements that have nothing to do with race. That is just an exercise in white denial.
A Ph.D in public policy?
He must be a day at the beach.
It was apparently just fine when Huey Long's Great Depression variety of populism made us the foundation for their New Deal coalition for fifty years, a period of a much more virulent "racism" than any remnants that exist today.
You can only concede so many of those big states to the blue column.
I think Penn. is gone for good, Ohio is on a razor's edge, Arizona may be gone, Minnesota and Michigan razor thin.
I'm not sure which GOP candidate can get these back, and hold the south.
This is a bit like observing that a woman over six feet tall is no less likely to reach the product on the top shelf than is a man who is six feet tall. True enough. It is just that there are far fewer of them.
I don't think so. Democrats like Napolitano can get elected here, but only if they are exceedingly competent (or at least perceived to be so), run against a weak Republican, and govern from the middle. There is no Left worthy of the name here, just degrees of conservative.
Remember Bob Stump Sr.? He was one of the most conservative members of Congress, but ran as a Democrat for several terms before finally making the jump to the Republican party.
Arizona is still a red state, perhaps a lighter shade of red than before, but certainly not a place where Democrats can count on winning anything.
-ccm
I think you're being a bit too pessimistic on Ohio. Yes, we got creamed there this year, but with Taft at 15% approval did you really expect differently? Arizona, I think is mostly hype. Napolitano, yes. But she originally won in GOP romp year 2002, along with Dem governors in Kansas and Wyoming! No one seriously talks about "losing" those states. And Giffords was a given, I think, after the lack of the Kolbe endorsement and the bitter primary. Hayworth's loss may be the only real cause for worry.
In actuality, neither party has had much room for error in Presidential elections for some time. The GOP starts counting on the South, Plains, and interior West, the RATs with the Northeast, upper Midwest, and West coast, and we fight over what's left. It remains to be seen whether the Dem's gains in so many Bush 2004 districts portend any real trouble for us long term. Remember, 1982 and 1986 were seen as disasters at the time, too, and it foretold nothing about the health of Reagan's coalition. Anyone telling you they see "realignment" three weeks after a single election is wishful thinking.
I've heard this said about ner' do well whites. Us hillbillies, for example. Does that prove racism? It's been around since the beginning of time.
I remember the days when merely believing that the federal government is limited only to the powers it is granted in the Constitution (Tenth Amendment) would earn you the deep-seated hatred, ill will, enmity, hostility, antagonism, animosity, rancor, antipathy, animus of caring people of good will screaming contemptuous epithets at you; to wit, "You support Goldwater!! Why you $#^&*@. . . .!!!" (And those were the employees of the MSM of the 1960s.)
I thought Mr. Perlstein was / is a Freeper.
If the Gop controls the south as this pompous bastard alleges, it is because Southerners respect human life, especially among the unborn, while the Dims are determined to see that the baby slaughter continues unchecked until there are no more Americans being born.
Nope, you have it backwards. You were a bunch of racists when you were practicing affirmative action.
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