Andrew Leonard: Too Much Is Being Made of How Conservative the New Southern Conservative Democrats Are

Florida Gator fans, among which proud group I count myself, have always been a little suspicious of Heath Shuler, the former quarterback for the University of Tennessee Volunteers, a hated Florida rival. But if one was to believe the talking heads from Tuesday night's election coverage, good old-fashioned liberals should be even more wary of the newly elected Democratic House representative from North Carolina. That's because, as was repeated ad infinitum by the likes of Candy Crowley and numerous others, Heath Shuler is the embodiment of the new, socially conservative Democrat. Anti-same-sex marriage, anti-choice, eager to drop the name of Jesus at every opportunity, the new socially conservative Democrats are being offered as proof that for the Democratic Party to win power, it had to become Republican. So don't you dare interpret these election results as some kind of ratification of meat-and-potatos Democratic liberalism. And you better watch out, because trouble's gonna start brewing when these new socially conservative Democrats arrive in Washington and start getting ordered around by Nancy Pelosi and her ilk....

White Southern Democrats, by and large, have always been conservative. Heath Shuler is the latest in a long tradition. But you want to know the real difference between Shuler and the likes of Zell Miller or the Dixiecrats of yore? Shuler was born in 1971, six years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. So unlike generations of Southern Democrats before him, he probably won't change his registration to Republican because his party forced through historic civil rights legislation.

This point, absolutely central to the history of modern politics in the United States, rarely gets mentioned by pundits blathering on about red and blue states. Instead the South's transformation from blue bastion to rock-ribbed red Republicanism has been painted as some kind of tactical failure by Democrats -- they"lost" the South because they weren't as smart or organized or respectful of"family values" as the Republicans. When, in point of fact, any student of political history understands that the Republican takeover of the South is the result of Lyndon Johnson's passage of the Voting Rights Act. The so-called conservative ascendancy did not begin in 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected. It began in 1965.

Sometimes, you pay a price for being right. The price paid by Democrats for forcing through landmark civil rights legislation was the collapse of a big tent that held both Northern liberals and Southern conservatives -- an uneasy alliance at best, and one that only as masterly a politician as Johnson could manipulate into a unified force. Ever since, Democrats have faced a political landscape in which the electoral math hasn't worked in their favor.

But, as is abundantly clear from Tuesday's election results, many Southerners no longer feel that Republicans represent their interests. So now some new politicians like Heath Shuler are making the scene. The Democratic Party is big enough to handle it.