Nicholas Lemann: What Is the South?
... The South is a big, complicated region, but the simplest available explanation of its politics is that they are primarily racial. From the end of Reconstruction through World War II, Southern voters were overwhelmingly white, and were unified by their dislike of the Republican Party. Pro-civil rights sentiment was detectable in the national Democratic Party from the New Deal onward, but Franklin Roosevelt's economic policies were so popular in the South, and his embrace of civil rights so faint, that the South stayed solid for the Democrats through his death. Not long after that, the Democrats' hold on the South began to loosen. Thurmond's Dixiecrat defection came well before what we now think of as the beginning of the civil rights movement, and Dwight Eisenhower carried four of the Confederate states in 1952 and five in 1956. Since 1964, the Republican Party has been strongly ascendant in the South, first in national elections, then in state and local ones, even though the Voting Rights Act brought the South an enfranchised black populace for the first time in nearly a century.
In national politics, this has had a curious double effect: it has made the Republican Party much more powerful, but within the Democratic Party it has empowered southerners. Every successful Democratic candidate for president in the past forty years, plus one almostsuccessful one (Al Gore), has come from the old Confederacy. The reason is obvious: chipping off just two or three southern states creates a Democratic presidential majority. Yet Thomas F. Schaller is here to argue that the Democrats should now ditch the South.
Schaller's book is not an analysis of southern politics, it is a prescription for Democratic presidential victory. Such books fall into two broad categories: those that want the Democrats to move to the center and those that want them to move to the left. Whistling Past Dixie is a move-to-the-left book. Schaller believes that the Democrats can seriously pursue the possibility of winning southern states only by trying to appeal to conservatives, which is not something that appeals to him. Anyway, he argues, it won't work. Instead, he sees the West as the area of opportunity for the party. A farther-left Democratic presidential majority can be achieved, he says, by forgetting about the South and assembling a different collection of states.
Although the election results of last fall make the opening sentence of Schaller's book--"The Democrats are in disarray"--look outdated, his overall argument stands up pretty well. The Democrats gained less in the South than elsewhere last fall, and where they did gain it was usually in border states, via notably conservative candidates who did not win by much, such as James Webb in Virginia. Schaller argues that the South is so deeply conservative mainly because of race and religion--that southerners prefer to vote on non-economic issues. He treats Trent Lott and Jesse Helms in particular as racial politicians. Helms "embodied the tradition of steadfast southern resistance to racial equality." ...
Read entire article at New Republic
In national politics, this has had a curious double effect: it has made the Republican Party much more powerful, but within the Democratic Party it has empowered southerners. Every successful Democratic candidate for president in the past forty years, plus one almostsuccessful one (Al Gore), has come from the old Confederacy. The reason is obvious: chipping off just two or three southern states creates a Democratic presidential majority. Yet Thomas F. Schaller is here to argue that the Democrats should now ditch the South.
Schaller's book is not an analysis of southern politics, it is a prescription for Democratic presidential victory. Such books fall into two broad categories: those that want the Democrats to move to the center and those that want them to move to the left. Whistling Past Dixie is a move-to-the-left book. Schaller believes that the Democrats can seriously pursue the possibility of winning southern states only by trying to appeal to conservatives, which is not something that appeals to him. Anyway, he argues, it won't work. Instead, he sees the West as the area of opportunity for the party. A farther-left Democratic presidential majority can be achieved, he says, by forgetting about the South and assembling a different collection of states.
Although the election results of last fall make the opening sentence of Schaller's book--"The Democrats are in disarray"--look outdated, his overall argument stands up pretty well. The Democrats gained less in the South than elsewhere last fall, and where they did gain it was usually in border states, via notably conservative candidates who did not win by much, such as James Webb in Virginia. Schaller argues that the South is so deeply conservative mainly because of race and religion--that southerners prefer to vote on non-economic issues. He treats Trent Lott and Jesse Helms in particular as racial politicians. Helms "embodied the tradition of steadfast southern resistance to racial equality." ...