If there is almost any single lesson that has been burned into the brain of a progressive Democrat over the last 40 years, it is that Southern Democrats are willing to sell out the party on the issues that burn the progressives the most. From Civil Rights in the 1960's, culminating with backing a third party run in 1968 and continuing with opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment - to backing of hard right social policy such as the death penalty and religious schooling and overturning Roe v Wade, through helping Reagan push through his borrow and squander policies, and supporting Bush the younger's misguided war, the Southern Democrat has taken on the image of being the Dinocrat - a Democrat In Name Only, particularly when the chips were down.
Ed Kilgore blasts [1] Tom Schaller for supporting an "unsouthern strategy" - running against the Rubinomics and Christianism of southern culture - and instead calls for a Democratic Party that is in the south. It's a victory for Tom's point of view, actually, even though the smarm and sneer is laid on fairly thick. Tom tells the Democrats to Whistle past Dixie [2] and Kilgore, however ill tempered he is about it, accepts the bottom line.
It isn't about "Southern" "Democrats" but about regressive theocracy.
On one hand it is easy to show how it is not merely southern democrats who have been willing to ally with the Republicans over the last several decades. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 wasn't a case of Southern Democrats and Republicans [3] - but of conservative Democrats reaching out beyond the south itself. Afterall, the engineer of its passage was - LBJ.
NAFTA wasn't a Southern Democrat-Republican alliance, but, instead a free trade Democrat-Republican alliance. CAFTA was even more starkly so. The Blue Dog caucus ranges across the country - and they vote with the Republicans far more often than southern Democrats as a whole.
In short, while Southern Democrats are more conservative than the party as a whole, and they have led signal revolts against the general direction of the party - they are not the only source of reaction or conservatism. The most conservative new Democratic Senator this election cycle probably won't be Jim Webb, the most conservative new Democratic house members will be scattered throughout the country.
The Democratic anger at Southern Democrats comes from their willingness to attack the base of the party, to betray on large issues dear to the core of progressives, and as the seeming center for a counter ideology which loaths the cosmopolitan inclusionism which is the assumed backdrop of much of the progressive movement.
It is not merely that the Republicans made gains in the south, it is that Democrats openly defected there, and the South is now the home, not merely to Republicans, but to the most reactionary of Republicans, the hard core angry reactionaries who spew the most egregious bile.
Or are they really southerners? Many of the offenders are not, in themselves, "Southerners". Consider George Felix Allen. He's from California. Consider George W. Bush - his roots like in the Northeast. It is not that there is a locus of infection that is the South, it is that the South is a magnet for a certain kind of person who went to make money in the boom of the new south. Strangely, the liberal opening of the South from decades of economic and transportation isolation, created a road for the very people who would later evict the Democrats from power.
The south may be home to a particular culture, but it is a fusion of carpet baggers from the North, like Allen, Gingrich, DeLay and Bush - with the original southern Dixiecrats which makes up the south as it is.
Kilgore's case is flawed:
Part of the problem with Schaller's approach is that he dismisses contrary evidence as irrelevant to the irrefutable case for the solid Republican South. In his Salon piece, he says: "Over four decades, in fits and starts, the Republicans captured the South." Well, one man's "fits and starts" is another's "cycles and countercycles." At the risk of dating myself, I can say that I've been hearing that the South was on the verge of becoming a one-party Republican "base" region quite literally since 1964. But every time that Republican "great gettin' up morning" has been about to dawn, one of those "fits and starts" has occurred -- in 1970, 1974, 1986 and 1998 at the sub-presidential level, and in 1976, 1992 and 1996 at the presidential level. Sure, the overall trend has been toward the GOP, but that's hard to avoid, since the starting point was a one-party Democratic region.
It was easy enough to avoid for a very long time - the South had been a one party Democratic region since the collapse of the Whigs in the 1850's. One hundred years, half the life time of the American Republics, is a very long time indeed. While nothing is forever in politics, the collapse of a one party area into one where the Republicans hold constitutional super-majorities in legislatures, and can steal Presidential elections in - is a very large change.
This fusion is based on something far deeper than evangelical Christianity, and is rooted in the culture of oil. Once upon a time, the Democrats were the party of the culture of oil, and now, it is the Republicans who are. The South, without a rail network, embraced the road and engine economy as the Jeffersonian boon that it was - once again every man could be a business.
This culture of energy is part of Kevin Phillips' ur-argument in "The Coming Republican Majority" and his post-script in his recent works. Schaller's book is the Phillips book for the early 21st century - the South is, and will remain, the culture of gasoline. In fact, this will only accelerate as there is more drilling in the gulf, and the region's economy is more and more dependent on petroleum.
The reason Schaller points to the disintegration of the Republicans in the Northeast is that there is a clear demographic shift in the suburbs. For three decades the suburbs were the escape from the cities, and allied against cites with exubia. They've realized that they are part of the metro-economy. When Democrats take control of both houses of New Hampshire's legislature, the signs have got to be clear. The reason Shaller's vision for the potential for the Democrats in the mountain West, is that the culture of petroleum cuts against those areas, even areas like Wyoming which is a net oil producer, and states like California which has some of the largest oil fields in the US - because they are also home to energy intensive industries. What joins these two movements is a movement away from plunder and squander economy linked to borrow and squander political economy, as well as a social and civil libertarian impulse that is at odds with social conservatism. Economically progressive and socially progressive voters finding common cause to leave a party which is now about the military-outsourced industrial complex.
In short, while there is a glossy surface of mega-churches and Jeee-suuuhs, the underlying difference is one of the source of livelihood. That isn't going to change, even when the current religious revival atmosphere turns to irreligious revelry.
-:-
But the "God Argument", as Kilgore zeros in on, and Pastor Dan [4] notes is a brewing controversy beneath the Democratic Party and Progressive Movement - is going to come up again and again, because it is not really about "God" or "Christianity" but about a particular form of community organization, for which God is the territorial marker. Perceived attacks on that sense of identity. The recent elections showed a rejection of - something. That something is certainly associated with the authoritarian, unquestioning anti-intellectualism that is exemplified by the Southern wing of the Republican Party, and there is no question that the entire southern political system is somehow entangled with it.
Schaller's argument that is not that particulars of southern culture are the problem, but that the theocracy - the merging of particulars of culture with an overt attempt to enforce political power - is becoming toxic. The evidence for this is not seen merely in the South, but in places like Kansas, where moderate Republicans are fleeing the Party, even running as Democrats. It is theocracy that is the reek that comes up from the South, and even many evangelicals are beginning to reject it. The World has been a seen as a threat to purity and the soul for centuries, and politically, the flirtation with a "Republican Republic of Virtue" is souring in the mouths of people who are culturally devout and pious.
He is also arguing that the Southern economic model - of resource extraction and an unregulated building boom - is not serving the rest of the country well. After the housing bust takes full effect, and as people watch developments go up as their own home price goes down - this is going to be an easier and easier sell to make. And as that economic model cools so will its cultural cachet. [5]
But let's remember the original position of DLC and Southern Strategists - namely that the Democratic Party needed to nominate from the south, pander to the south and pour resources into the South. The centrality of the South is the backdrop against which Kilgore's argument is written - and how far from that assertion his piece is.
Thus, Kilgore's piece, despite the tone, shows that Tom Schaller is a standard bearer for the winning side - from "we must be a Southern Party" at the Presidential and policy level - to merely pleading to be part of the 50 state strategy party - of Howerd Dean - is a huge tectonic shift in position. No longer is the Democratic Party to be neo-Jeffersonian small government, but instead a national movement. This stabs into the heart of Southern politics, which has, since before the American Revolution, preached Southern exceptionalism. If Kilgore is willing to abandon that, then he is really abandoning almost 300 years of Southern political theory.
My roots are in the South, I am supporting a Southerner for President in 2008, but not because he is a Southerner, but because he is speaking to the need to heal the rift between "Two Americas". This call, for One America, is implicit in the 50 state strategy, which Tom Schaller supports. Schaller argues that a Democratic Party that doesn't need the South will do better in the south as a progressive party, because then they will not have to sell out core positions for marginal seats, but instead will be able to focus on winning elections which will advance and enhance the progressive movement.
One example is in the run off in Louisiana's Second Congressional District, where Karen Carter [6] is taking on "Cold Cash" Jefferson. A Democratic Party that must walk on eggs in the South could not afford to challenge any incumbent, however corrupt - but a Democratic Party that is secure as a progressive party can. Build a progressive party, and the south will come to it.