Should the Democrats Give Up on the South?
Michael Tomasky, the liberal journalist, says the Party should “dump Dixie” and concentrate its electoral efforts on other parts of the country. “Practically the whole region,” Tomasky writes, “has rejected nearly everything that’s good about this country and has become just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment…. Forget about it. Forget about the whole fetid place. Write it off. Let the GOP have it and run it and turn it into Free-Market Jesus Paradise.”
.. During the hundred years after the Civil War, the Democrats’ monopolistic grip on the region was at least partly based on its tacit, and in some places explicit, support for a racist power structure. Once the Party’s Southern hierarchy, in the personage of Lyndon Johnson and his supporters on Capitol Hill, endorsed the civil-rights movement, its fortunes suffered—just as L.B.J. predicted. Today, however, almost all Democrats would regard any effort to repudiate the Party’s post-L.B.J. history, or even to tweak it in a direction more amenable to reactionary Southerners, as morally abhorrent. As Tomasky puts it, “Trying to win Southern seats is not worth the ideological cost for Democrats.”
.. He quotes Steve Cohen, a Democratic congressman from Memphis, as saying “a lot of white Southerners vote on gays and guns and God, and we’re not going to ever be too good on gays and guns and God.”