Why the Democrats Are Winning Back the South

[marmar]

via AlterNet:



Why the Democrats Are Winning Back the South

By Bob Moser, Texas Observer. Posted November 5, 2008.

The more Democrats focus on economic fairness in the South, the better their chance to shut down the right's culture wars.



Ed. Note: With the latest wave of Democratic House and Senate victories and Obama's wins in the South, this excerpt from Bob Moser's book gives vital background on the new climate in a formerly Republican stronghold.

This article is excerpted from the first chapter of Texas Observer editor Bob Moser's Blue Dixie: Awakening the South’s Democratic Majority (Times Books, 2008).


There is a party for Caesar, a party for Pompey, but no party for Rome."
-- TOM WATSON, Georgia populist & Democratic senator


The tale of how Republicans "won" the South, and why Democrats gave it up, has been ironed out into a quintessentially American fable of good and evil and reduced to its satisfying essence for retelling every four years, when Democratic strategists and media pundits begin their ritual debate about whether, and how, Democrats should try to reclaim a slice of Dixie with a Southern strategy of their own.

The legend goes like this: The Democratic Party became the unity party of white Southerners -- a political extension of the Confederate States of America -- after the Civil War. (True enough.) From Appomattox through the civil rights movement, the national Democratic Party was really two parties, with an enlightened Northern wing and a Southern wing wallowing in the muck of benighted traditionalism. (The exaggerations begin.) The "good Democrats" of the North swallowed hard and accommodated their Dixie cousins for the very practical reason that without their "solid South" vote in nearly every presidential contest, they would not have been contests. (Right.) Even Franklin D. Roosevelt put up with the racist demagogues of the Southern leadership, the Bilbos and Vardamans and Talmadges, because of political expediency. (Right again.) And even though white Southerners didn't have a liberal bone in their bodies, they kept making an X in the boxes next to Democratic presidential candidates' names. (Well …)

But "with a stroke of the pen," as the saying always goes, the first Southern president since Andrew Johnson, Texan Lyndon B. Johnson, intrepidly signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and brought a sudden and irrevocable end to the Democrats' solid South. Why, even LBJ himself said so; in a quote that has become an inextricable part of the fable, the president worried out loud to one of his aides, the future journalist Bill Moyers, that he had "delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come." .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/election08/106103/why_the_democrats_are_winning_back_the_south/