It’s hard to ignore the irony. The wannabe Republican heirs of George W. Bush gather in New Orleans, the city Bush’s callousness and ineptitude all but destroyed, to advance a movement best called the New Confederacy.
At the Southern Republican Leadership Conference here, Texas Gov. Rick Perry invoked his love for the Tenth Amendment, the New Confederacy’s code term for “get the black man out of the White House.”
Touting his states’ rights bona fides, [Perry] said, “I believe in the 10th Amendment with all my heart. Basically what is says is that the federal government was created to be an agent of the states, not the other way around.
Sarah Palin was here. So was Newt Gingrich. Mentions of Hurricane Katrina were few and far between. “We are so over Katrina,” said a New Orleans GOP activist. But the full collapse of the moral levees that once held back a tide of hatred and prejudice was evident. The New Confederacy – despite Mitt Romney’s one-vote win and Palin’s third-place finish in the Southern Republican Leadership Conference – is now the GOP’s dominant political force.
Republicans’ coded racist appeals, beginning with Richard Nixon’s infamous “southern strategy,” weakened the Democratic Party in the South. In the wake of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, white voters fled the Democrats’ Big Tent for the Republicans’ Big Box, the wall-to-Walmart, magnolia-white land of confederate dreams.
I can’t decide now whether the Republicans have ineffectively cornered themselves in the South (and in a few simpatico states outside Dixie), or whether they are building a viable new movement, based in the former slave states, but with enough national appeal to reverse the outcome of the Civil War, to impose hierarchical, racist attitudes on the rest of the country.
For those who’d rather wish away the role of race in American elections, I think it’s telling that Democrats’ national victories since the ‘60s have been by two Southerners and one African-American. Talk of racial transcendentalism surrounded all three of them. How long can we keep theoretically transcending racism? I don’t know.
I do know this. Democrats, especially in the South, are often fairly paralyzed by their opponents’ racist appeals to voters. Faced with a violent storm of prejudice, they can be as inept as Bush was when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans.
In my own Texas, Democrats tried to hang on to rural and suburban white voters by dodging and ducking the issue. Any talk of race might alienate more whites, they figured, so they were forever trying to change the subject to something more genteel and fit for polite company.
A part of this is Democrats’ vexing habit of trying to fit themselves to the current mood of voters rather than set out to change the mood of voters. Republican consultants are far more ideological than Democratic consultants. When they get their polls back, they look at where the voters are, but only so they know what they have to do to move them. Democrats’ more, uh, politically flexible consultants mistake the map for the territory. It is an odd thing that the party of change is, tactically, the party of conformity.
In any case, it seems almost trite to say we have a moral imperative to take on the racists. As Blue Texas noted at FireDogLake last week, a new study shows us that “there seem to be an awful lot of Teabaggers who have a serious issue with race.” Right now, false gentility and wishful thinking are fogging up or moral lenses. A New Confederacy is being built. Maybe it will collapse under the weight of its own moral depravity. We shouldn’t wait to see.
We don’t even have to look forward to see it. The strategy of ignoring or side-stepping the racist appeals of Republicans has failed Democrats for nearly half a century. Why they would continue to think it will work is, well, simply stupid.
