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It\u2019s hard to ignore the irony. The wannabe Republican heirs of George W. Bush gather in New Orleans, the city Bush\u2019s callousness and ineptitude all but destroyed, to advance a movement best called the New Confederacy.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s hard to ignore the irony. The wannabe Republican heirs of George W. Bush gather in New Orleans, the city Bush\u2019s callousness and ineptitude all but destroyed, to advance a movement best called the New Confederacy.<\/p>\n
At the Southern Republican Leadership Conference here, Texas Gov. Rick Perry invoked his love for the Tenth Amendment<\/a>, the New Confederacy\u2019s code term for \u201cget the black man out of the White House.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n Sarah Palin was here. So was Newt Gingrich. Mentions of Hurricane Katrina were few and far between. \u201cWe are so over Katrina,\u201d 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 \u2013 despite Mitt Romney\u2019s one-vote win and Palin\u2019s third-place finish in the Southern Republican Leadership Conference \u2013 is now the GOP\u2019s dominant political force.<\/p>\n Republicans\u2019 coded racist appeals, beginning with Richard Nixon\u2019s infamous \u201csouthern strategy,\u201d weakened the Democratic Party in the South. In the wake of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, white voters fled the Democrats\u2019 Big Tent for the Republicans\u2019 Big Box, the wall-to-Walmart, magnolia-white land of confederate dreams.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n I can\u2019t decide now whether the Republicans have ineffectively cornered themselves\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n For those who\u2019d rather wish away the role of race in American elections, I think it\u2019s telling that Democrats\u2019 national victories since the \u201860s 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\u2019t know.<\/p>\n I do know this. Democrats, especially in the South, are often fairly paralyzed by their opponents\u2019 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n A part of this is Democrats\u2019 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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n In any case, it seems almost trite to say we have a moral imperative to take on the racists. As Blue Texas noted<\/a> at FireDogLake last week, a new study shows us that \u201cthere seem to be an awful lot of Teabaggers who have a serious issue with race.\u201d 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\u2019t wait to see.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n\n
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