The political power of Dixie has faded

December 15th, 2009 at 12:14pm Pat Cunningham

.

 

. 

   Peter Beinart has an INTERESTING TAKE on how the political clout of the South has declined in recent years.

.

   A few excerpts:

.

   Ironically…in the 1960s, when the Dixiecrats finally lost their struggle to preserve legalized racism, their power began to rise. Alienated from the Democratic Party over civil rights, the South began defecting to the Republicans, and under Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan became a key component of the GOP’s emerging political majority. By the 1980s, the political culture of the South substantially shaped the political culture of Washington, D.C. As taxation grew more regressive, the welfare state atrophied, government regulation of business diminished and labor unions faded into near-irrelevance, the federal government increasingly resembled the government of say, Alabama. And presidential campaigns came to resemble political campaigns in the South as well, as Dixie-born consultants like Lee Atwater insured that crime, welfare, busing and other racially polarizing issues took center stage…

.

   Southern power reached its apex in 2000 when not only did the Democrats nominate Gore, but the Republicans nominated Texas Governor George W. Bush. And when Bush won, Southern hegemony only grew. In the 1970s and 1980s, the GOP had still boasted strong northern voices, and its political base had been in the West, the region that produced Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. But by Bush’s presidency, northern Republicans were increasingly extinct, and the power balance within the party had shifted from the libertarian West to the moralistic South. Dixie had truly risen again.

.

   Then, in the second half of the aughts, everything changed. As President Bush grew less and less popular, the Republican Party became more and more radioactive outside the South. And as Democrats began seizing control of larger and larger swaths of the North and West, many began to realize that they didn’t need Dixie to win. In 2008, the Democrats held their national convention in Denver—a testament to their growing confidence that Hispanic immigration was giving them a foothold in the interior West. And in Barack Obama and Joseph Biden, they nominated their first presidential ticket in a quarter-century that didn’t include a Southerner. The Obama campaign didn’t entirely ignore the South, of course; it ended up winning Florida, Virginia and North Carolina. But it didn’t need those states to win.

.

   Southerners, unsurprisingly, are unhappy about the way things have been trending. A late October poll by Research 2000 found that Obama’s approval rating was only 27 percent in the old confederacy, less than half his approval rating nationwide. But as long as Obama maintains his support north of the Mason-Dixon Line, there’s not a lot Dixie can do. The secession thing, after all, has already been tried.

.

Entry Filed under: Southerners