Monday, November 17, 2003

The New Civil War Today, writing in the LA Times, Ron Brownstein said “Evangelical white Southerners, the modern core of the GOP in Dixie, preferred Bush by 71% to 18%.”   His article goes on to show how hard it is becoming for democrats to hold on to Southern congressional seats.   The affront that many of us feel with George Bush is a cultural affront:  He magnifies the Southern ideas that have never been strongly accepted in the rest of the U.S.  These ideas support religion, racism, and corporate and authoritarian control.    Many of us on the East and West coasts tend to dismiss the South, as an anti-intellectual bastion of racism, jingoism, and rabid evangelicalism.   So Democrats are at a cross roads.   If Howard Dean is the nominee, with his intellectualism, tolerance for gays, and anti-religious rationalism, he represents the Yankee stereotype to Southerners as much as they represent bigoted stereotypes to us.   What can we do in this situation?    First, this will not turn around overnight.  It means that the 2004 election will have to be won by democrats with Florida, but none of the other Southern states.  That will be a hard job, but it cannot be done by pandering to Southerners.   Despite the correctness of Dean’s desire to appeal across economic class, it will take far more education than can be done in a single campaign season to begin to make a new alliance of blacks and economically depressed southern whites that can reverse the Republican gains in the South.   So perhaps our strategy should be to go right at them:  to attack the ideas that are out of step with liberal democracy.  Brownstein says Bush lost 71% of the electoral votes outside the South in 2000.  We need to increase that number to 80%, and we can win.   Then we need to expand the democratic franchise again so that the right to vote truly extends to all people.  In states like Virginia, Florida, and some others, the denial of the right of felons to vote is swaying the elections, disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of African American voters.  Combined with a draconian war on drugs, the effect is of a new Jim Crow, as inimical to democracy as a poll tax, a literacy test, or just plain denial of suffrage.   Secondly, we need to expand the number of people voting in the rest of the country.  These are people who do not want to be ruled by evangelical pesticide salesmen like Tom Delay, and as they realize how much of their freedom is being compromised by the evangelical authoritarians, they can be persuaded that politics do matter to their personal well being.   This is also what is behind the Dean campaign.   So we are at a cross roads, and the outcome is by no means certain.  Will we see democracy crumble under the assault of authoritarianism and evangelicalism from the least liberal part of the U.S.  Or can we persuade enough voters in the rest of the country that a reversal of the gains made in the civil war, the women’s rights movement, and the civil rights movement is truly a threat to each and every one of us.     That is what is at stake in this election, and I want a real fighter, not a compromiser who tries to be all things to all people. 12:25:36 PM   comment []

© Copyright 2003 Toby Sackton. Last update: 12/15/2003; 9:28:16 PM.