Edward Sebesta has been up and running with his Anti-Neo-Confederate blog for several weeks now. He's very good at analyzing how this particular strain of rightwing radicalism is seeping into the mainstream. In this fairly lengthy post, Neo-Confederate Opposition to the Voting Rights Act Extension 06/24/06, he goes into some detail about the ways in which a supposedly respectable defender of the Republicans' latest attempt to reinstate massive voter discrimination based on race uses arguments that are standard for the neo-Confederate/white supremacist crowd:
Instead the Voting Rights Act is argued as a personal attack, a slander on the residents of the South, "our states", specifically white Southerners, who are the "us" implied in the "our" of "our states." Butler makes a point of comparing "our state officials," Southern state officials to officials of "New Jersey and Pennsylvania." Butler is making this into a North versus South comparison, and attempts to make it an issue of insult to Southerners, an appeal to Southern nationalism. The Voting Rights Act is made to be an insult to national honor. Southern nationalism is Confederate nationalism renamed, with these States' civil religion being the Confederacy, with the Confederate flags and the Confederate state holidays and other observations to honor the Confederacy, this nationalism is Confederate nationalism.
The second quote, about "the people most responsible for electing him," reveals the bargain of the Southern strategy of the Republican party and makes a claim on it, the South votes for the Republican party and in return the Voting Rights Act is to have its strongest provisions cut out and out of the South. If it reminds you of 1876 and the abandonment of African American civil rights by the Federal government then, it should.
The [neo-Confederate] Southern Partisan has long lead a campaign against civil rights legislation with these two themes, "South is being treated unfairly" and that the Republican party would be nothing without the South, so the Republican party owes the South, in particular owes the South the reduction of Civil Rights legislation. The difference is primarily that Butler says "our states" instead of "the South." (my emphasis)
Thomas Schaller addresses Democratic strategy in the South in Cat Scratch Fever: My run-in with Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, the Democrats' Dixie huckster American Prospect Online 06/21/06.
He talks about a fact that is under-appreciated by many, which is that in several Southern states the partisan split is very much a racial split, as well.:
For Democrats, racialized voting in the South is frustratingly punitive. Depending on the cycle and the office, southern whites vote between 60 and 80 percent Republican, while blacks vote anywhere between 75 percent and 95 percent Democratic. Hold aside Florida and Louisiana, and in general the blacker the southern state, the wider George W. Bush’s margins were during the past two presidential elections.
Consider Mississippi, the state with the highest share of African Americans. According to exit polls, 90 percent of black Mississippians voted for John Kerry in 2004, and they were 34 percent of the statewide electorate. T he Census Bureau estimates blacks were 37 percent of all 2004 voters in the state, but whether the 90 percent performance is multiplied by the lower or higher estimate, Democrats effectively started the 50-yard dash to a statewide electoral majority at somewhere between the 25-yard line and the 30-yard line, yet still finished second - by a wide margin, no less. Meanwhile, the top three statewide elected officials in Mississippi are Governor Haley Barbour and Senators Trent Lott and Thad Cochran, none of whom might be described as liberal Republicans. Today’s white southerners, particularly in the Deep South, vote Republican with a vengeance. (my emphasis)
For some reason unknown to me, Thad Chochran tends to get a significantly higher percentage of the African-American vote in Mississippi than Trent Lott does. But so far as I can see, Cochran is pretty much as bad as Lott on the issues. Cochran was even one of the few Senators who voted against the McCain-Levin anti-torture bill; Lott voted for it.
Schaller does an analysis of partisan voting patterns in Viriginia, and suggests based onthat, that Democrats should concentrate on winning swing voters in the growing suburban parts of the Southn and not on trying to out-"Bubba" the Republicans with what he calls a "rural strategy". And he thinks that the more effective national strategy for a Democratic Presidential candidate would be based on a model that assumes:
... winning outside the rural areas and then taking a record of smart, progressive policies to rural voters for their inspection - which ratifies the strategy of Democrats first building a non-southern majority, governing confidently and successfully, and then appealing to the South, the nation’s most rural, poor, and conservative region. This approach is essentially how Bill Clinton, the first Democratic president since the Civil War to win a higher share of the vote outside the South than inside, won and governed.
Schaller focuses on national (i.e., Presidential) politics, so he doesn't address the role of Southern Democrats in Congress in this brief article.
But this article made me focus on a couple of issues. One is that the common red-state/blue-state viewpoint really can be misleading, because for all the Republican strength in the South, this is not a Republican version of the old Democratic "solid South" that we have now. Republicans are stronger in statewide elections in Mississippi, for instance. But of the state's four Congressional Representatives, two are Republicans (Bennie Thompson and Gene Taylor) and two are Democrats (Roger Wicker and Charles Pickering).
The other is that the Democrats need to find a way to address the racial divide in politics more directly. And not by kissing up to neo-Confederates or trying to out-Jim-Crow the Republicans. The neosegregationist strategies the Republicans are using to disenfranchise black voters, like racially-discriminatory voter-roll purges, could be very useful issues in that regard.
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