Y’All Come Back Now

Posted in ARTS to American Life by Jean Forst on Wednesday, December 10, 2008 at 1:00 pm

Like most Americans, I was taught that in passing the National Voting Rights Act of 1965, LBJ betrayed the South, and this region then folded itself, seemingly for good, into the arms of the GOP. So be it, was the Democrats’ response. Such, to their way of thinking, was the cross to bear for finally standing up to racist hicks.

Yet, I could never quite reconcile this image of the racist South to my experience in the North, having grown up as I did in the “white flight” suburbs of Chicago, and knowing what I knew about Chicago’s history.

It is good, then, that a new book compellingly muddles this showdown between good and evil. Bob Moser — a native of North Carolina and political correspondent for The Nation — offers a fascinating study of the South: Blue Dixie: Awakening the South’s Democratic Majority (Times Books, August 2008). Here, he complicates the image of southern racism, and argues that only a strategy of economic populism can turn Dixie blue again.

Moser contends that seeing the South as unchangeably red is the contemporary Democratic Party’s most destructive myth. If such an argument seems a bit inflated, the facts support it. “The White House had never been occupied by a Democrat who failed to win at least five Southern states,” Moser reminds us.

No doubt the book is uneven and, at times, works at cross-purposes. Moser wants dearly to upset the idea that the South’s complicated history on race is somehow more racist than the rest of the country’s. We cheer his shaming of Northern condescension towards the South — their “Dixiephobia,” as he terms it. References to Howard Zinn’s idea of the “Southern Mystique,” H.L. Mencken’s account of the 1925 Scopes trial and the work of Southern historical revisionist C. Vann Woodward are brought together in Moser’s discussion of the inflated Treasury of Virtue that allows the North to feel superior. He offers numerous examples of voting trends that contradict the idea of a fundamentalist, inherently racist voting bloc.

Yet what emerges as a big reason why Moser believes that the Democrats can win over the South isn’t that white southerners aren’t racist. Rather, it’s because the South isn’t, well, the Old South anymore, and the New South is even newer. His chapter on immigration reveals how intensely Hispanic immigrants have shifted the demographics away from a white majority. Moser also points out that, in contrast to its history, the South’s population is becoming markedly urban.

Of course, Moser asserts, the Democrats haven’t just misunderstood the population of the South. One of the Democratic Party’s most damaging recent mistakes, Moser argues, was to take to advice of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), founded in 1985, and become the “Republican Lite” party. By this, Moser means, that the DLC “cooked up a bizarre, defensive recipe for winning back white Middle Americans with a pro-corporate, small-government agenda.” This foolhardy attempt to woo Dixie by moving to the center proved profoundly unsuccessful, as it left little for disgruntled Republicans to ingest that was markedly different from what the GOP was serving up. Moser insists that the Democratic Party must return to its roots and distinguish itself from the Republicans by addressing economic inequities.

Yet at times, Moser overstates his case for economic populism. He’s wrong to think that joining whites and Hispanics in economic solidarity will magically dispel anti-illegal immigration sentiment — white hostility over changing populations is as much a cultural response as an economic one, and it must be addressed on both fronts.

Still, he offers convincing evidence that this strategy can indeed win south of the Mason-Dixon line. For example, while Moser admits that “countrifying” Mark Warner (by surrounding him with bluegrass bands and his buddies in the gun rights group “Sportsmen for Warner”) helped inoculate him against being dismissed as an effete liberal, it was Warner’s “tremendously appealing economic message,” Moser writes — a message at one with economic populism — that propelled the technocrat into the governor’s mansion in Virginia.

Of course, there have been victories. “[A] near-solid South — all but Virginia,” Moser reminds us, lifted Carter into the White House in 1976. Moser highlights Barack Obama’s successes in the South, and praises Howard Dean’s fifty-state strategy for re-energizing the southern presence of the Democratic Party. He urges Democrats to continue on this track. It is clear that a region with, as Moser points out, the country’s lowest median income, highest poverty rate, and highest percentage of people without health insurance can indeed be courted — not with roses, but with bread and butter. So, c’mon, Democrats, get to it, you hear?