House of Paine

dlc southern comfort

 "lets make one thing perfectly clear ...."

well no lets not

lets create a  complete muddle 

and call it progress 
towards the historic  truth 


==================


 myth exploded???


"THE EROSION of the Democratic Party's 
hold on the South 
is one of the most important changes 
in postwar American politics"

indeedy 


" In 1950, only a handful of congressional districts 
in the region even featured Republican candidates
 on the ballot
 Today, the GOP holds the majority 
of House seats below the Mason-Dixon"


 
 the story of how the Democrats
 lost the South 
is also one of the least examined
partly because so many people seem 
to agree on what caused it.
 For most, it boils down to one word:
 race."



"But a new book 
by a pair of political scientists
 aims to stand that conventional wisdom
 on its head" 

"The End of Southern Exceptionalism" 
 by Richard Johnston and Byron Shafer 

--------- have not the book
and was stymied on their scholarly papers
 by that nasty 
 digital library 
 porter and cap and balls  snob 

jestor !!!!!!

so i can only rattle and rustle these journalistic scraps
its less then having 
 lucy's left lower jaw 
        -----------------

the thesis:

" it was economics,
 not race,
 that upended the Southern apple cart"

" As the South boomed 
and Sunbelt cities added millions of suburban residents
 its burgeoning middle classes 
naturally tilted to the Republicans'
 fiscal conservatism, 
which promised tax cuts 
and smaller government programs"

------so ole dixie 
became sunbelt east 
ie 
    orange county cal like ----------

''The engine of partisan change
 in the postwar South
 was, first and foremost, 
economic development 
and an associated politics 
of social class," 

 ''The impact of legal desegregation 
and an associated politics 
of racial identity 
had to be understood through 
its interaction with economic development." 





"if Johnston and Shafer are right, 
it's also an argument 
that could have major implications 
for how the Democrats view
 their chances in the region
the country's fastest-growing
and how they shape 
their strategy nationwide"


 ----this amazes me isn't it pure DLC  
ie the new south new dem strategy -------

''Sooner or later,"
 the political scientist
 V.O. Key wrote in 
''Southern Politics in State and Nation" (1949)
 ''the trail of inquiry leads to the Negro."

 
 But what Key could not have foreseen 
was how soon, and how rapidly,
 that would all change.

 
''Everybody forgets that the South,
 in the immediate postwar period
 is the third world.
 Over 40 percent of the South 
is in subsistence agriculture," Johnston sez

-------- subsistence ag ????
 poli sci idiot 
the fuckers were far from that 
hell the last  bunch
 doin anything like  subsisting 
round those parts  
 were  the  pre columbian cherokee --

 ''Not only is the country going to boom 
in the postwar years 
but the South is going to catch up"

------ tell the folks in mississippi arkansas and alabama
they done ....caught up -------



".... And the impact of that 
on its politics causes the South
 to finally give up 
the old Southern party system 
and join the nation."

---- okay i'll drop the dukes here

yes t'is kinda true 
round atlanta houston charlotte 
orlando  nashville etc etc 
things got to be ---with a lag -----
like  uncle walt's  orange county california  ------

 the study's data base :


"to test the conventional wisdom "

they reviewed

" the hundreds of House elections 
that had occurred 
since the end of World War II"


"What they found was startling: 
White voters who lived 
in predominantly white areas, 
who held moderate political views,
 and who exhibited
 no pronounced racial antagonism,
 were in fact more likely 
to vote Republican 
than lower-income whites 
in predominantly black areas
 who had at times 
bolted the Democratic Party 
to support segregationist demagogues
 like Strom Thurmond and George Wallace"


"the shift was not about race, but class:
 The white middle class went right,
 while the white working class
 for the most part, stayed left,
 regardless of racial views"



--- ie the dirt balls still had old style 
dixie dems to vote for in their districts

till they got weeded out ------

''What you see is a movement
 in the class divide first," 
 ''The critical point 
is that well-off Southerners 
who were not particularly 
one way or the other on race questions 
recognized correctly that the Republican Party 
was simply the more conservative party 
on economic questions."

------but note this delta tail here 
sports fans instead of revin up the wallace voters
to stay donkey
the dlc strategy included indentity politics 
enougfh to say
red necks and their panderers not wanted ----

 

"it was not until the 1990s, 
when other social issues
-particularly religion 
and the culture wars-
began to become significant political factors 
that the region's lower-income 
white voters turned to the GOP as well"

----one addition here
  nam vet  bashers
      was a demo label
the dlc struggled too late and too foolishly 
to shed  -----------

------there's yer new made up story
the dixie white boys were part 
of a national blue collar revulsion 
against all things  hip and culturally prog--------

-----so what about the johnson back lash...???-----



-----and what about---------------- 


 " the decades of subtle 
and not-so-subtle efforts
 by Republican presidential tickets 
to court white racism
Barry Goldwater's anti-Civil Rights Act
 stumping in 1964,
.... Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign kickoff 
in Philadelphia, Miss.,
 site of the ''Mississippi Burning" murders"


------ the answer ---------


"numbers don't lie:
 For all the drama of the civil rights era,
 when it came to the ballot box
 Southern whites voted with their wallets"


------ but when did a dlc plank 
ever come to  mean money for wallace ites 

the promised
workin familly tax cut
 was the first clinton axe victim in 93 ---------

 "while the overtly segregationist campaigns 
of Thurmond in 1948, Goldwater in 1964,
 and Wallace in 1968
 made impressive showings
 among Southern voters
 in retrospect they stand out more
 as aberrations than ''bridges" 
to a new race-based GOP voting bloc-"

------ right the bridges of the repubs 
were built after the dems forced the white wagery our
by stinkin up the party
with indentity goo goo politics
that didn't take money out of richy riches wallet 
and put it in a workin mans pay check ------------


"  many of the middle-class Democrats 
who crossed party lines for Eisenhower
 had rejected Thurmond four years earlier"

----- the orange county effect ---------

" And when Nixon tried to capture
 Goldwater voters 
in the 1970 midterm elections
 by openly supporting 
anti-civil rights candidates
 he lost much of the white middle class
 who instead elected
 such moderate Democrats
 as Georgia's Jimmy Carter
 Florida's Reubin Askew
 and Arkansas' Dale Bumpers
 The Southern middle class
 preferred the GOP's fiscal conservatism
 but not its racial demagoguery"

----- now thats interesting
 if true 
its exactly where and why
 the dlc nonsense 
about a progressive american majority
got brewed up ---- --------

------ so its obvious

the wider dixie middle 
like most vulgar 
 nouveau riche 
self made  babbit man types
voted for the party
that would out peckerwood 
the dlc 
" i earned  mine
 you earn yours "
"uncle  rip down 
yer fuckin 
 tax and hand out  system"
in that department how else 
could the DLC  seem
but a  very pale copy 
       of 
the   repub  bruisers -----  


" If economics had more to do 
with the realignment than race
 then Democrats lost the South 
for the same reasons 
they have had a hard time 
breaking into the suburban middle class
 around the country-namely
 a failure to win consistent majorities 
of white middle-class voters"

------notice no talk of 
a possible
un- DLC attack
to recapture the wallace boys
  by hard left lunch pail populist 
                   chatter ---------


"when Democrats lost the white middle class
 they lost the South"


--------  true in those areas 
where 
 the new south 
made  a sun belt morph
 and a sun belt middle klass
 grew up there 
spontaneously 
  and before
 the industrial  south
itself  started
 to clobbered by globalization 

theres much more to say

but 
heres my  quick and dirty points


one

the white south wagery vote 
may indeed only be  recently (the election of 94)
  definitively lost
and at that
 only  until 
the  deadly dlc strategy 
that produced this class disaster 
  is  put into  big sleep mode 

 two  

if dixie is just orange county 
with a twenty year time lag

and if a dlc strategy 
accounts for some 
of that demo cal revival 

as in
notice todays orange county
      its doin a  demo tilt 
nope 
its no longer  
the goldwater ghetto
 it was in 64 
well ....

the contradictions abound

this is for sure

both classes  in all regions
 both wagery  and middle  types
       are constantly fluxing
                  into different  shapes 

and  thus like the rest of us 
 
    " the  south shall morph again" -----------