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发帖数: 29846 | 1 Democrats lost the South through culture war and elitism
By Timothy P. Carney | December 9, 2014 | 6:00 pm
If not for Southern Democrats, Republicans would have nearly had a
filibuster-proof Senate supermajority after the 2002 elections, giving
George W. Bush some real clout. Without Southern senators, Democrats wouldn
’t have taken over the Senate with Jim Jeffords’ party switch in 2001. If
not for Southern Democrats, Obamacare wouldn’t have become law.
For the foreseeable future, though, Democrats will have make do without
Southern senators.
With Mary Landrieu’s gigantic loss on Saturday, following Hagan’s surprise
loss and Pryor’s thumping, the Southern Democratic senator is officially
extinct. In the House, there are no White Democrats from the South.
Why did it happen?
In short: Democrats waged a culture war against the South, trying to force
Southerners to stop “clinging” to their guns and to God. When you try to
make it illegal for people to conduct their own affairs according to their
conscience, you tend to lose their votes.
The self-soothing story the Left tells itself is that it’s all racism, that
Democrats have lost the Southern vote because they’re not as willing to be
racist as the Republicans are. Liberal columnist Michael Tomasky cheered
the Democrats' loss of the South, which he lovingly called “one big nuclear
waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment.”
Any full accounting of Southern politics has to involve race and racism, but
it isn’t a top reason for the realignment.
Tomasky and other liberals may not have heard of Sen. Tim Scott, the first
black Southerner elected to the U.S. Senate since reconstruction. South
Carolina not only elected Scott to the Senate in a special election this
fall, it gave him 757,000 votes — 85,000 more votes than his South Carolina
colleague Lindsey Graham received the same day.
South Carolina’s voters re-elected their Republican Governor, Nikki Haley,
nee Nimrata Nikki Randhawa. The state that defeated Mary Landrieu has had an
Indian-American governor since the 2007 elections.
White racism can’t explain the GOP takeover of the South.
The best explanation comes from the mouth of President Obama himself.
Speaking to San Francisco donors in 2008 about white voters in the Midwest,
Obama lucidly expressed his low opinion of all non-rich voters in flyover
country: “they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion.”
Naturally, Democrats and the Left have tried to pry Southerners away from
their guns and religion. Gun control has largely been a culture war effort
for Democrats. “Some of the southern areas have cultures that we have to
overcome,” was Congressman Charles Rangel’s explanation for why gun
control was both needed and difficult.
The Washington Post’s Gene Weingarten cursed the Second Amendment as "the
refuge of bumpkins and yeehaws who like to think they are protecting their
homes against imagined swarthy marauders desperate to steal their flea-
bitten sofas from their rotting front porches."
Obama and his party waged this culture-war crusade with glee — and failed,
but not before making it clear that they disapproved of the way Southerners
live.
And the Democrats have made it clear that they are willing to use government
to impose their morality on others. Through the courts, the Left has banned
prayers at high school football games and forced states to remove the Ten
Commandments from public grounds.
The Obama administration, through its birth-control mandate that includes
abortifacient drugs, has told Christian employers that they can’t run their
businesses as Christians.
There’s no mystery here, and no need to assign widespread racism to why
Southerners have rejected Democrats. It’s simple: Democrats and the Left
have tried to outlaw Southerners’ way of life.
Here’s a related factor in the realignment: Democrats have given up on
being the populist party, and — as they have increasingly won over the
wealthy suburbs and the college-educated — have embraced their status as
the party of the economic elite.
As crony capitalism and corporate welfare have grown, and as the Washington
region has sucked in more and more of the nation’s wealth, Republicans have
started to take up the populist mantle.
Alabama’s Jeff Sessions, whose populism flares up in many ways, joined
Louisiana’s David Vitter in co-sponsoring a bill to break up the big banks.
Sens. Landrieu, Hagan and Pryor all campaigned unsuccessfully on their
support for the Export-Import Bank (a federal agency that subsidizes U.S.
manufacturers and the banks that finance them).
Democrats have become the party of Hyde Park and Chevy Chase — elitist on
culture and economics. It’s no wonder they cant also be the party of
Charleston and Shreveport.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner's senior political columnist, can
be contacted at [email protected]
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His column appears Sunday
and Wednesday on washingtonexaminer.com. |
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