The New Republic’s Clay Risen, a native Tennessean, had a great piece this week about a recent trip to Alabama. Risen details his perspective as a “southern expatriate” and notes that the region used to have important liberal leaders whose voices in the South once mattered. They are, alas, literally a dying breed.
But with an eye on partisan politics in the future, however, Risen also notes that the right-wing grip on the region may get even worse in the future. (Yes, that’s possible.)
White Southern liberals still exist, but they are too rarely a viable political or social presence, particularly in the Deep South of Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and rural Georgia. Back home in Nashville, I had lunch with one such rarity. David Carlton is a history professor at Vanderbilt University (and a Presbyterian church elder) who grew up in a South Carolina mill town before escaping north to Amherst. But he was drawn back, both by his intellectual pursuits and his regionalist pinings. Over sandwiches and coffee, he foretold of dark times. “I don’t believe the political realignment of the region is complete yet,” he said. “What appears to be an increasingly toxic blend of traditional conservatism and ‘Christian’ moralism continues to gain strength.”
I heard Carlton’s pessimism repeated in conversations throughout my trip. The fear is not simply that Republicans will continue to control the vast majority of the region’s political offices; conservatism, as it is conventionally understood, tends not to draw the same ire from Southern liberals as it does nationally. Rather, it’s that things like the Alabama amendment vote or the recent flap over anti-evolution disclaimers affixed to Cobb County, Georgia, textbooks show the powerful grip that religiously charged, anti-enlightenment conservatism has on the region, and that, without the moderating voice that the region’s liberals once presented, these forces will eventually roll back even the modest social gains made during the heyday of Southern liberalism.
I think this is absolutely right, except for the one addendum I like to add to every discussion of the South: not all states south of the Mason-Dixon line are created equal.
The LA Times Ron Brownstein has turned his fascination with the Republican “lock” on the South into a cottage industry for himself. Most recently, he noted that there are 1,154 white-majority counties in the South. Eight years ago, Clinton won a little under half of them (510); Kerry won only 90 of them this year (or about 8%).
Some Southern states are, as Risen and Brownstein would no doubt agree, as out of reach to Dem presidential candidates as New England is to Republican candidates. No matter whom we nominated or what the national condition may have been, Dems weren’t going to compete, for example, in Mississippi or Alabama. Risen’s observation that these states could become even more right-wing in the coming years seems more than reasonable as predictions go.
On the other hand, there are two observations I’d point out that offer hope for the future of the South. One, Dems’ vulnerability in national races hasn’t necessarily destroyed the party’s down-ballot prospects. Bush may have crushed Kerry in Louisiana, for example, but Dems still control most of the state government there. Bush didn’t have much trouble winning North Carolina’s 15 electoral votes, but Dems, on the same day, won the governor’s race easily and now have majorities in both the state House and state Senate. If the party were really “dead” in the South, this wouldn’t happen.
And two, some of the South seems to be getting better for Dems, not worse. As Noam Scheiber recently noted, Fairfax County, Virginia, is one of the region’s biggest counties. (I have a special fondness for the county because I used to live there.) No Democratic presidential candidate had won Fairfax since 1964 — until John Kerry won it this year. Likewise, Mecklenberg County, North Carolina, also saw the first victory in a generation for a Dem presidential candidate.
What do these counties have in common? Well, they’re home to educated, affluent white moderates. The key to the Emerging Democratic Majority thesis is that counties like these will continue to grow and have a stronger influence in electoral politics than rural, conservative districts. Counties like Fairfax are moving in the right direction through a coalition of moderate whites and African Americans who embrace the Dem agenda. It helped Virginia elect a Dem governor and put the state in play for Kerry for part of 2004.
Could the South get worse? Sure, but there are hints that some of the region’s biggest states may be more competitive for Dems in the coming years, not less.