rollertrain

A Shorty History of the Southern Conservative Universe

theimmoderate: (wordy, but so worth the read.)

I am not a fan of the Democratic party. Unions, Nadar-New Age leftists, urban Northeast political machines all get under my skin. The Democrats take in as much soft money and troll K Street for lobby love as much as the Republicans. The true Left is as prone to be as self-righteous as the true Right. Both lack the quality of introspection, both see themselves as martyrs to the cause.

I did not so much vote for Obama as I voted against the conservative movement of the Republican party. Here is my reason why in a short history of the conservative movement.

1.    1787. The newly minted United States of America drafts a new constitution, a remarkable piece of political engineering designed to prevent a single dominating authority over the state. Northern and Southern framers expediently agree to disagree over the question of slavery and table the issue for a future generation to resolve.

2.    After decades of band-aid patches and compromises on the issue of slavery, a coalition of Southern slave states declare independence from the Union. To me personally, their argument for independence was consistent with the logic of the Constitution. Their membership in the federation of states should not have been coerced. The American Civil War was not fought to end slavery, but it did end that ‘peculiar institution’. The South had identified with the looser federation envisaged by the Jeffersonian Democrats for a number of decades. Lincoln and the Republican party were the progressive strong federalists of their day, like the Democrats of more modern times.

3.    The Southern whites intensely resented the North for the Reconstruction, the indignity of occupation by Federal troops, and the elevation of slaves to freedmen citizens. The presidential election of 1876 between Republican Rutherford Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden was one of the closest in American history. Hayes had 185 electoral votes to Tilden’s 184. Tilden in fact won the popular vote by almost 3 million votes. Hayes brokered a secret deal with the Southern Democrats to acquiesce in his favor in exchange for the removal of Federal troops from Southern states, effectively ending Republican political control over the South. Within another 12 years, Southern Democrats had nullified the black vote with Jim Crow statutory barriers to voting, meant to circumvent the 15th Amendment (1870) which prohibited the denial of voting rights based on race.

4.    The South was resolutely Democratic for the next 60 years. Fast forward to 1948. Truman begins tearing down the Jim Crow laws and desegregating the military and public school. Southern Democrats, increasingly uncomfortable with the Northern Democratic party’s embrace of the immigrant vote in the industrial states and a philosophical shift to the progressive left under FDR, began their first exodus from the party. Their Moses was Strom Thurmond, US Senator from South Carolina, who announced his candidacy for the newly created ‘States Rights’ Democratic Party. Strom took South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana on the electoral map and garnered over a million votes.

5.    By 1964, the Southern Democrats were increasingly restless and disheartened with the direction of their national party, so much so that George Wallace, a segregationist Democratic presidential contender won 10% of the primary vote and scored well outside the traditional South, including Indiana, Maryland, and Wisconsin. A bitter delegate dispute between the civil rights and segregationist wings of the Democratic party over how the Mississippi convention delegates would be counted furthered pushed out the conservatives. Barry Goldwater, the Republican libertarian-conservative Presidential candidate, was whooped in the general election; 486 electoral votes for LBJ, 52 for Goldwater, including his home state Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, but it was the first glimmer of recognition to Southern conservatives that the Republican party, the Satan of their grandfathers, might be their Zion promised land after decades in the political wilderness.

6.    1968 flipped everything over. It was the breaking of the dam of the Democratic hegemony that had dominated national politics for nearly a hundred years. The South broke out en masse for George Wallace, now running under the American Independent Party banner (Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia) or went Republican with Nixon (Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina) Vietnam, anti-war violent activism, the rise of the ‘hippie’ Left all galvanized the Southern conservatives to break the last bond of tradition holding them to the Democratic party.

7.    1972 was a monumental landslide for Nixon, who worked to lock in Southern conservatives by reducing federal efforts to implement LBJ’s Civil Rights package. In 1976, Reagan picked up the groundwork laid down by Nixon and Goldwater in moving conservative voters to the Republican banner. His genius was to connect with the ‘Big defense, Small government’ sentiment of the southern conservatives to the national-security and big business wings of the Republican party. The Republican party started appropriating the evangelical language of the southern conservatives. As the Democrats went Left, the Republicans were happy to take in the social conservatives. Reagan blew the 1976 Republican nomination when he tried to appeal to moderates by announcing he would choose a liberal Pennsylvania Senator as his running mate; moderates were unimpressed and conservatives felt betrayed, and the nod went to Ford, who lost to Carter. The victory of Carter, and later of Clinton, shows that a charismatic centrist Democrat can woo back social conservatives - but only to a degree and only under times of national downturn.

8.    Reagan pulled the southern conservatives close to him in the 1980 election, courting the leaders of the evangelical movement, giving his very first post-convention speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi - a small Southern hamlet noted for only one other event in its history - the brutal slaying of three civil rights workers by the local klan and sheriff’s department just 16 years prior, preaching the theology of state’s rights, which is just political code for pro-Crow statutes. This was the advent of the Moral Majority, where pulpits became political rallies, and being a good Christian was tied to being a good Republican. And there you have the history of the migration of the conservative movement to from the Democrats to the Republicans. In another time, in another article, I will talk about the timeline of the conservative coup d’etat of the Republican party.

The most important fact to understand about the conservative movement is that while they are running the conservative party currently, they do not own it. Think of them as hijacking the cockpit… The basic truth of the social conservative movement over the last 60 years is that they never forgave the Democrats for ensuring African-Americans the right to vote. When you hear war cries for ‘states’ rights’ and ‘small government’, those are the ideological echoes of the defeated South, coerced to remain in a union against its will. Bush intensely disappointed the conservatives with his insincere support of overturning Roe v. Wade. If he had been able to stack the Supreme Court to overturn that one decision, he would have soldered their allegiance for a generation to the Republican platform. The absurd growth of the federal government and budget deficit have also cut away at conservative support for the Republican party. The conservative movement is not leaving the Republican party this election round, but you are seeing the beginnings of the moorings being drawn taut. The conservative movement is not the Republican party. Think of them as something living inside a host body…

The ascension of John McCain was problematic for conservatives. They were compelled to support the candidate though they considered him a false-Republican, remembering that in 2004 he briefly flirted running as Democrat John Kerry’s running mate. They were repulsed by him in ultra-conservative South Carolina in 2000 and held his candidacy at arm’s length though he spent the next eight years carrying George W. Bush’s towel in an effort to be the anointed heir apparent. McCain’s strategy made provident sense in 2003, when George W. Bush was bathed in 89% approval ratings in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, but little sense five years later when the insurgency has collapsed our pathway out of Iraq with a clear, indisputable victory. McCain, more the enfant terrible of the Republican party than its cool maverick, was less tolerated when news broke that he was courting the notion of inviting Democrat-Independent Joe Lieberman to his ticket. They sent a clear message to McCain that they would stay home en masse on November 4th if a McCain-Lieberman ticket was on the ballot. McCain capitulated and swung right, pulling in Sarah Palin, a charismatic, evangelical conservative who speaks fluent ‘states’ rights’. Conservatives have little qualms now voting for a 72 year-old who has had multiple bouts of cancer. They love his backup. Unfortunately, the Republican vote machine only works when the center of the party and moderate-right Independents are solidly for the candidate, and the conservatives play the checkmate vote. Palin doesn’t play as well with the center and Independents and they are shifting away from the ticket. The defection of many of the party thinking class and illuminaries in the last several weeks shows the strain of this fault line.

If McCain loses in a week, it will be a critical time in the marriage of the Republican party and conservative movement. Basically it all depends on the division of assets and who gets to keep the house. There will be a temporary separation as each side flings burning balls of blame at the other for their loss, especially if Congress and the White House are lost to the Democrats. If the center-rights and Independents feel comfortable enough with the Obama policies to remain intellectually pliant (if not directly support them) then the conservative movement will pull up stakes and wander again in the wilderness, the Diaspora to be occasionally being fired up by another Wallace-type demagogue, while they wait for another Reagan-Messiah to come down a forge a new alliance between conservatives and some other marginalized but emergent faction - OR - the conservatives will go Khmer ‘Rouge’ and ideologically cleanse the party of the non-believers, reducing its national electoral reach, but giving it an energized, militant cadre to go dominate state politics, and perhaps come at restructuring the federal system by way of hacking the Constitution through a quorum of Red-dominated states. But as long as the conservatives are the warrior caste of the Republican party, its long term demographic prospects weaken. Within the next 30 years, Hispanics will become the numerical majority. When Hispanics find a serious political home and lock in, that party will carry the strategic advantage in mid-21st century national elections. The conservatives, with their militant disgust of illegal immigration, are posing the same dilemma to the Republicans now that they did to the Democrats in 1948 - if you champion this minority, you will lose us.

I voted against all this.