Bob Moser, a North Carolina native living in New York and discussing the changing political demographics in Texas, has written a proposed strategy by which the Democratic Party can regain political dominance in the Old Confederacy. This proposal, entitled Blue Dixie - Awakening The South's Democratic Majority, is about to be released by Henry Holt & Co. through their Times Books subsidiary.
Moser makes some pertinent observations regarding how the Democratic Party walked away from Southern voters. Curiously, Moser dismisses Lyndon Johnson's signing of the Voters Rights Act of 1965 as being the prime mover of Southern Democrats into the ranks of the GOP. Moser also dismisses racial animosity as a cause, yet the evidence of a racial problem pops up quite often in his expansive discourse on why the rest of the nation has the wrong impression of Southern voters.
Part of the problem between Southern voters and the rest of the nation is, according to Moser, leftover animosity from the Civil War and Reconstruction. This era of outright Republican national dominance led to the regional dominance of the Democrats in the South in response. Moser claims that both sides stiffened their resolve in the face of the other until the New Deal came along. It took Franklin Roosevelt to reclaim Southern loyalty for the Democratic Party through such vast efforts as the electrification of the Tennessee River Valley and other Depression-era projects which greatly improved the lives of the common people of the South.
One point Moser makes I disagree with strongly. Moser attempts to make the case that non-Southerners need to ease up on their hostility toward the South and just let Southerners be Southerners. Something about this stuck in my craw until I heard a country song at a baseball game last night which bragged about how "Southern folk will survive" because they "know how to live simple" and "can shoot straight" and "if you don't like it you can go [away]". Who here is displaying animosity toward others? I've heard little anti-Southern expression in pop music since Neil Young's Alabama, yet the Clear Channel Radio spectrum is full of anti-non-Southern country music.
Still, as Moser points out, nothing can be improved among the various regions of the nation if some kind of commonality isn't created. Dialogue can't be productive if it consists merely of Smothers Brothers-style bickering among the various factions. I hold that even the South is going to have to give a little in the name of common advancement.
Article comments
1 - Polemicscat
Strange that there is no mention of Conservative and Liberal in this. The South is conservative and has been since before the War Between the States. Strong central government has been a Northern thing since before Lincoln. Southern conservatives (disliking a powerful central government) were Democrats in opposition in Lincoln's war to create a strong central government. In the mid-twentieth century those Southern conservatives started becoming Republicans in the face of Northern Democrats becoming increasingly in favor of a powerful Federal government. There is no end in sight of the liberal Democrats' desire to micro-manage the lives of citizens. The Constitution forbids it but is ignored these days. (Read Ninth and Tenth Amendments). Southerners have wished to be left alone by government since a time before Lincoln shredded the Constitution.
2 - Polemicscat
Supplemental Reading for you: Why the North Needed War Northern Editorials (1861) Following the Secession of Southern States
The predicament in which both the Government and the commerce of the
country are placed, through the non-enforcement of our revenue laws,
is now thoroughly understood the world over.... If the manufacturer at Manchester [England] can send his goods into the Western States through New Orleans at less cost than through New York, he is a fool for not availing himself of his advantage... If the importations of the country are made through Southern ports, its exports will go through the same channel. The produce of the West, instead of coming to our own port by millions of tons, to be transported abroad by the
same ships through which we received our importations, will seek other routes and other outlets. With the lost of our foreign trade, what is to become of our public works, conducted at the cost of many hundred millions of dollars, to turn into our harbor the products of the interior? They share in the common ruin. So do our manufacturers... Once at New Orleans, goods may be distributed over the whole country duty-free. The process is perfectly simple... The commercial bearing of the question has acted upon the North... We now see clearly whither we are tending, and the policy we must adopt.
With us it is no longer an abstract question - one of Constitutional construction, or of the reserved or delegated powers of the State or Federal government, but of material existence and moral position both at home and abroad.... We were divided and confused till our
pockets were touched. - New York Times March 30, 1861
__________________________________________________
The Southern Confederacy will not employ our ships or buy our goods. What is our shipping without it? Literally nothing.... It is very clear that the South gains by this process, and we lose. No - we MUST NOT "let the South go."
----Union Democrat , Manchester, NH, February 19, 1861
__________________________________________________
That either revenue from duties must be collected in the ports of the rebel states or the ports must be closed to importations from abroad.... If neither of these things be done, our revenue laws are substantially repealed; the sources which supply our treasury will be dried up; we shall have no money to carry on the government; the nation will become bankrupt before the next crop of corn is ripe.... Allow rail road iron to be entered at Savannah with the low duty of ten per cent, which is all that the Southern Confederacy think of laying on imported goods, and not an ounce more would be imported at New York; the railroads would be supplied from the southern ports.
---New York Evening Post March 12, 1861, recorded in Northern Editorials on Secession, Howard C. Perkins, ed., 1965, pp. 598-599.
3 - Dr. J.M. Ashburn
The term "war between the states" is better known as The war of Southern Independence. The North (Federals) drew first blood and committed the horrible crime of invasion on a sovereign Nation, The Confederate States of America. To say otherwise is blind history reconstructed for the purpose of self appeasement.