National Party No More

Zell Miller is a conservative Democrat, an heir to the Jeffersion tradition long since extinguish. In his book, “National Party No More” Miller lays out a past Democratic tradition rarely seen today. Miller writes, “If Thomas Jefferson … lived today, he would have a great lawsuit against the Democratic Party for consumer fraud…He would be appalled by the powerful hodgepodge of special interest groups that actually run the party he created, the party that now oppose tax cuts and strives for a more and bigger government. The Sage of Virginia dreamed of a nation stakeholders and citizen lawmakers.”

There was a time that the solid south voted straight Democratic and Georgia actually gave John F. Kennedy a higher percentage of votes in the 1960 election than Kennedy’s native Massachusetts. Today, the Democrats play second fiddle to the Republicans on a national level in the South, a section of the country that was exclusively theirs just a generation ago.

The cynic would argue that Republican gains came from white racist votes and the Civil Right Bill of 1964 made it easier for the GOP to make inroads into the Old South. With former white Democrats such as Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond joining the Republican Party, these charges would appear to have merit.

The South is more than mint juleps or NASCAR. Many of us north of Mason-Dixon line see the South as land in which the KKK still reign in the shadows. Miller tells of another South, a South that isn’t “rusting and rotting away like a places up North. Recent census statistics listing the fastest growing counties in the United States are from the South. Many of them are immigrants from the Blue States.” Many of these southern Republican voters are not the racists’ voters of the past but northern immigrants who have moved south. The Republican gains are not based on racism as some would like to believe but on economic freedom gained by moving South.

The states that make up the South would produce the world third largest economy and Zell Miller’s Georgia would be the World’s seventeen largest economy superseding even Saudi Arabia. A third of the Fortune 500 locate their headquarters and education has vastly improved among Southern children.

Miller makes a case for a resurgent of what was the Jeffersonian concept of individual liberties and freedom, in particular on the economic front. Miller observes, “Good government doesn’t mean big government Good government doesn’t mean a generous government. Good government means providing basic services efficiently. Good government means not just asking how to make a program more efficient, but asking what would happen if we got rid of the program entirely.”

Article Author: Tom Donelson

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