While everyone in Left Blogistan is going through all sorts of gyrations to avoid electoral giddiness, let me tell you a different story.
In the ancient base of hatred, that base still holds. (That’s the current Georgia flag to the left.)
I am speaking here of the Deep South, the swath of states across the Southeast that gave the Confederacy its last full measure of devotion. The states where the Klan first rose, where it rose again after the Leo Frank lynching. Jim Crow’s hometown.
We like to pretend things changed a lot with the coming of the Sunbelt. Well, some things did. The old Democratic set-up of overt racism and no power sharing was replaced by something more akin to the 1870s, with Republican carpet-baggers (Newt Gingrich is from Pennsylvania) giving a few black satraps bits of power while they controlled the pursestrings and used that power just like in Randy Newman’s 1974 classic song, Rednecks:
We’re rednecks, we’re rednecks
We don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground
We’re rednecks, we’re rednecks
We’re keeping the niggers down
This part of the Republican base still holds firm, and I’ve had the honor of covering it this year for Voic.Us. Want to take a tour? Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy trip.
- In Georgia, where I live, Democratic Congressmen are still running away from their party. (Until a few years ago, that mess below was our state flag.)
- In Alabama, Democrats tried to keep out a gay candidate after she won the primary. They nearly succeeded.
- In South Carolina, far-right Republicans are gleefully purging their ranks of so-called RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) yet they are still favored.
- In Mississippi, closet racist Trent Lott has drawn token opposition, from a black professional candidate.
- In Florida, Republican candidates are still trying to hang onto Gov. Jeb Bush’s coattails, and succeeding when they do.
Along the margins of this core, there are signs of hope. North Carolina may produce some Democratic Congresscritters. Tennessee politics looks competitive — at least the Democrats there are Democrats. Arkansas and Louisiana both have Democratic Senators. Virginia may yet get one.
All these states are now dominated, politically, by their exurbs — far-off suburbs where rich whites can move into exclusive, often gated communities, and control most of the state’s capital from afar. It’s a hopelessly corrupt, almost plantation-like situation, in which corporate lobbyists are shaken-down for money and white liberals (as well as blacks) are kept to their own ghettos.
Worse, the black political leadership in these states seems satisfied with the crumbs they get off master’s table. People like Joe Reed in Alabama, Erik Fleming in Mississippi, and Herman Cain in Georgia take what they get, mastery of their own little domains, and self-righteously attack anyone uppity enough to complain. Generally, they keep their mouths shut when it comes to the bigger picture all around them.
History continues to move forward of course. Florida is sinking into the ocean. The exurbs can’t sustain $5/gallon gas. The urban core in such cities as Atlanta is beginning to expand outward, urban pioneers surrounded by suburban ghettos, which is slowly changing some political equations.
But change comes slow. God, guns, and gays still works in Dixie. Black churches respond eagerly to gay-bashing, and congregants obey their preachers. They accept the guns as part of the cost of getting along. They know it could be worse. Their social conservatism makes it worse.
Yet I call this region home, and plan on continuing to do so. There are many great people here, many great places — Atlanta, Asheville, Athens, Birmingham, Decatur, Oxford — places where you can feel comfortable. Such places did not exist a century ago.
The place I hold closest to my heart, Decatur, Georgia, was in the youth of its most famous son, Roy Blount Jr., still part of the Old South, the overtly racist South. (Roy never knew until much later how hard his own father had fought that.)
But I know, living here, that progress doesn’t come all at once, and that it is a two steps forward, one step back sort of deal.
