Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 26 of
This Week's Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since
March, 1997. It would be the issue of July 2.
Enjoy.
It is very seldom that national parties collapse. The most recent such event I can recall is the collapse of the Progressive Conservative Party in Canada, which ceased to exist as a national force in 1993. A successor party finally came to power last year.
Usually, failed national parties go through a long period of reform and come back wearing new clothes. This is what Labour did under Tony Blair. It's what the nation's Conservatives are now trying to do under David Cameron.
But can that happen when the party in question finds itself isolated to a regional base, more important to an ethnic base? That's what is happening to the Republican Party, which is devolving into something like Canada's Parti Quebecois, only based in the old Southern Confederacy. (To the right, that party's favorite for the Presidency.)
In the Midwest, farmers are abandoning Republicanism. The Mountain West is suddenly friendly toward Democrats. The Midwest sees Republicans on the run in most every state. The party is nearly extinct in the Northeast. On the West Coast, only Alaska remains GOP country, and that party may soon be speaking from inside a jail cell. Republicans who succeed outside the Confederacy (like Arnold Schwarzenegger) do so only by leaning into the prevailing Democratic thesis, accepting its premises and seeking moderation.
But in the old Confederacy, and especially in the Deep South, where I live, the Republican Party is advancing across a broad front. In Georgia's 10th CD, for instance, Democrats didn't even make the run-off. Mississippi is now seen as a model for Republican governance, a model Louisiana seems anxious to emulate. In Florida and Tennessee, the Republican Party is strong, in South Carolina and Texas it's dominant, and everywhere else in the South it is competitive.
Outside the old Confederacy, this is just not the case. And one can argue that some of the party's dominance in the South is attributable to Washington largesse, largesse you can expect to be pulled by a future Democratic government.
This is the bargain Nixon made. This is the final nail in the coffin of the Nixon Thesis. And there's a reason for it.
Race.
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