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The South
THE SOUTH....For many years, the Democratic Party controlled the agenda of American politics and Southerners controlled much of the Democratic Party. So the South had enormous political influence.
Later, most Southerners switched to the Republican Party, but by then it was Republicans who controlled the agenda of American politics. So the South still had enormous political influence.
As of January 20th, however, the Democratic Party will control the American political agenda once again. But Southerners are still Republicans, which means that their political influence will be nearly nonexistent.
In other words, for the first time since Reconstruction, the South will be almost completely shut out of national power. There are still a few liberal Southerners who belong to the Democratic Party, of course, but the reactionary, traditionalist South is, for the time being, nearly powerless. They will not control anything, their caucus is a discredited rump, and their influence will be negligible. There is no reason to fear them or to care what they think. Their power to filibuster, itself guttering and only barely alive following the 2008 election, will be all they have left.
This is the first time this will be true in well over a century. So say it again: The South will have essentially no influence over the course of American politics for the next eight years. We live in momentous times.
More interesting, still, is that the last time the South had control of politics and then lost it was around 1861. Before then, the south had at least half of the votes in the Senate...
This time, they gave up power without a war. The question is whether the north (and this time, the west) will impose a modern day reconstruction.
Actually, the South doesn't even have the power to filibuster: of the remaining Republican Senators, two are from Maine, one is from Pennsylvania, and one is from Ohio -- and they're all far, far to the left of the average Southern Republican.
There won't be any filibusters unless the New England and Midwestern Republicans want them. The South has no ability to sustain a filibuster by itself.
The only remaining leverage for the South's politicians is that the South leads the Republican caucus and so controls committee assignments. But since the legislation is being written by Democrats, that's not much leverage any more, even over the New England and Midwestern Republican Senators.
Southern democrats were also empowered by a former rule that required a two-thirds majority to choose a presidential nominee.
I don't like the disproportionate influence that the southern states formerly had, but I am uneasy at the suggestion of this post, which is that all that has changed is the right of another section or sections to exert its will upon the rest irrespective of their desires. Rather than reveling in the defeat of an ancient, apparently contemptable foe, perhaps the better thing is to consider whether pursuing so much through the exertion of the universal instrument of national power is right.
Thank fuck for that.
I'm so tired of Presidents that have to sound like they just came from the set of Deliverance. At last, we have one who sounds like what he is - a college educated non-southern guy.
"The South Will Rise Again."
But not anytime soon, politically.
perhaps the better thing is to consider whether pursuing so much through the exertion of the universal instrument of national power is right.
Hmm, I never recall the southern pols who held so much power for my entire adult life being the least bit shy about exercising all the authority they possibly could. It's a little late to suddenly come around to appreciating the beauty of restraint in the hands of power.
I do wonder what will happen in southern political culture as their powerlessness dawns on them in the coming months/years. They seceded once; will they be tempted to do it again? Or will we just see a few replays of the Oklahoma City bombing?
That is an interesting point indeed. Maybe that explains why Limbaugh, DeLay, and their cohorts are throwing such fits. It will be nice to have some forward looking policies instead of all those backward looking - conservative ideals. Ideals that are just wishful thinking and revisionary sugar coating of what they wished it was like.
Damn, well, it's time to secede again.
I expect the South to have relatively little influence during the next couple of years, but eight years seems a bit of a stretch--if the Democrats don't mess up, it could easily be eight years, but there are a lot of Senate and House elections between now and then, and as I recall Obama might need to face the voters sometime in there too.
All the more reason for the Dems to move quickly and decisively on anything they want to get done.
You overstate more than a little. While the South has been politically dominant for a very long time, it hasn't been since reconstruction. In fact, from the end of the war until 1932 the South never had real political dominance, as it was a Republican era and the South was entirely Democratic, with the possible exception of the early Wilson administration. However, once the Democrats took over in 1932, the South has been dominant ever since. It will indeed be a welcome change.
Does anyone really think that the Southerners will be ignored or marginalized by policy makers or the press? One thing that has been proved many times over is that changing the conventional wisdom is like turning an ocean liner. The (modern) radical Republicans will have to be out of power a long time before the establishment notices.
No disrespect for 'older' people in general and especially the ones reading blogs. --
Does it really matter whether Republicans / Conservatives / Southerns did (or did not) hold power during the entire period covered since the reconstruction?
I mean... How many people online actually lived through AND remember the politics before the 1930's? I think the vast majority of people online remember the failed policies of the Bush administration, some will remember what the Republicans did during the Clinton years, and a few will remember the Nixon era... Yes the vast majority of that was done by Southerners and was awful governance at best.
Let's not nit-pic and agree that it is about time that those Southern Conservatives have to sit on the sidelines.
jjb writes:
"However, once the Democrats took over in 1932, the South has been dominant ever since. It will indeed be a welcome change. "
Seriously? The South was politically dominant when congress passed the Voting Rights Act? Sure, I'll grant that the South has had an outsize influence on the course of partisan politics because its realignment after 1964 was so stark, but this kind of overstatement is ridiculous.
Regions like Rust Belt and highland south, which are rich in swing states, have been very politically influential, and Bill Clinton is a Southerner, but this loses sight of the fact that the Southern political establishment lost the biggest political fight of the last 50 years, civil rights. We're lucky it did, of course, but this kind of commentary is neither accurate nor helpful.
I suspect political powerlessness will be but one more grudge to nurse. I was rather amazed (shocked) when I saw the polls that Brad DeLong posts on white voters. In Mississippi and Alamba 88% of the white vote was for McCain, outside of the old confederacy (including Oklahoma and Kansas), Obama won a majority of the white vote. I can only conclude, that the losers of the civil war, still have not accepted that they did in fact lose.
Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida were important parts of the Obama electorate, and last I checked they were still part of the South. It's mainly the Ozarks that have been bypassed.
Responding to jjb re: 1932.
You should know better than to forget the 1874 Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives and the subsequent abandonment of Reconstruction policy in the South (with the near exception of the 1890 Lodge "force" bill). The South may not have controlled national politics from 1874 to 1932, but the North made its peace on white supremacist grounds, effectively ceding the national racial narrative to the South.
So Kevin is right in the end...
This is a completely different era now. The South and its dominant value system does not control, or even temper, the national political system.
Uh, Kevin, that would be the *white* South.
Granted they make up the majority of the region's votes, but it's a distinction that's pretty important.
White southern influence was really disproportionate in several different periods off and on starting, some say, in 1787. From about 1877 or 1890 to about 1936 they were Democrats but didn't matter much policy-wise.
But FDR's northern base shrank about then and the Dems fell into a pattern of depending on holding white southern voters to keep control of the HR until 1994 and had to kowtow to them, much like the Israelis have had to kowtow to the tiny religious parties.
jjz is right that they lost on civil rights, but the act of 1964 depended, if I remember right, on a lot of northeastern and midwestern Republican votes. Southern Democratic senators filibustered it and blocked it until cloture was revised down from 2/3 to 3/5 (why 60 is the crucial number now rather than 67).
The Southern Strategy was of course all about Republicanizing the white South and it worked for nearly 40 years. Howard Dean and Obama have been brilliant in stepping outside that box and seeing that the Great Lakes, Plains, and suburbanizing VA would more than offset the Republican white South and get past that stranglehold on policy.
I agree with Kevin on the overall point: if the Dems can hold on to most of what Obama won this time, the white South won't have much influence-- it'll be back to 1865.
I'm a Yankee. I want it to be that way. What the white South believes in happens to be completely wrong as a national policy basis and impossible to govern by. It can only be a minority creed anyway, so everybody will be better off if it actually is a minority.
Zeke,
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (and the Voting Rights Act of 1965) was indeed a defeat for the South. But it was so exceptional that it, more than anything else, forced white Southerners to abandon the Democratic Party (even though many Northern Republicans backed it). So, maybe for a brief interlude between 1957 (first Civil Rights Act) and 1968 (Wallace takes the Deep South and Nixon takes the Upper South) the white South actually lost control of national politics.
This post is overly simplistic. Many of the greatest advances in civil rights and social programs (Great Society/War on Poverty) took place under LBJ.
For me, the question is what happened to Texas? Texas was a fairly liberal state until recently. We once had a people like Ralph Yarborough in the Senate and a governor named Ann Richards (with Jim Mattox and Jim Hightower as AG and Ag Commissioner, respectively).
Was it the awakening of the Christian Right or redistricting that marginalized minority votes? I'm not sure. But with the demographic changes taking place, I believe the biggest state from the confederacy will soon be voting Democratic again, leaving only the Deep South as a bastion of right wing reactionary religious backwardness.
Kevin forgets the Blue Dogs and Obama's new friends Jim Cooper and Sam Nunn. You will hear much kvetching that certain policies go to far and the party is being too liberal from southern Dems who rely on white votes.
"Southerners are still Republicans" - Not all of us goddammnit.
People need to stop confusing (white) southern politicians with "southerners". the former is a subset of the latter, not the other way around. And even white southern politicians includes LBJ, who muscled the 1964 civil rights act through congress.
I'm happy to have super-smart, highly educated president who ariculates his thoughts in a compelling way, wherever he's form.
oh, and "form" is the new "teh."
Say it Kevin, you know you want to. I shouted it election night c'mon let it out...
The last time I looked, there's a fair number of moderate and liberal white southerners. The may not be the majority but they have helped considerably with Democratic wins in Virginia, North Carolina and Florida. They have also forced conservatives to work hard to win in other southern states which makes it harder for southern conservatives to spread their influence elsewhere. Times are a'changin.
"The South will have essentially no influence over the course of American politics for the next eight years."
Famous last fucking words
The last two Democratic presidents were southern governors. The incoming president is a northern senator from our westernmost state. It does appear that a Democrat can win without feigning a drawl.
And has anyone noticed that said president elect is black? That is a stake through the heart of the Confederacy.
Kevin,
One thing you fail to mention is that VA & NC went to the Democrats. This change is the result of the great influx of migrants and immigrants to the major urban areas of Charlotte and the Triangle Area (NC) and Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads (VA). Moreover, this is more than an aberration - at least in VA. Virginia has elected two successive Democratic Gubernatorial administrations and both US Senators are Dems. In the Hampton Roads region of Southeastern Virginia, a military community much like San Diego in your native So. California, we now have two Democrats and two republicans in the House. This may not seem a big deal but for a long time we wouldn't have had any Democrat if it weren't for a federally drawn majority-minority district.
This ain't your Grandmother's South.
In other words, for the first time since Reconstruction, the South will be almost completely shut out of national power.
I'm with JJB, for one. The South was pretty much shut out 1860-1932. Yeah, they occasionally managed to grab power, but not in an enduring way. Otherwise waving the bloody flag would have done the Republicans of that era no good.
Elrod: The South may not have controlled national politics from 1874 to 1932, but the North made its peace on white supremacist grounds, effectively ceding the national racial narrative to the South.
But not the economic or foreign policy agenda. The R's in that period were the party of peace and depression and the D's were the party of war and inflation. (See Woodrow Wilson.) Now the R's have returned to their (Dixiecrat!) roots and become the party of war and bubbles. So the D's have to become the party of peace and inflation.
Altoid: jjz is right that they lost on civil rights, but the act of 1964 depended, if I remember right, on a lot of northeastern and midwestern Republican votes.
Da. That's why the really strong provisions of the Civil Rights act applied only to the Gulf states. (Which is bad, and should be corrected.)
Elrod: So, maybe for a brief interlude between 1957 (first Civil Rights Act) and 1968 (Wallace takes the Deep South and Nixon takes the Upper South) the white South actually lost control of national politics.
Yes! Which gave us the backlash. And during the 1860-1932, the South only had brief interludes of controlling national politics.
DevilDog: Was it the awakening of the Christian Right or redistricting that marginalized minority votes? I'm not sure. But with the demographic changes taking place, I believe the biggest state from the confederacy will soon be voting Democratic again, leaving only the Deep South as a bastion of right wing reactionary religious backwardness.
Redistricting, and the movement of conservative Yankees (that is, people from Ohio that voted Republican) into Texas. Currently being counter-balanced by the movement of hispanics into the state.
You will hear much kvetching that certain policies go to far and the party is being too liberal from southern Dems who rely on white votes.
There's the challange for Obama: swapping blue dogs for western ones.
Altoid: I'm a Yankee. I want it to be that way.
I'm a Texan, but I'm from the borderlands, so I am far more western, Indian and midwestern than the neo-confederates. And in 1952, I would've been a liberal Republican (that is, supporting blacks in the South), I am pretty sure. Not any more, since that breed is extinct.
So, yes to getting rid of the neos of any flavor.
max
['Let's keep it that way.']
Whatever will become of us as a nation, if we aren't being guided by the firm hand of our no-nonsense, salt-of-the-earth, down home, common sense loving, bible toting, values voting, non-elitist Southern cousins, with their excellent record of moral certitude, patriotism, and loyalty both to the Union and the ideals for which it stands.
We're doomed, I tell you, doomed. Men will be ditching their wives for husbands, wives will be ditching their husbands for wives; religion will be made illegal, only to be brought back again when the Muslims conquer an America made effete by the lack of meaningful input from the rock-ribbed, no-nonsense South; guns will be outlawed, funding for the military eliminated: we'll become a nation of burqa-clad, lesbian communist women, and prancing fairy commie men, praying to allah, asking the UN for permission before we bomb our own churches (the ones that haven't been converted to mosques), and then the Mexicans will swarm over the borders and really screw things up.
agree with jjb, as far as it goes. But it is also important to recall the 36 year cycle of US politics. Power has shifted decisively every 36 years since 1788, with two exceptions (1828 rather than 1824 and 2008 instead of 2004; which usually makes the change even more decisve for being late) think of 1860, 1896, 1932, 1968. South very important before 1860 (the change with Jackson was more from coast to inland South) and reduced 1860-1896, small 1896-1932 (Ohio and NY dominating), part of but not dominating, except in HoR, the FDR coalition 1932-1968, very improtant 1968-2008 as part of teh Nixon coalition (longer lasting than the FDR coalitioon but less mentioned) and now perhaps gone, or at least split.
Here I thought that Obama was a uniter! So the South has been disenfranchised when Obama became President-I thought they still had a few Senators and Congressmen. Kev-I really want a President that represents all of the Country, THAT would be momentous! This idea of we got our "Guy" in now has got to stop! We are the UNITED STATES of America and the President is not the head of a turf war!
While we decided that the South can't secede, has anybody given any thought to kicking a few of those states out of the union?
For the next 8 years? Don't you mean 4???
Let's focus on the first Obama administration.
The oil companies have had much of their influence come from Southern politics and politicians. This may mark a shift in our ability to do something real about global warming.
As several posters above have mentioned, it's the power of the South as a bloc that is upset by 2008, not the total influence of the region, which is growing and hence remains enormously powerful. In fact, the "solid south" has been in constant transition ever since the Dixiecrats broke with Harry Truman in 1948. A region that produced Jimmy Carter, Andrew Young, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, John Edwards, and other centrist types has been exceedingly diverse in ideology anyway, even if at times a solid bloc of Republicans or Democrats exerted a whip over the bloc vote in some ways.
Ah, yes--again with the hillbilly bashing. Unfortunately, you people know nothing about southern Republicanism. You think southern Republicans are a bunch of trailer-trash, and that insofar as the region is getting redeemed, it's by an influx of enlightened outsiders into places like Northern Virginia. In fact, it was outsiders who *created* the modern southern Republican Party--middle-class migrants swarming to the South in search of business opportunity who saw a political opening as southern Democrats found themselves losing control of the post-FDR Democratic Party. Indeed, until the 1980s Republicans still suffered from a "country-club" stigma in the eyes of many non-elite white southerners. Contrary to widespread myth, white southerners didn't automatically move to the GOP after the passage of the Voting Rights Act; indeed, it took over a quarter of a century for the GOP to gain dominance in the region. Even now, the Republican bastions are the suburbs.
Another thing--you'd never know from this sort of commentary that between the Civil War and World War II the South was by far the poorest part of the country; the regional per capita income was half that of the nation. FDR welcomed southerners into his coalition, not just because he had to, but because he recognized that helping the region was integral to what the Democratic Party was supposed to be about. Now, though, we have a party increasingly dominated by supercilious yuppies who look down on the poor [What do you think hillbilly bashing is?]. You want your party to look like you, or at least what you fancy yourself to be--urban, well-educated, in well-paying jobs. And, now that you've "won," you want to imitate Sarah Palin and start carving the country up into "good" and "bad" regions, with the "bad" regions being places like Appalachia where the poor live. Not a good move; it wasn't for her, and it isn't for you. If the Democrats are to be a responsible governing party, they need to be serious about the fifty-state strategy and lay off the regional rancor. Just ask the Republicans; what you've just gained can be lost in a single four-year cycle, and all this triumphalism can turn out to be stupidity.
The South isn't going to secede again. You're wasting your time if you think that. We have no independent source of $$$$, and we're too dependent on the federal teat, especially now that our real estate markets have collapsed. Property speculation, tourism, and the occasional auto assembly plant is basically all we have. Yeah, we've got some oil and gas in the Gulf Coast, but those are federal leases that the feds aren't going to turn loose anytime soon.
What will happen is political accommodation. The smart states will shut their traps for a while so they can continue to keep the feedbag strapped on. The stupid states will continue their slide into poverty until someone wises up and figures the game out.
The good news in all this is that Obama will hopefully continue to govern w/o drama, thereby undercutting the constant rationalization of "keeping the darkies down" that most white southerners of means do to assuage their fears and feed their remaining fantasies of noblesse.
And please, let's stop bashing the South. I'll take the rural areas of Alabama and Tennessee any day over the grinding poverty, meanness, and bleakness of rural Indiana or Ohio. At least we still say please and thank you, even if we really wish you'd go away.
mg:
Snark aside, which of the many things you describe do you think will not actually come true. Where you see paranoid fantasy, others see imminent reality. Perhaps you are too clever to think you are wrong.
This post doesn't seem particularly politic. It also deserves a little more research and some sort of chart.
I am glad to see Missouri lose it's bellwether status (and Maine before that). The crushing political dominance of Iowa and New Hampshire will hopefully be next.
For those who want to play bellwether next just remember the name comes from a castrated domestic sheep with a big ass bell around it's neck.
The votes required for cloture went from 2/3 to 3/5 of the Senate in 1975, not 1964 as stated by Altoid above.
See
http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/Filibuster_C...
The Southern viewpoint will still dominate AM radio and cable news, so it is not going away by any means.
Aren't you supposed to be fleeing in terror from the flames, Kevin?
Conservatives already consider themselves to be an oppressed minority group because of their beliefs and culture. That's what conservative talk radio hosts play to.
For at least the next two elections that is going to be a truly major theme.
Obama's election is going to continue to take the steam out of the White Supremacist elements of that culture. The worsening economy is going to take the steam out of the economic message of the Southern-based conservatives. Demographics are opposed to the White Man's party, as the percentage of White Americans declines. Spreading the conservative message as it is out from the South is going to be almost impossible.
The frustration conservatives feel is going to be multiplied many-fold. The Southern conservatives already have the tradition of the Confederacy in which they believe they should have won the Civil War and won't even now admit its loss. Traditions like that morph into something else similar; They don't disappear.
Conservatives are going down as a national political power, but they are not going to go quietly. The resistance will be centered in the South, which is used to and proud of fighting losing causes.
Thomas Jefferson effectively destroyed the Federalists after his election in 1800, but individual Federalists were still active half a generation later. The institutions of modern political parties are a great deal more durable now, so the Republican Party will not be destroyed. My bet is that it will be taken over by some other movement, perhaps even disaffected Democrats who think the party is going to wrong direction.
But Kevin is quite right that the center of resistance to a modern America is going to be the South.
Faulkner said, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." Which leads me to this here cotton-pckin' map, posted today:
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2008/11/15/
Sorry, David in Nashville, but I'm not "hillbilly bashing." I know full well that Republican strength has been based in the new 'burbs. I lived it in Baton Rouge for years.
Here's why I don't think the official white Republicans have a governing ideology: it's all about getting someone else to pay for your own economic mobility, as in fact happened there.
Those middle-class Yankee transplants, together with aspiring new-economy locals, fed and benefited from huge infusions of federal money and from plant relocations to union-unfriendly states from the late 50s on. Like SoCal with its federally-funded aircraft and defense industry after WWII. Federal funding has ironically been a great incubator of Republican votes.
Going back further, the post-Civil War South as a region was looted by outside resource extraction (and in the case of oil and gas by indigenous extractors). It was desperately poor until the interstate highway system, essentially.
Add to that pattern of depending on outside investment for growth a historic pattern of keeping taxes down-- to the point of tax phobia-- that goes back to plantation days and has persisted as a major cultural value.
That gave us W. He stands for a political and economic culture that wants its insiders to live large on somebody else's credit card. He's incapable of thinking about everybody's role in a whole economy but only about the kind of people he knows, and he can't begin to understand the production side of an economy in part because it's never been part of southern economic thinking. You can go back to Hinton W. Helper in 1855 on that one.
That's why I say that the white southern ideology that's had so much influence in our national political economy is not a viable governing point of view. It's a Ferengi point of view. It's all about grabbing more pie by diverting pies from somewhere else and thinking that pies are made magically.
I'm saying nothing about individual southerners of any background and I know there are plenty of liberals and plenty of poor people who have been ground into the mud and dust. I don't exult-- for God's sake, Gingrich was a Yankee transplant elected by the Atlanta suburbs, wasn't he?
I'm talking only about the way of thinking of southern political leadership, which is still institutionally dominant outside of VA, NC, and parts of FL. They're the people who deserve to be exiled from influence.
It is so important for the Dems and their allies to get and maintain congressional supermajorities. The threat of the filibuster by Bob Dole was enough to get the ball rolling to destroy Universal Healthcare. Region isn't as important as ideology. The problem with the South was always a reactionary mindset, not Dems or GOP. The South is changing due to changes in that mindset, a more educated and informed electorate, and shifting demographics. In the end we will win. We just have to live so long...
Altoid, the votes required for cloture moved from 2/3 to 3/5 of the Senate in 1974, not 1964 as you write above.
http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/Filibuster_C...
Wishful thinking.
Altoid, the votes required for cloture moved from 2/3 to 3/5 of the Senate in 1974, not 1964 as you write above.
The site is holding my comment due to my link to the US Senate webpage, so just google if you need a citation.
Max
What you wrote fascinated me, but especially:
DevilDog: Was it the awakening of the Christian Right or redistricting that marginalized minority votes? I'm not sure. But with the demographic changes taking place, I believe the biggest state from the confederacy will soon be voting Democratic again, leaving only the Deep South as a bastion of right wing reactionary religious backwardness.
Redistricting, and the movement of conservative Yankees (that is, people from Ohio that voted Republican) into Texas. Currently being counter-balanced by the movement of hispanics into the state.
I think you are correct about the influx of northern Republicans. They came in with George H.W. Bush and after as the jobs dried up in the rust belt, and created a viable Republican Party. Until the 60's, Texas was controlled politically by conservative Democrats, with an occasional liberal Democrat popping up.
But the expansion of evangelist Christians into politics followed that. Paige Patterson and some Houston Judge (Paul Pressler?) started a movement of conservative Southern Baptists who split that denomination. In the 80's the Christian Coalition was highly active politically, and by the 90's the evangelistic churches acting politically had used the Texas caucus system that allowed a small disciplined organization to take control of a Texas political party to gain control of the Republicans. It was that religious control of the Republicans that led to the 1994 election where George W. Bush defeated the popular Ann Richards, and the Republicans have held all the statewide political offices ever since.
During the period from the 50's to the present, Texas was also shifting from a largely agricultural rural state to an urban one. That and the increase in the Latino population is (I think) why the county-by-county map of Texas after 11/4 showed a red state with Blue cities (Austin, Dallas, San Antonio and Beaumont) and a blue swath along the southern border.
A key factor that holds the Texas Republicans and the Texas evangelists together (I think) it their agreement on White Supremacy - which differs from Racism. That White Supremacy is at the base of the anti-immigrant movement, and it is the reason why the Republicans have lost the Latino vote in spite of the fact that Latino's find a lot about conservative ideology attractive.
As the Latino population of Texas increases as a percentage I think Texas will become more Democratic, but the Democrats here will be more economically conservative than the national party. As that happens the Republican Party will decline.
As the state becomes more urban, it will become more open to diversity. It had better. Over a third of current Texans were born outside the U.S., to include a number of Asian.
Those two factors - increased Latino population and greater urbanization - will sharply reduce the political power of White Supremacist views here.
I read somewhere that the national Democratic Party may focus on taking control of Texas in 2012. That'll be a change. The state has been a source of funds to use elsewhere for as long as I can remember.
I didn't mean to write all this, but as I wrote one paragraph I realized what it led to, so I just kept writing. It's a question I've wondered about for quite a while, and this isn't all of it by a long shot. I could be very wrong, but of course I doubt that I am.
Two things additional. One, I think there is a difference between Racism and White Supremacy. White Supremacy is milder and includes White race supremacy over all other cultures as well as races. It's also more widely spread in the U.S. than just Racism. That's going to be important politically.
Two. The difference between conservatism and reactionary beliefs is important. Bob Dole was, in my opinion, a conservative, but not a reactionary. Most of the Southern (and California San Diego area like Daryl Issa - is that the military influence there?) Republican politicians who have survived the last two elections are reactionary extremists.