Essentials

I am from the South, and I can hardly stand living in the North or the West for very long. So, when I bitch about rednecks, racists, crackers, and the KKK, I want it known right off the bat that I love the South and most southerners. There are backward, covert racist idiots in huge numbers in the North, enough to make Malcolm X say that he preferred the Southern racist because at least he let you know he was against you. However, I don’t like bigotry much, and I am not some kind of strange anomaly for a southerner.

So, even if you are southern, I am only kicking your ass here if you hate black people or want to see the stars and bars displayed anywhere but a museum. This is not about southern Democrats, but about an increasingly shameless lie the Republicans are telling that somehow the Democrats are still the party of the Confederacy. To be sure, there are probably a lot of old old Democrats in South Carolina and Georgia clinging to the party like they still cling to the stinky old stars and bars. Nobody is trying to argue that Lincoln was not a Republican or that Robert E. Lee was not a Democrat. However, I am here to tell you that the Republican and Democratic parties are not the same parties they were in during the Civil War. Do we need more proof than Kennedy desegregating the south?

This move left a lot of Wallace Democrats pissed off, to be sure, but I am here to tell you that all those pissed off Wallace Democrats and other dirtbags of which we have such a concentration in the South have switched parties. The Republicans courted them, and they got them in the mid-1990s in what has become known in political science circles as the realignment. The concept of the realignment is simple. All the Bible-thumping, xenophobic, prejudiced, and just plain wrong rednecks left the Democratic Party and started voting Republican. You Republicans can’t claim to be the party of Lincoln after the realignment any more than liberals can claim to be the party of John Stuart Mill’s classic liberalism after embracing “hate speech” laws. Yet still you Republicans claim Lincoln, as if half your constituency would not still love to see Lincoln lynched for the War of Northern Aggression.

Why do you think Dean got in trouble for saying Democrats need to court the assholes with the Confederate flags in the rear windows of their pickups? It’s because we don’t have them anymore! Democrats won during the New Deal because we were a party of coalitions, and to win, we brought together such strange bedfellows as northeastern Jews, southern crackers, the descendants of slaves, northern organized industrial labor unions, and various disenfranchised groups. During the New Deal era, the Democratic Party essentially changed its character from one of exclusion to one of inclusion. No longer was it the party of Lee. It grew into the party of Kennedy.

I am not here to argue that the Democratic Party did not pander to southern racists within its ranks to win. It did. However, in the mid 1990s, the Republican party did the same. Admit it, and stop this ridiculous argument that Democrats are the remnants of the Confederacy. The Republicans courted the remnants of the Confederacy, and they got them. For better or worse, they are yours now.

Trent Lott recently said, in his characteristic southern accent, “I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years either.” He was saying that if the racist Dixiecrats had won the presidency, the Negroes would still sing in the fields, God would be in his heaven, and all would be right with the world. Now, at least Strom Thurmond has tried to distance himself from his past, and here we have the REPUBLICAN MAJORITY LEADER PRAISING THURMOND’S DIXIECRAT RUN FOR THE PRESIDENCY AND STILL REPUBLICAN’S CLAIM TO BE THE PARTY OF LINCOLN!

Whew. I got a little steamed there. Calm down. Maybe I need to consider the other side of the argument and be reasonable. I guess perhaps this realignment thing might be a myth even though DAVID DUKE, FORMER GRAND WIZARD OF THE KKK AND NATIONAL SOCIALIST NAZI, RAN FOR SENATE AS A REPUBLICAN IN SOLID DEMOCRAT-COUNTRY AND WON! NO, THERE WAS NEVER REALIGNMENT!