The GOP Has Gone South

The choice of Zell Miller, a far-right Southern Democrat, as the keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention probably did not help the GOP attract moderate swing voters. But it symbolizes the degree to which the Republican Party has become the party of the Deep South.

In 1860, the Republican candidate for president, Abraham Lincoln, did not receive a single Southern electoral vote for president, and his election inspired the South to secede. The liberalism of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman, however, produced a small trickle of Southern conservatives out of the Democratic Party.

That trickle became a flood when Lyndon Johnson, a Southerner himself, pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964. With his "Southern strategy," Richard Nixon welcomed right-wing Southerners into what was still a party based in the Northeast, Midwest and Pacific Coast.

By 2000, however, the Southern Right had taken over. They have turned the party of Lincoln into the party of Jefferson Davis.

Their core territory consists of the states of the Old Confederacy, plus those of the mountain and prairie West. With leaders like George W. Bush, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, the Republican Party now speaks with a distinctly Southern drawl. Their issues are those of the old Dixie demagogues: religion, the military, traditional values and (in coded form) race.

By slashing income taxes for the rich and estate taxes, the Republican Congress and George W. Bush have quietly shifted the overall tax burden from the wealthy to working Americans.

If the strategists of the Right succeed with the next stage of their scheme, rich people whose income derives from investments won't be taxed at all -- while working Americans will continue to suffer from high payroll taxes.

Small wonder that, like the Dixie demagogues of yesteryear, today's Southernized Republicans prefer to change the subject from economics to "culture-war" issues like gay marriage. This cynical strategy has worked in recent elections, in which the white working class, distracted by such hot-button social issues, has voted against its own economic interests.

Today's Southern conservatives find many allies among working-class white Catholics in the Northeast and the Midwest. This is nothing new.

From the 1800s onward, the closest allies of the Southern plantation elite in national politics were Catholics in the North, particularly Irish-American Catholics. You might think that rural Southern Protestants who believe the pope is the Antichrist would have little in common with urban Catholics in the industrial states. But they have long shared two enemies.

First there are the "Yankees" -- New Englanders and Midwesterners of New England Protestant descent. Southern politicians have long hated their Yankee counterparts as rivals for control of the federal government. For its part, the Catholic working class in the North has long resented the affluence and perceived snobbery of the Northern Protestant elite.

In addition, white Southerners and Northern working-class Catholics have been allied throughout history against blacks. Southern whites, rich and poor alike, feared black equality because it would undermine their status as the master race in their own region. Northern Catholics feared competition with blacks for jobs and neighborhoods.

"The issue is not the issue," as the '60s saying goes. American politics is, and always has been, tribal and regional.

This election, like others, pits white Southerners and their allies among Northern Catholics and Westerners against New Englanders and their current political allies: almost all black Americans as well as most Latinos. The Republican Party is the majority party today because its coalition outnumbers the rival Democratic coalition.

The problem for Democrats is simple: They don't get enough of the white vote.

The last Democratic presidential candidate to win a majority of the white vote was Lyndon Johnson. Clinton came close, but in 1996 he still lost the white vote to Dole by 3 points.

In the 2000 election, Gore lost the white vote to Bush by a whopping 12 points. And the white vote is not just a factor in presidential politics.

White working-class voters, women as well as men, gave the Republicans a majority in both houses of Congress in 1994 and cemented it in 2002.

Instead of trying to win back white voters, the Democrats have pursued a losing "rainbow coalition" strategy of appealing to blacks and Latinos with policies like racial preferences, bilingualism and amnesties, in-state tuition and driver's licenses for Latin Americans who violate federal immigration laws.

In a generation or two, the growth of Latino numbers might push a liberal white-Latino-black coalition into majority status -- at least if Latinos remain primarily loyal to the Democrats. But this isn't going to happen in the near future, because Latinos register to vote in far smaller numbers than "non-Hispanic whites." For example, in Texas, blacks and Latinos are already a majority, but white "Anglos" make up three-quarters of the electorate.

Can the Democrats win back the white voters they need?

Conservative white Southern Democrats like Zell Miller are -- no pun intended -- a lost cause. Instead, the Democrats should concentrate on the largely Catholic "Reagan Democrats" of the swing states of the Midwest.

While many of these voters have conservative views on abortion and gay marriage, they tend to be pro-union and to support federal policies that help working people.

In order to win back the Reagan Democrats, however, the national Democratic Party would have to be tolerant of Democrats with conservative views on social issues. And the Democrats would also have to downplay or repudiate their support for policies like affirmative action that discriminate against whites on the basis of their ancestry in favor of blacks and Latinos.

Most of today's elite Democrats would rather die than welcome white voters opposed to abortion or racial preferences into their shrunken party -- even if the alternative is to remain not only the party of minorities but also the minority party. So the Democrats will probably continue to lose elections, while hoping that one day enough Latin American immigrants, legal and illegal, will give them an electoral college majority.

The motto of today's Democratic Party -- and perhaps its epitaph--might be a quip by Adlai Stevenson: "I'd rather be right than president."