Despite everything we know, or think we know, about the private life and opinions of Judge Roy Moore, I have no doubt that he will win the Alabama special election on December 12, and succeed to Attorney General Jefferson Sessions’s old Senate seat.
I don’t think that he will win by a landslide—there are Alabama conservatives who cannot set aside the accounts of his behavior, and even deep-red Alabama has its share of liberals and Democrats—but I have every expectation he will gain the necessary majority of votes. (Whether the Senate will permit him to join his erstwhile colleagues, or survive a vote of censure or expulsion, is another matter.)
How do I know this? I am no particular expert on Alabama and its current politics, although I would mention that I once lived for a year in an Alabama town (Anniston)—where I worked for the newspaper, which confers a kind of bogus authority—and my (Southern) wife lived in Birmingham for seven years of her childhood. I know this because I have long believed that a very large portion of political sentiment is tribal, and peoples’ tribal identity usually supersedes intellectual principle, or even self-interest.
As long ago as 1908, the English political scientist Graham Wallas published a slim volume titled Human Nature in Politics, in which he argued for the importance of irrational impulses—custom, tradition, ethnic identity, prejudice, etc.—in explaining why voters choose as they do. Wallas counseled politicians to study psychology in order to learn how to appeal to the electorate, but you don’t need to know very much about human minds to guess what’s crossing them in Alabama.
To begin with, Alabama is a Deep South state, and the South, like the Midwest, or New England, or Southern California, tends to consider itself a place apart in the United States, with a distinct identity. But unlike New Englanders, for example, Southerners, who of course did secede from the Union 150-plus years ago, tend to be routinely lectured by their fellow countrymen about their retrograde, or primitive, or perverse, beliefs and folkways. Many Southerners—notably the late journalist W.J. Cash, author of The Mind of the South (1941)—take the critique to heart; but many, and especially many white Southerners, do not, and feel the same degrees of resentment that animated the oratory of John C. Calhoun (strong) or the fiction of William Faulkner (mild).
Being Southerners, of course, this is largely hidden behind a polite façade. But rest assured that Alabama readers of the New York Times know what’s being said about them.
In Moore’s case, the opportunity to cast a ballot-riposte will prove irresistible, and every effort to persuade Moore voters to do otherwise will only deepen their resolve. You can well imagine the limited appeal in Alabama of, say, a CNN talking head who, having condemned the existence of memorials to admirable people such as Robert E. Lee, now tells them what to think about a less-admirable archetype like Roy Moore. This is the same instinct, I would guess, which prompted the voters of South Carolina, in 1996, to re-elect the 94-year-old Sen. Strom Thurmond to another term, despite their knowledge of his mental and physical state. Graham Wallas would not be surprised.
And of course, lest we conclude that this is another peculiar emblem of Southern exceptionalism, not so long ago defiant Massachusetts voters returned Sen. Edward M. Kennedy to Washington for seven more terms after he left a helpless young woman to drown in his car while he scrambled for hours to preserve his political career. The tribal rites of the New England electorate can be no less mysterious, even deplorable, than the instincts of Alabama voters.
Philip Terzian is a senior editor of The Weekly Standard.
