Sen. Mary Landrieu’s crushing defeat in Saturday’s Louisiana runoff has put the Democratic Party out of its misery across the American South.
Her unceremonious ouster ends the process of southern realignment that occurred mostly this century, not last. In 2004, Pelican State Democrats held six of seven statewide constitutional offices (including the governorship), both houses of the state legislature, and both U.S. Senate seats. Today, they have nothing.
The result has white liberal writers hopping mad that there are parts of America where their quest to impose their social values has failed.
“Practically the whole region has rejected nearly everything that’s good about this country and has become just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment,” the Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky wrote on Monday. He added that Democrats should “[f]orget about the whole fetid place. Write it off. Let the GOP have it and run it and turn it into Free-Market Jesus Paradise.” Talk about choleric!
He finished his column by referring to the South as “the biggest welfare moocher in the world in terms of the largesse it gets from the more advanced and innovative states.”
In 2012, GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney made a now-infamous comment similar to Tomasky’s, in which he wrote off “47 percent” of the U.S. electorate as unwilling to vote for him no matter what. It was a defeatist comment from Romney, and it came back to haunt him. It expressed an unbecoming elitist sentiment that applies just as well today to Tomasky and other coastal liberals.
Tomasky’s assertion that Democrats can win congressional majorities without the South is almost certainly untrue, especially given that they only just finished writing off the northern regions of Appalachia. Democrats regained their House majority in 2006 by moving to the center, making themselves more palatable, and protecting the many southern incumbents they then had. They lost nearly everything there in 2010 after moving leftward and passing Obamacare. And in 2014, voters finished the job.
The South is different from the rest of America because of its history, but it isn’t as different today as Tomasky and others persuade themselves. There was a time when southern white Democrats commanded total allegiance from voters — people now long dead — by simply standing behind the violent, racist system we know as “Jim Crow.” When this program of state-sponsored terrorism was put to rest, the Democratic party lost its only selling point in the region. Older white voters died and so did their nostalgia for a horrible past. A new generation of voters has changed the face of politics in a much-improved modern South. Today, Republicans win in the South primarily on issues such as abortion and gun control, two subjects on which Democrats impaled themselves before this year’s midterms.
Tomasky and others don’t have to admit to themselves that their social values have cost Democrats an entire region of the country in just 14 years. They can blame voters for the sins of those voters’ fathers. It’s a self-indulgent luxury available to anyone with no interest in winning an an election.
