The South and Racial Politics - Capitol Hill Coffee House

Everyone knows that in recent years the GOP has become the dominant political party in the South. What you may not know is that they have done so by their willingness to employ "racial politics”, or at least that is the reason given Friday in Washington, DC at a conference held by the liberal group “Take Back America”.

Having been born in the South, not to mention having lived here most of my life, I was rather amazed at this claim by Gar Alperovitz, a professor at the University of Maryland, who also stated that Republicans represented “the dark side”. Now understand that while I am most assuredly conservative, I don’t especially identify with the Republican Party (although that is a subject for another column). The good professor (who received his MA from Berkeley), however, appears to be shifting the blame for the Democrats’ minority status in the South away from their own failings, and attempting to make the Republican Party the boogeyman.

Without going into a full-scale history lesson, let’s just state that people in the South have always been overwhelmingly conservative. For years, they voted for Democrats who, in the South at least, were conservative as well. The 60’s and 70’s of course, changed all that. As Democrats at the national level became more and more liberal, Southerners began to drift away from a hundred years of tradition. By the 80’s, and the Reagan Revolution, the transformation was pretty well complete – the New South voted GOP. This occurred, because the Democrats had moved too far to the left for the majority of Southerners – not because of “racial politics”.

That is why Professor Alperovitz’s theory is flawed – it rests upon a stereotype that I had hoped we had all outgrown. The South is not comprised of a bunch of toothless dullards (a la the movie Deliverance) who wish to go back to the days of segregated restrooms and lunch counters. I recall being a high school student in the early 70’s when our school system was ordered by a federal judge to bus students across town in order to achieve “racial balance” in all the system’s schools. The judge was dead wrong in his reasoning, but parents, while grousing, still went along with the plan. Sure, there was friction at times between black and white students, but overall, it went reasonably smoothly.

Contrast that with the violent reactions from parents a few years later, in oh-so-liberal-and-enlightened Boston, or in Pontiac, Michigan, where parents chained themselves to school buses in an attempt to thwart a similar plan imposed on their system.

What Alperovitz is attempting to do, is accomplish three things – one, paint Southerners as “racists”, two, paint conservatives as “racists”, and third, ignore the real reasons Democrats have been losing ground consistently throughout the “red states”, which of course includes more states than just those in “the south”.

Alperovitz has written a book, America Beyond Capitalism. The title alone speaks volumes about where the good professor is really coming from. His problem is actually with the American free enterprise system – in fact he said in a recent interview with the Cybercast News Service that capitalism was “dangerous”, and “unsustainable”. In addition, he favors a new system that would combine capitalism and socialism, but avoid big government (talk about the ultimate dichotomy).

Alperovitz even goes on to claim that he is “not a socialist”, which sounds about as convincing as Howard Dean’s recent pronouncement that socialist Bernard Sanders (whom Dean endorsed for Senate as Jumpin’ Jim Jeffords’ replacement), wasn’t actually a socialist, he was “really a populist”.

People are conservative in the South, and in most other areas of the nation, not because of “racial politics”, but because they believe in the free enterprise system. They believe in self-reliance and liberty. They wish to be able to keep more of their hard-earned dollars to spend as they see fit, rather than having it go to fund the behemoth that is the federal government. They believe in the principles of the US Constitution and don’t think the second amendment was put in there by mistake. And yes, many of them are Christian and believe that when the Founders recognized freedom of religion, they didn’t mean freedom from religion.

The problem for leftists such as Alperovitz, is that they fail to grasp that the majority of Americans reject extreme liberalism. As long as the Democrats continue to rely on the far left to articulate their “vision”, they are destined to remain a minority party – and claiming that the GOP won in the South because of “racial politics” will only hasten their descent, not to mention that it reveals quite clearly that it is they who are practicing “racial politics”.

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