Barack Obama's victory had another mostly overlooked effect: the end of Southern influence at the national political level.
After the election, I was checking some stories in my hometown newspaper, the New Orleans Times-Picayune and was struck by this story by Jonathan Tilove. Here's the lede:
With statewide turnout estimated at about 64 percent, Louisiana delivered its nine electoral votes to Republican John McCain on Tuesday, the first time in 40 years that the state's pick was not the choice of the nation.
...
The split outcome marks a watershed moment in American electoral history and may signal an end, at least temporarily, to a long period of outsize Southern power in Washington.
That outsize power wielded by Southerners has throughout our history been used for obstructionism and worse. Remember this passage struck from Thomas Jefferson's first draft of the Declaration of Independence:
He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivatng and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.
We all know the subsequent history: the "three-fifths" compromise that counted a slave as 60% of a person for representation purposes, the South's fight to extend slavery into the territories despite the slave trade having been outlawed in 1808, climaxing in armed insurrection against the lawful government of the United States.
In the decades following the end of Reconstruction in 1876, Southern political influence waned at the presidential level as the "Solid South" voted Democratic during a period of Republican dominance of the White House. In 1924, Calvin Coolidge won election to a full term despite not carrying a single state of the old Confederacy. Southern influence increased during the New Deal as the Southern "Dixiecrats" formed a key part of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal coalition. Indeed, since 1924, no President has been elected without carrying at least four states of the old Confederacy.
Southern influence was felt most strongly at the Congressional level. In the days of the strict seniority system, the committees were almost all chaired by Southerners since their seats were the safest in Congress. Advancing any progressive legislation was extremely difficult, especially after the Democratic congressional majorities eroded following their peak in 1934. Passage of civil rights legislation was impossible, since the Southern chairmen would either bottle up the legislation in committee or filibuster if it managed to reach the floor. The breakthrough civil rights legislation of 1964 was achieved only when the rest of the country decided that the violence inflicted by white Southerners was intolerable.
The seniority system was finally broken in the 1970's, at the beginning of the Republican ascendancy at the presidential level broken only by Southerners Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Mark Shields, in his television appearances, would often point out that the Democrats had not won with a Northern liberal ticket since 1940.
In Congress, the old Dixiecrats and their political descendants became Republicans and became part of the Republican majorities when they took the Senate in 1980 and the House in 1994.
Thus it was--until Tuesday. Tilove continues:
[Obama] crafted an electoral victory that did not depend on the South but that made inroads in what had become a dependably Republican region... [He] ran very well in the fastest-growing stretches of the South, winning Virginia and Florida, and running even in North Carolina with most of the vote counted.
Obama will enter the White House with large Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate at a time when the Southern congressional delegations are lopsidedly Republican.
"The South is so out now," said David Bositis, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, of the new political landscape in the wake of Tuesday's results.
"He is not going to have a Southern mentality, and neither is anybody around him," Bositis said.
And in Congress the Republicans are back in the minority with their numbers concentrated in the South. Committees are now chaired by committed progressives like Henry Waxman, John Conyers, and Barbara Boxer.
So now the most retrograde region in the country is largely shut out of political power for the first time in our history. Given the lack of appeal of the Southern political agenda outside the region and the demographic changes documented by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, Tilove's "temporarily" looks like a long time.
As a progressive American, I have only two words:
Good riddance.