At The American Prospect, Bob Moser writes—A New South Rising: This Time for Real. The midterms made clear that progressive candidates can retake the region with young and minority voters.:
[...] For a decade and counting, liberal optimists like me have looked at the rapidly changing demographics and culture of the Sun Belt South—down the Atlantic Coast from Virginia to Florida, and along the Gulf to Texas—and predicted the imminent rise of a whole new breed of mostly nonwhite Southern progressives. It seemed like crazy talk to most political observers. After all, the South had always been dominated by white, race-haunted reactionaries—Democrats from the Civil War to civil rights, and Republicans thereafter. And when the last white Democratic members of Congress from the Deep South were defeated in the midterm landslides of 2010 and 2014, with every legislative chamber in the former Confederacy firmly Republicanized, liberal pundits and strategists loudly insisted that Democrats give up on the region altogether. “Forget about the whole fetid place,” Michael Tomasky wrote in The Daily Beast after Senator Mary Landrieu was trounced in a Louisiana runoff four Decembers ago. “Write it off. Let the GOP have it and run it and turn it into Free-Market Jesus Paradise. The Democrats don’t need it anyway.”
But the demise of the Blue Dogs did not spell doom for progressive prospects down South. Quite the contrary: What had actually, and helpfully, died was only the Democrats’ antiquated formula for winning elections in Dixie—the stubborn notion that only white, Clinton-style compromisers could ever hope to carry elections in the region. In the post–civil rights era, the formerly insular Sun Belt South had gradually—and then rapidly—transformed into the most racially and culturally diverse region in the country. But its politics had lagged behind, partly because the Democratic Party still clung to its old Southern stereotypes, convinced despite mounting setbacks that recapturing white Reagan Democrats was still the magic formula for success in a state like Georgia or Texas.ve won. (And if ex-felons had been allowed to vote in Mississippi, Espy would probably have added a fourth victory to the mix.) [...]
Southern progressives saw it differently: Instead of helping Democrats win, the endless chase for crossover conservative white voters had convinced millions of African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and young, liberal white folk to sit out elections. “The Democrats couldn’t see our power, even if we did,” says LaTosha Brown, the Atlanta-based co-founder of Black Voters Matter. And so BVM, along with an array of groups dedicated to turning the South’s rising majority into a political movement—Voto Latino, Texas’s Jolt Initiative, Woke Vote, and BlackPAC, to name a few—set out to prove those Democrats wrong.
The breakthroughs came quickly. In 2017, Chokwe Antar Lumumba and Randall Woodfin—both young, black, left-wing, and championed by Bernie Sanders—won mayoralties in Mississippi and Alabama’s largest cities, Jackson and Birmingham, respectively. In Virginia’s off-year elections, Democrats nearly erased Republicans’ sizable statehouse majority in one fell swoop—sending the state’s first Latina, socialist, and transgender delegates to Richmond along with a dozen more progressive-minded Dems—and elected 38-year-old Justin Fairfax, a progressive African American, as lieutenant governor and chief executive-in-waiting. But the most eye-opening result was yet to come: In Alabama that December, Democrat Doug Jones upset scandal-scarred Republican Roy Moore in a U.S. Senate runoff, propelled into office by groups like Black Voters Matter, whose organizing led to record black turnout for a non-presidential election.
Something mighty strange was afoot down South. And if anybody failed to see it in 2017, they couldn’t miss it in 2018. Seemingly out of nowhere, three unapologetic Deep South liberals—Abrams, Gillum, and O’Rourke—rose up to dominate the midterm political buzz alongside new-wave Northern lefties like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Democrats hadn’t won governorships in Georgia or Florida, or a Senate race in Texas, since the mid-1990s—but this time, with candidates who’d completely thrown away the old centrist playbook, who all sounded far more like a Sanders than a Clinton, they threatened to break the GOP stranglehold right up to election night.
Without the voter suppression unleashed in Southern states when the Supreme Court overturned a key part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, all three of the South’s new progressive supernovas would likely have won. (And if ex-felons had been allowed to vote in Mississippi, Espy would probably have added a fourth victory to the mix.)
But the near-misses had forced the GOP to spend precious resources to defend Southern seats the party had long counted on winning easily. And the rising progressive tide lifted Democrats to surprising victories down-ballot in federal, state, and local elections. [...]
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“The Winter Solstice has always been special to me as a barren darkness that gives birth to a verdant future beyond imagination, a time of pain and withdrawal that produces something joyfully inconceivable, like a monarch butterfly masterfully extracting itself from the confines of its cocoon, bursting forth into unexpected glory.”
~~Gary Zukav, Thoughts from the Seat of the Soul (2001)
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BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2005—Disgrace: NY Times Knew Before the Election:
The LA Times is reporting this morning that the NY Times had the domestic surveillance story prior to the 2004 presidential election.
The New York Times first debated publishing a story about secret eavesdropping on Americans as early as last fall, before the 2004 presidential election.
But the newspaper held the story for more than a year and only revealed the secret wiretaps last Friday, when it became apparent a book by one of its reporters was about to break the news, according to journalists familiar with the paper's internal discussions.
The NY Times was sitting on the biggest story of the year. The NY Times was sitting on the information that the President of the United States was illegally spying on citizens of this country. The NY Times knew that the administration was carrying on illegal surveillance of the American people before those very Americans were going to the polls to elect a president. Hmmmm.... It would have been kind of handy to have had that information on November 2, 2004, wouldn't it? As for why they held it? Care to explain, Bill Keller?
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Trump tweets the U.S. out of Syria, drops sanctions, slashes SNAP, and is self-centered lout. In other news, how should you feel about this criminal justice reform bill? Wilbur Ross lies some more. AG nominee Barr's Mueller memo makes waves.