I'm getting annoyed by the surrender-monkey claims that we need to give up on the south, or the Christians, or essential progressive principles, etc etc.
Would anyone-- anyone-- in 1960 expect that southerners would be voting Republican by 1968? No way. The Republicans were evil abolitionist Yankees to those in the land of Dixie.
Or in 1960 would anyone expect that the Republican party would today be dominated by bible-thumping right-wing Christians? I mean, come on. It was the party of elite Yankee industrialists!
Politics makes very, very strange bedfellows. It's entirely possible to reclaim the south, and I'll argue that we don't necessarily need to abandon our principles... but rather fan the flames of "wedge issues" which divide their coalitions, while standing firm on the common ground on which we will build ours.
A couple things happened well happened 1960 to produce the current sad state of affairs. To recap:
First of all, the Democratic party took a principled stand with the Civil Rights Act in 1964, a politically courageous move which, as predicted at the time, "lost the south for a generation". Race became a huge "wedge issue" for Dixie at least. Nixon's "Southern Strategy" provided a home in the Republican party for disaffected white racists.
Secondly there was the blunder of the Vietnam War, another huge "wedge issue" had split the Democratic party in two by 1968. It arguably lost them the youth vote at a time when youth was a particularly large demographic group.
I've seen lots of ink here about how the Goldwater/Reagan conservatives organised after 1964 and built their field organisation over a generation. Finally of course in the late 70's the Christian Right began a deliberate attempt to take over the Republican party from the inside, county-by-county-- an attempt which has been wildly successful. They've won more than a seat at the table, they've won the head of the table.
Now not much of this is new to people here. But I rehash these to point out two things: 1) all of this was just as unlikely as the idea of the midwest and south turning Blue, and 2) we can use many if not all of these techniques.
So...
- Iraq is a blunder on the order of Vietnam. Kerry's "reporting for duty" campaign did a great job of keeping the Iraq issue at the top of the debate (hell, it dominated all three debates!) and I know Republicans who voted for Kerry solely on this issue.
- There are natural cleavage points between the Christians and the Corporate elite. The profit motive is inherently amoral, and global economies of scale inevitably clobber at least someone's morals. Corporate-driven globalisation and amoral consumer culture are toxic to values most religious people hold dear. On the other side, I know other Republicans who voted for Kerry out of fear of Bush's Christian Right policies. I'm sure there are wedges we can force into this, and I'm keeping a careful eye out for them.
- Some of the "principled stands" the Repugs are taking (to them, maybe. "Raw meat to their base", to us) carry some risks. It all depends on how far they overreach, when, and in which direction (i.e. driving the corporate globalisation agenda at the expense of the Christians, or vice versa). We certainly can't count on them to screw up that badly, but then we didn't expect Iraq either-- and in fact worked very hard to try to prevent it. If they are as over-optimistic and rashly aggressive in the "culture war" as they have been in foreign policy, they will create lots of train-wrecks that will lose them support.
- I agree with those who say it's time for us to adopt the style and moral-imperative language of the right wing, not their positions. We have to Obama-ise the party's message.
- I've been following the analyses of the Christian Right very closely too. I think their personal, local, county-by-county, face-to-face organisation is first-rate, and it's as powerful today as that of the Unions was 40 years ago. Groups like DFA need to grow to that level of strength... we need a ground army out there and I for one have cleared my calendar for MeetUps and DFA activities. I think Dean is on the right track here.
- Finally, invoking Obama points out how weak our bench is-- he should be the rule but instead he is the exception. Clinton was a blip, Obama is a blip, Dean is a blip, and that's a problem. It's just going to take time to build a bench. The Christian universities and MBA-laden corporate think-tanks have been grooming candidates for a generation. Maybe a few brilliant candidates will just appear out of nowhere, but we need something more consistent. I want to help build candidate-mills that will field inspiring, principled, Obama-like winners all over the country.
Overall, I have hope for DFA on the organising and candidate-grooming side, for the Left Blogistan as a kind of giant collaborative distributed think-tank, and for Republican hubris to give us at least one or two good wedge issues to exploit.
It's going to take a long time and require hard work, but I do not think that giving up-- on either principles or on huge swaths of the population-- is an option.
