Latter-Day Confederacy

The Republicans have voluntarily transformed themselves into a regional and agrarian party. If the Democrats play it as it lays, they have the opportunity to create a permanent Democratic majority -- permanent into the foreseeable future, that is. 

McCain was the candidate of a geographical region, not of the nation. How many votes did the Arizona Jekyll/Hyde senator win that were outside of the old Confederacy (reminder: the Confederate States of America were, in order of their secession, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee. The "border states" of Missouri and Kentucky did not legally secede but were allied with the Confederacy)? These states constitute the heart of McCain's support. Of his 162 electoral votes, 113 came from the southern pocket.  he rest came from the otherworldly Mormon states of Utah and Idaho (9 votes) and from impoverished agrarian states, many of them suffering from declining populations, such as the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, and Montana. In the entire country, the only areas where McCain in 2008 ran ahead of Bush in 2004 were some of the all-white rural counties in the old confederacy and Oklahoma and an occasional retrograde county in undeveloped western Pennsylvania and West Virginia. If anyone in America found Palinity appealing, it was people in the poorest, least educated parts of the continent  -- and also in the atypical Alaskan kleptocracy.

The Democrats made inroads into the new old south because northern Virginia's Washington suburbs and the research triangle area of North Carolina have joined the new century, and because Florida is a haven for northeastern migrants. 

The Democrats are the party of the future: multicultural, educated, international, young, high-tech, entrepreneurial, secular. The Republicans are the part of the past:  geriatric, racist, melanin-deprived, Bible-thumping, rural, poor, less well educated. Their day is over and gone. 

The "pundints" (as McCain calls them) want Obama to govern from the middle. I agree, except that I think that he should govern from the middle of New York, New England, the upper middle west, and the far west -- not a middle somewhere between Virginia and Mississippi. Obama should make an effort to educate the denizens of the American backwater, but if it's necessary to drag them kicking and screaming into the 21st century, then so  be it. But the United States of America can no longer allow itself to be shackled to a mean, recalcitrant, atavistic, pre-Darwinian southland.

It's not longer red state versus blue state. It's all blue except where it's all white.

Comments

[Kyla]

Have you ever lived in a "red' state?

[Axel Sprengtporten]

In these heady days of uplifted spirits, should we look at the Republicans' state of disarray and stoop to petty feelings of schadenfreude? You betcha.

I never listen to Rush Limbaugh except when things are going bad for his side. Today I listened to a half-hour of Rush and it was delicious. You'll be happy to know that the civil war within the GOP is well under way, complete with angry recriminations, backbiting, character assassination and other good stuff. It's the Palin-Limbaugh yahoos vs. the McCain campaign vs. the moderate Republicans (the group that caucuses in a telephone booth) vs. the neocon intellectuals (you know, the really smart ones who helped get us into Iraq). What makes it better is that these factions are irreconcilable.

So while we celebrate the election - the best thing America has done since liberating and rebuilding western Europe - let's not forget to enjoy the spectacle of the GOP spending long years in the political wilderness. The bastards deserve every bit of it.