PONTEFICATIONS

"I DO NOT UNDERSTAND AMERICAN POLITICS,” the young Swede said to me as our ferry churned between Copenhagen and Stockholm. “Your Democrats, your party of the Left controls Congress, but they have not created a complete social welfare state. Why not?”

“Our constitutional republic was designed to make big changes difficult,” I replied, “but what you most need to see is that America looks from the outside like a two-party political system – but it isn’t. Our government is actually divided among three major parties as well as regional and other interests.

“Those three political parties are Republicans, Northern Democrats and Southern Democrats,” I continued. “And the ideological differences between those two Democratic parties is almost as great – and in some ways even greater – than each is different from Republicans. You ought to think of Southern Democrats as halfway between Republicans and Northern Democrats, and as capable of siding with Republicans on many issues.”

Nearly 25 years have passed since this conversation. Democrats no longer control the Congress and likely will be out of power for a generation. Those needing to learn the three-sided nature of American politics are presidential candidates such as Senator John Forbes Kerry (D.-Mass.), whose ideology is closer to socialist Sweden’s than it is to traditional American values.

The one top-tier Democratic candidate who at least vaguely understands is Howard Dean, former Governor of Vermont. Days ago this Yankee politico ignited a Leftist firestorm by saying that he wanted to be “the candidate for guys with Confederate flags and gun racks in their pickup trucks.”

Rivals who had been eating dust at Dean’s heels lunged at this opportunity. They took care not to mention gun racks, having grown gun-shy of this issue that in 2000 probably cost Democratic standard-bearer Al Gore the key states of West Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and with their loss the presidency.  (Dean himself deleted gun racks from his own repetitions of the statement, including his widely-quoted remarks to the Des Moines Register)  But virtually all Dean’s opponents attacked him for embracing the Confederate flag and all that it represents.

“You can’t bring a Confederate flag to the table of brotherhood….,” said Rev. Al Sharpton. “I don’t think you’re a bigot, but I think it is insensitive, and I think you ought to apologize to people for that.”  Most of the other Democratic candidates engaged in similar demands that Dean apologize.

Howard Dean for most of a week stubbornly refused, insisting that “We’re not going to win in this country anymore as Democrats if we don’t have a big tent….We can’t beat George Bush unless we appeal to a broad cross section of Democrats.”

But at mid-week Dean cracked under the pressure. “I think the Confederate flag is a racist symbol,” he said, “but I think there are a lot of poor people who fly that flag because the Republicans have been dividing us by race since 1968.”

This, of course, is the proverbial pot calling the kettle black – or African-American. Sigmund Freud called it “Projection,” a tendency to see in others what you yourself are – e.g., a thief seeing all other people as thieves. It is Democrats, not Republicans, who have divided people by race through imposed racial preferences, set-asides and other aspects of an Apartheid-like racial spoils system.

By Wednesday Dean collapsed and like the broken tortured victim at a Stalinist show trial or Winston Smith in George Orwell’s novel 1984 confessed and begged for forgiveness, saying: “I deeply regret the pain that I may have caused to African-Americans and Southern Whites” by embracing those with Confederate flag decals.  Dean also “apologized for any people in the South who thought they were being stereotyped.”

Political historians will probably mark November 5, 2003, as the day the Democratic Party accepted permanent minority party status – and the day they lost the 2004 election.

By forcing frontrunner Howard Dean to recant and to repudiate and reject the white Southern vote, Democrats suicidally slashed their own throats and wrists and will now quickly bleed to death as a major political party.

These historians will also record that it took 40 years, but Barry Goldwater’s 1964 clarification of the Republican Party and success in cracking what had been the Democratic “Solid South” were triumphant. Goldwater opened the way to a political realignment that drove Democrats out into the wilderness for the next 40 years or more. 

Let’s take a longer view of the ebb and flow, the musical chairs, of American politics. The original Democratic Party was the Southern Democratic Party. This party claims as its founding fathers Thomas Jefferson of Virginia and Andrew Jackson of Tennessee. Democrats were the party of the slave owners, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow and Bull Connor. It is still America’s racist party, relying on the politics of racial division and polarization for its power.

With the defeat of the Confederacy in the War Between the States, when Southern whites eventually regained their right to vote they used it to sweep all non-Democrats from office.  Millions in the former Confederate States of America declared that they would “rather vote for a yellow dog” than any Republican, and upon the one-party states of the South the Democratic Party built its power.

Up until 1932, notes demographer Michael Barone, African-Americans voted more faithfully than any other ethnic or racial group for the party of the Great Emancipator Abraham Lincoln, the Republican Party.  But thereafter the black vote shifted to the Democratic Party. This, combined with white segregationist Democrats of the Solid South, were cornerstones on which Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s semi-National Socialist New Deal was built.

But since then, with the sole exception of the thousand days of John F. Kennedy, every Democrat elected President has been either from the border Southern state Missouri (Harry Truman, who briefly was a member of the Ku Klux Klan – and left the KKK not because of its anti-black racism but its anti-Catholic bigotry) or from the deep-fried Confederate South (Lyndon Johnson of Texas, Jimmy Carter of Georgia, and Bill Clinton of Arkansas).

As retiring Senator Zell Miller (D.-Georgia) notes in his insightful book A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat (whose subtitle deliberately echoes Barry Goldwater’s book title The Conscience of a Conservative), in year 2000 Al Gore did not carry even one of the 13 Southern states, despite being a Tennessean himself.

Can the national Democratic Party win the presidency without winning any Southern state?  Yes, but pundits calculate that to do this would require them pretty much to run the rest of the board, to sweep the toss-up states of the West and East Coasts and around the Great Lakes. Democrats have no margin for error, and a single loss in any of these other states could mean defeat. 

In decades to come, the Democrat situation will become even weaker.  Migration and population growth within the U.S. is shrinking Democrat states and enlarging Republican states. This will cost Democrats not only congressional seats but also electoral votes for the presidency.

Senator Miller, meanwhile, is at least half right.  The Southern Democratic Party has largely disintegrated as formerly Democratic white Southerners now increasingly vote Republican.  Soccer moms in the wake of 9-11 have become Security Moms preoccupied with voting for strong, national defense-oriented leaders. Their husbands have become NASCAR dads who share the values of this original American automotive sport whose roots are in the South.

Leftist Democrats, by contrast, have become mostly a party of the Northeast, Far West and Rust Belt with a shrinking base of genuine popular support, a party mostly of greedy and wealthy special interest groups.

What remains of the Southern Democratic Party after its white exodus is an organization dependant on black votes. And the black vote is increasing in the South thanks, in part, to a huge influx of African-Americans moving from northern snowbelt cities back to the Southern sunbelt states of their ancestors. 

These black voters should recognize that the end of segregation in the South and the fading of racism there corresponds exactly with the end of Democratic one-party rule, and with the rise of the Republican Party.  Will they vote for the return of racist politics, or for the liberating party of the Great Emancipator? 

Howard Dean was forced to grovel at Rev. Al Sharpton’s feet over the Confederate flag issue this week precisely because key Southern Democratic primaries such as South Carolina’s will hinge on black voter turnout.

This is why the Clintons through their sock puppet figurehead of the Democratic National Committee, Terry McAuliffe, injected former Illinois Senator Carol Moseley-Braun into the race to split the black vote in South Carolina and other key states to prevent Rev. Al Sharpton from winning such primaries. 

By sheer seniority and perpetual re-electability, white Southern members of the House and Senate used to chair all the powerful committees. This was one of the reasons that Leftists such as FDR almost never had a bad word to say about segregation, Jim Crow or the other pillars that upheld Democratic Party power in the South – and through it the nation.

But today’s white Southern politicians now depend on African-Americans for at least half their votes. Their positions, accordingly, are harmonized with the Leftist agenda of black groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Because this dependency forces white Southern Democratic politicians more and more to the Left, it pulls them farther and farther from the low-tax, pro-business, pro-morality, get-government-off-our-backs, God-fearing, gun-loving patriotic positive values of the modern, dynamic South. 

This is why the Southern Democratic Party, which (unlike Northern Democrats) used to share these values, is now disappearing into a friendly merger with the Republican Party. What results is the retention of positive Southern values but purged of a terrible evil from Democrat days: racism.  Its fast-coming demise was heralded by the defeat of Democrats last week in gubernatorial races in Mississippi and Kentucky, where Democrats had monopolized the Governor’s mansion for almost a third of a century.

Of 26 Southern U.S. Senators, 17 today are Republicans.  Only Arkansas, Louisiana and Florida elected two Democratic Senators. But Democratic Senators are retiring in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina.

In West Virginia (a state the Republican ticket carried in 2000) Senator Robert Byrd turns 86 on November 20. (Yes, this is the same former Ku Klux Klan Grand Kleagle Robert Byrd who in 1944 wrote to Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo to proclaim that he would never fight “with a Negro by my side. Rather, I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.”)  Such are the fading politics and politicians that built today’s national Democratic Party.

Contempt for the South by Northern Democrats now running for president is accelerating the disappearance of the Southern Democratic Party. So too is the use of unethical filibusters by Democratic Congressional leaders to block the appointments not only of racial minorities such as Hispanic Miguel Estrada but also to block Southerners named by President Bush to serve on high Federal courts.  (After 2004 Leftist Democrats may no longer have the 40 Senate votes needed to sustain these undemocratic filibusters.)

The Northern Democratic Party now discriminates against Southern whites in much the same way in the past it discriminated against racial minorities. No wonder thoughtful, modern Southerners are fleeing from the Democratic Party.

These formerly-Democratic voters will not be seduced or tricked into returning by the token addition of a Leftist Southern politician such as failed Presidential candidates and retiring Senators Bob Graham (D-Florida) or John Edwards (D.-North Carolina) or retired General and Arkansan Wesley Clark to the 2004 national Democratic ticket as its Vice Presidential candidate.

Howard Dean shot himself in both feet by reaching out to his stereotype of Southern whites whose trucks carry Confederate flag decals and then yielding to the demands of Rev. Al Sharpton, who called this flag “the American Swastika.”  In becoming Sharpton’s vassal, the vacillating, mercurial Dean called the Confederate flag a “loathsome signal.”

Last week Dean also told a Tallahassee audience: “Don’t base your votes on race, guns, God and gays.”  (Ironically these are the same issues [from their reverse side] that Dean and his fellow Leftist Democratic candidates tell audiences in New York City and San Francisco to keep in mind when voting.)

But Dean at least tried to restore what had been the Democratic Party’s winning coalition by reaching out to the kind of white Southerners Dean stereotypically connects with the Confederate flag (but not white Southerners who have rejected racism and turned Republican).

“I don’t have much use for the Confederate flag,” wrote Orlando Sentinel columnist Kathleen Parker, who in three columns urged that it be removed from the South Carolina statehouse because “It seemed inappropriate to fly such a divisive symbol over a public property.

“But the Confederate flag is tricky among Southerners,” Parker continued. “— a volatile issue, the nuances of which are often lost on Northerners and other visitors to the kudzu states. Not everyone with the battle flag in his home or on his truck is a dangerous racist, though some are.

“For many others – well-educated, prosperous, thoughtful Southerners, as opposed to the undereducated, uninsured, vacant-staring Walker Evans sharecroppers Dean apparently envisions,” continued Parker, “the Confederate flag is a symbol of Southern history, of battles fought and lost, of family members valiant and dead, of a person’s right to express himself even if it offends others.”

As to Dean’s outreach, writes Parker from Florida, “The whole episode smacks of classism if not racism: Northern Nobility embraces Southern Idiocracy. How long before one of them says: ‘Why some of my best friends are Southerners?’” 

“Since Dean is the front-runner, his rivals hope to score points by attacking him [for his outreach to Southern whites],” wrote New York Newsday columnist and African-American Sheryl McCarthy. “But what he said makes sense, and the Democrats should embrace the wisdom of it.”

“Gephardt, Dean, Lieberman and Kerry probably won’t waste too much time trying to court the Southern pickup crowd,” wrote Kathleen Parker. “Most I’ve seen – with American or Confederate flags on them – also have another sticker on their bumpers. It’s red, white and blue and says: Bush.”