How large is the intersection of the sets "moral," and "culturally-conservative"? Doesn't "culturally-conservative" mean, especially in the South, "looking out for no one but one's own"? Isn't that outlook the very foundation of immorality? All of the statistics on domestic abuse, divorce, rape ... anything that has to do with morality show the the South barely qualifies as part of our civilization. The only way to really appeal to their "values" is to put forward canidates who embody corruption. Once upon a time, that was the Democratic way there. But nowadays, let's leave that to the Party of Corruption, which thankfully is no longer us.

The arguments made against the non-southern strategy sound akin to "but the neo-nazis and the KKK are Americans too!" Well friends, the GOP has already chosen to represent them, so we don't have to.

You really don't understand why white southerners vote so dramatically different from black southerners? It's because they HAVE TO shop at the same stores, go to the same schools, the same football games and the same restaurants as black southerners. Geesh.

So the South barely qualifies as part of the civilization? No values?

And people wonder where I get the idea that this whole discussion (and book), framed though it might be in high-brow electoral math, is simply a mask for an extraordinarly regionalist view that is sadly prevalant among a certain population of liberals.

I would never say that you should go after the South exclusively. You're right- it doesn't make sense. But it's not primarily for the reason you imagine, that we're a conservative cultural backwater. It's because, as the Republicans have taught us, nationwide campaigns are far more effective then regionally centered ones.

The thing is that you really seem to think that the Democrats have tried and failed with the South. TRUST me on this- WE HAVE NOT.

Jumping around some more to the race thing:

You can't explain politics in America, let alone the South, without getting into race. You just can't. So your plea to explain the differences in racial voting without race will continue to go unanswered. But at the same time it's not quite as easy as just saying 'oh, white southerners are racist.' There's a lot of history and emotion that has very little to do with race. I've touched on this is my blog:
http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/bama_belle_0?page=1, and frankly don't have time to write a long comment, since I'm expected to work at some point today.

TOM SCHALLER- I don't know how much research you did into the South in doing your book, but I have to think you didn't get to talk to a lot of real Southerners. So please, email me. (That goes for anybody else that has SERIOUS questions.) I can't claim to be a cultural historian, but I am both a real Southerner and a real Democrat, and I think it is entirely possible for the Democrats to win us back!

I don't know how this plays out West, but, historically, Appalachia and some parts of the South used to be the frontier -- that is, the "wild west." I think the importance of fundamentalist religion has to do with the historical effort to civilize the frontier. That kind of religion was seen as the best way to do it. As you have pointed out, the effort is not finished, yet. That probably has something to do with unrelieved poverty, and that probably has something to do with the hierarchical social structure. The planters were replaced by the textile manufacturers, but economic exploitation did not change.

Anyhow, from this point of view it is not surprising that the most insistent views about morality are found where there are real social problems. Southern conservatism therefore represents a mixture of good and bad motivations.

Speaking as a liberal west-coaster of Midwestern (i.e. "Northern") extraction, I don't see an inherent moral inferiority on the part of the South. Yes there is still corruption and racism there (and sure, maybe there is more overt racism than elswhere), but these exist all over the US.

The reason Republicans seem to have cornered the market on corruption is that they've been in power long enough to market their influence and capitalize on it. Republicans are "superior" at this sort of thing, just as they are superior in marketing in general.

The only reason corruptors haven't pandered to Democratic politicians is that they don't have sufficient influence to make it worth while. In other words, we have a very brief opportunity to reform the system before the Democratic Party becomes corrupted itself.

-Dave Adams-

I was at the panel at YearlyKos, and I agree that it wasn't particularly enlightening, in part because I think you and Mudcat were mostly talking past each other. (I appreciate Mudcat's help in getting us Mark Warner as governor here in VA, but I'm not overall a big fan of his.)

Here's the question I didn't get to ask there: When you talk about a "non-Southern strategy," are you talking exclusively about presidential elections? It seems to me that's the only context in which an argument about relative numbers of votes in an entire state makes sense, and is the reason there is so much talking past each other on this topic.

If you're arguing that the Democrats should not put significant resources into southern states in presidential elections, I'd agree completely. I'm sick and tired of the conventional wisdom that Democrats have to nominate Southerners because Southernors won't vote for anyone else, but the rest of us don't get that slack.

But outside of presidential elections, I think it's vital to compete in the South, because otherwise we'll never win there. Doing good things nationally and expecting to get credit for them if we're not there locally is a pipe dream. Populations aren't static, and generations aren't static, and speaking as an activist in a Southern-border state, we can change our fortunes on the ground.

When a population is as deeply polarized as is ours, it becomes inevitable that political parties will polarize along the same lines. It just so happens that racism is one facet of that polarization, just as is opposition to homosexuality and abortion rights. But I think it is so for historical reasons and not due to outright support for racist or anti-gay values throughout the South. Instead, I think the South is still fighting the civil war. Were we all Republicans and they Democrats, were we the racists and homophobes and they the party of sexual and racial tolerance -- that is, the situation reversed -- the polarization would remain dug in throughout our society.

As long as the political realm remains a proxy for continuing a civil war long since over, there will be no resolving this conflict. For it is not a conflict about differing social values as much as it is a conflict over raw power. And the Republicans are winning.

Well, yes.

Because the South isn't as rabidly conservative as you think. For example: We elect our Supreme Court Judges in Alabama. This year, in the Republican primary, there was a whole Roy Moore (he of the infamous 10 commandments fame) supporter slate running- Moore for governor, his buddy Tom Parker for C.J., and several others for justice. And they all lost. Pretty badly, actually. So look at it this way: only about 40% of the most conservative voters in Alabama actually support that agenda. That should tell you that it's not quite as hopeless as you think.

But how to actually win? Well, you need a plan. A NATIONAL plan to win the war, lower gas prices, feed the hungry, etc. etc. Easier said then done, I know, but here's the thing: the ideas are out there. And then, as another commentator here said, engage us. Like we're normal people. Be honest! Dean could come down here and say 'Look, South, we've had our differences. We're sorry for any part we've played in antagonizing you, and we don't think you're a bunch of idiots. We respect you. So look at our plan. This is what's best for America. We're not budging on social issues- but honestly, we don't think you want us to. We're not going to make your church perform homosexual commitment ceremonies. We don't want special rights for any group. But we're not going to tolerate discrimination either.' Find the next Bill Clinton (hopefully one that's faithful to his wife) to say all that and BOOM- victory.

Vastly oversimplified of course- but that's it in a nutshell. Notice that the main part of it really is not special to the South. Sure, we've got our own little culture, but we're not actual aliens. We just have to get our act togather as a party.

I agree that pundits need to stop the obsession as it leads to looking at us like we're some sort of lesser organism on a slide. If this book changes that, well, great. I'll take back all the bad things I said about it.

But the problem is that I think this book just plays into that idea. What's needed is a national strategy. So, yeah, maybe Schaller's right that we don't need a Southern strategy. But we don't need an anti-Southern strategy either.

Well, having spent a fair number of characters arguing that the South isn't monolithic, I can't exactly then turn around and expect to fill in Bama Belle's points, considering we're from pretty different parts of the region. But here's the way I see it from Durham...

1) Take abortion as a morally complex issue seriously, and stop referring to people who have serious moral qualms with it as "anti-Choice." While I really don't want Hillary as our next nominee, she got this exactly right earlier this year when she called for massive programs to try to decrease the frequency of abortion without putting legal restrictions on it, by taking on unwanted pregnancies, seriously and not just as a passing thing. Base it on strong research, and if you can show sex ed really cuts down on teen pregnancies (and I think you can), argue it forcefully and agressively, that the prudes would rather have more abortions, unhealthy babies, and children in broken homes rather than hear the word "penis" in school. Use Tim Kaine as a model here, but you have to mean it -- you can't fake this one.

2) Get Big Government Out of My Marriage -- Why should the government care what we call a marriage? Leave that up to your church, and make all marriages a civil union, but use the bully pulpit to encourage people to get married and to take it seriously. (This was my argument a year and a half ago, and while I still think it has merit, the past 18 months have changed the debate significantly. Specifically, all over the country, gay people are becoming a lot less scary to the average voter.)

3) (The big one) Invest heavily in our economic infrastructure, both in urban areas and in the rural areas of the country. Nationalize the railroad network and spend billions to improve it and make it stronger. Invest in research on how rebuild America's manufacturing core with highly trained workers, in such a way that the superior productivity of American workers overcomes the cost advatages elsewhere, then put money into community college programs to make sure that we have the capacity to retrain adult workers who are now unemployed or underemployed all across the rural south right now.

4) Quit nominating preening, condescending pretty boys from New England for president. Kerry's inability to run in the South largely stemmed from his personality, which even all the hard-core progessives in my family found incredibly off-putting.

Unfortunately, the personalization of the issues sometimes cuts both ways.

But Appalachia is different, even on the scale of Southern politics: you've got a Democratic governor and two D Senators in West Virginia, a Democrat representing the area around Boone and strong liberal Democratic pockets on either side of the Great Smokeys. (I wonder if it goes as far back as the Civil War, when Appalachia was pro-Union.)

Come down from the mountains and look at the North Carolina foothills, an area which includes Sam Ervin's home town, and you've got poor white voters, whose home industries of textiles, paper and furniture have been devastated by outsourcing and CAFTA, marching to the polls for Republicans. Why? Immigrants, gays and the power of the Lord Jesus.

So whaddaya do? Horse, water, etc.

You're completely misreading the South and how it votes. The "looking out for no one but one's own" set is actually largely in opposition to the "morally conservative" set within the GOP, and it's taken a lot of rhetorical and moral contortions for the Republicans to maintain the appearance that they're pleasing both. Not that I have much truck with either.

I don't know what you're seeing in the rape figures -- I haven't seen those. The divorce figures can be pretty easily attributed to two things: lower employment and income, and a lower proportion of Catholics, for whom divorce rates are much lower (and instances of unhappy marriages are higher).

This is too narrow a space to get into all the subtleties behind the South's different voting patterns, but here's an easy one to consider -- the South has a dearth of progressive religious institutions, lower rates of unionization, and fewer progressive institutions overall. Rather than walking away, some of us would like to rectify this situation.

Yes. Having spent large amounts of my life in both, it bears repeating: the southern highlands are quite different culturally, economically, and politically than the southern lowlands. This has been true for well over 200 years. The two share some characteristics, but about as many as the mountain west and the southern lowlands share.

Given their choices in government, they prefer corruption over intrusion. They have long resented the government, believing other institutions are more suited to deal with their social problems.

Er, I don't think this is right. The pre-1970 southern Democrats were always big government Democrats, who believed in government investment in the economy. Ask an old timer in Louisiana about Huey Long, and the answer is "Huey Long built the roads." That's no small thing. One of the major reasons the south came out of WWII as the bluest part of the country was because of the New Deal, which built untold numbers of bridges, roads, railroads, and other structures all over the South.

Now, there's certainly plenty of suspicion about intrusion from the *federal* government, but I see that as an argument for implimenting progressive domestic policies at the state level where they can be regionally tailored, rather than politically walking out on an entire region.

Yes, that's it. There isn't really a progressive answer to that, because we dont't want to win the racist vote back to our party.

"Racial resentment" is a key term. I don't actually know a lot about people who hold racial hatreds, because I do not want to know very much about that subject. But once I browsed on the Internet to see what views are out there, and I found a real basket case who seemed to be envious of every little attention that goes to black people.

This is the real elephant in the living room.

The fact that the GOP builds its majorities by appealing to a host of single issue, bigoted voters is pretty well acknowledged. The pandering to the NRA, homophobes, anti-abortionists, Chistian fundamentalists is an acknowledged fact.

What tends to go largely unacknowledged to a significant degree, is that the largest group of single issue bigots voting GOP is the nations racists.

The South continuing to lead by example in this pathetic practice.

Having gone to school there, I can safely say that NC and AL are indeed a bit different. But I think your big three- abortion/marriage as part of a civil liberties stand and economic infrastructure investment- are true, no matter whether you're in NC, AL- or Ohio, for that matter. So actually you did an excellent job filling in my points (for which I thank you), because infrastructure is one area where we are still lagging behind the rest of the country, and pretty much any 5th grader down here can tell you a lot of it is the legacy of failed Reconstruction-era plans. Not really anything to do with race- in fact, we know our black friends and neighbors struggle with the same issue. It's one of the reasons the New Deal coalition held togather so long. When you start talking about what sorts of infrastructure, you're going to start seeing serious intraregional differences. But the basic need is, I think, the same.

And as for your 4th point- well, all I can say, in the best of Southern tradition, is bless his heart.

Clinton and Al Gore supervised a great expansion in the fortunes of working-class Americans, including white southerners

Now the facts.

Clinton fulfilled the decades-long Republican dream of removing the safety net under the poor as shabby as it undoubtedly is. Lower-paid workers as well as the jobless were abandoned entirely with the ringing call for Democrats to address the concerns of the middle class. The proportion of income going to wages of workers continued to decline and the chasm between poor and privileged continued to widen.

It is ironic that when Gore first ran for president in the primaries, Gore announced himself as the conservative alternative. Now Gore is a wet dream for young bloggers without memory of things past. He was a great aid to Clinton in dismantling the landmark environmental legislation, the Protection of Species Act.

Clinton/Gore debased the political dialogue as one only between conservatives. It is hardly any accident that the House fell to the Republicans under Clinton and the stage was set for our current nightmare.

Times are a' changing. Hopefully the Clintons will soon be consigned to the dustbin of history along with the requirement to select a conservative Democratic presidential nominee from the South.

Best, Terry

5. Maybe was a segregationist.

Oh wait, didn't he just die a while back at about the age of 100? After bolting to the Republicans?

The GOP claims that laws are messages and hypocrisy therefore is inevitable, and government can't do much so government shouldn't try. With that sort of message the repubs can afford to write off whole regions, and to press a narrow partisan advantage.

But liberalism is about making the government serve the people, all the people, and in that light, how can the democratic party serve people when it's perpetually working out these too-clever-by-half strategies for pinpointing districts, states and regions so as to sneak into office on lukewarm less-of-two-evils support?

The party needs to have a political presence everywhere with money and organization and outreach and media interaction. That means a ground-up localized structure. These local dems can find and support candidates who figure out how to win in local conditions. Those that are successful achieve national prominance.

The most successful run for president.

I'm a Southener. I know it's hard for non-Southerners to figure out how to talk to Southerners. But they don't have to. Local dems can do that if they have money and organizational backing. But in the long run the dems can't be the party that cares about the working class if dems aren't comfortable with the working class--including rednecks.

The South is where it is the national democratic party wrote it off.

I agree with everything you say here. There's something about those winters that makes you want to hole up, and something about the summers down here that make you want to go out and howl at the moon in a very un-Minnesotan way.

After watching some of the interactions between white Minnesotans and the newly arrived Hmong and Hispanic populations, I got a lot less tolerant of people there trying to lecture me, the southerner, on racial harmony. "It's not racism, we just want them to act, talk, and dress like everyone else!" (Where everyone else means the white community.)

1) I fail to understand what Dems WEREN'T doing this. As far as I can tell that is about as uncontroversial a position in Dem circles as I have ever seen.

Here's some data that is interesting. Though I'm not sure if it's what you meant. All I can say is that for me personally, being male, it's not a morally complex issue at all. For others it may very well be and a difficult one and one that I would personally like to stay out of except for making sure people have open access to all the information possible to make the decisions.

2) I have been supporting abolishing government recognized marriage and replacing it with an economic/civil system since early 2004.

3) Nationalizing railroads is a good idea and actually spending to imrpove it so that it is more highspeed and modern is great. Totally agree, but:

"Invest in research on how rebuild America's manufacturing core with highly trained workers, in such a way that the superior productivity of American workers overcomes the cost advatages elsewhere"

Can you link me to anything showing that's even POSSIBLE? I'm not saying it's impossible, but before we look at the HOW we need to look at the CAN. Maybe a transformation to an entirely different economic mode is what we'll have to do instead but I don't know.

4) Also, I was a Deaniac (and later a Clark supporter) who lives in a blue dog district. I've had fights with friends from Iowa over the Kerry nomination. Say what you will but Dean was not a pretty boy, he reminded a LOT of people that not only was it okay to be a Dem, but that standing up to the GOP was a good thing.

Well, but when Dr. King marched for open housing in Chicago he was hit in the head with a rock. He said that the violence he encountered there was almost as bad (maybe worse, I would have to look it up), than he encountered in Mississippi. You can look it up in Wikipedia and the web site of the King Center.

Ultimately, Dr. King concluded from his experience dealing with City Hall in Chicago that the Civil Rights movement was bogging down as it ran up against the entrenched interests of the economic power structure. They would make promises to him, but then they wouldn't do anything about their promises. Dr. King couldn't talk very much about that publicly, because he knew he would be branded as a Communist.

As I understand it, Dr. King concluded that one reason you have ghettos is that somebody is making money off the people in the ghettos.

That is very true. I have family in both places. I also have roots in Canada, which makes me an outsider everywhere I go, whether it makes me any more objective or not.

I might have also pointed out that the very distinction between "civilization" and the "wild west" suggests a hierarchic frame of reference. The elites think of themselves as the defenders of Western civilization.

It is probably difficult for a progressive to pry the good and bad motivations apart when the underlying frame of reference is so different. After all, civilization is a good thing, isn't it?

I tend to agree.  But I think it is unfair to paint all of Dixie with the "racist" brush.  But there are enough of them there which makes playing the electoral race/hate card very effective.  The dems lost the south when they took up the cause of civil rights.  That is when the white southern voter switched to the GOP and the GOP is doing everything they can to keep those people who do hate in their fold.  But, again, it doesn't mean every southerner is a racist...just enough to make the difference.

Another difference between North and South, though it may be truer in the Midwest and West than in the Northeast, is the difference between an egalitarian mindset and a hierarchical mindset. In the North you grow up believing that we ARE all pretty much created equal. Conservatives in the north believe that because we ARE equal we should ALL make the effort to succeed and if we do we will more than likely succeed. Liberals believe we should ALL be treated equally and have equality in opportunities.

In the South, they never have believed people are inherently equal.

I agree with you about the Minnesota nice but I think you are overlooking the very strong Scandinavian and German cultural influence on Minnesota and the upper Midwest in general. There is an egalitarian, stoic, taciturn, hard work ethic that results in good schools and healthy lives. Consider those German Catholic farm wives who have a life expectancy of 84 in Stearns County. Granted, the weather did make some difference. If you didn't make hay while the sun shined, you'd never have made it through the winter. But you are right about them not warming up to outsiders particularly racial minorities.

That's because we boomer age feminists remember when the Ivy League was all male, when women couldn't get a job unless they could type and men never got one which required typing. The freedom to make your own choices is a hard won and relatively new freedom for women. That makes the choice and privacy issues particularly salient for women who remember a time when there were few choices.

In a rare moment of candor, my very devoutly Catholic, anti-abortion, 85 year-old mother recently admitted that even she didn't believe the government should be deciding whether or not a woman could have an abortion.

Men who think this issue can be casually cast aside don't have a good sense for the complex emotions that this issue involves for women.

I was born in rural MN near Canada, lived in MN for 30 years, moved to NC for 14 years, now live in Tokyo. In my humble opinion this isn't a South thing so much as a "who's threatening your job" thing. Let me explain. The richest Americans have nothing to fear from the poorest Americans - their worlds are too far apart. Hence, the richest Republicans pander to the poorest Republicans. They get along fine. It's the person "right behind you" that you loathe the most. I find myself being guilty of this at work, in my voting habits, my subtle bigotries. At work I notice the feircest jabs are between two people very close in status - about to trade places.

In the south, who is always right behind the poor white folks, or even the middle-class white folks? The slightly poorer black folks, that's who. If a white person makes some bad decisions, or gets laid off...who can take his job and shove him down the economic ladder? The black person, the immigrant, foreigners, and any other working person of average intelligence.

As a member of the middle-class, I sense I'm always about two missed paychecks away from a double-wide and no pension or insurance. So I naturally vote against the "uneducated, ignorant poor people" as I call them - those who are not that far from me though I hate to admit it.

I may also naturally vote against the rich who I believe have unfair access to the best colleges, secure investments, insurance and nice perks. At work I used to believe they had some class-advantage I just can't quite overcome. A stupid thought, but it may still linger there in my mind.

Which brings me back to the South. The poor whites in the south are, or feel they are, just barely ahead of the blacks - who tend to vote Democratic. If blacks are perceived as Democratic, the whites will vote Republican, as a matter of self=preservation. The blacks are "too close."

In the north, there's still a feeling of such wide separation - certainly in MN - that the white majority has nothing to fear from different people because there are so few of them. That's changing in MN, and the time will come when the locals will feel threatened and start assuming the bigoted, fear-mongering and loathing that is so common with anyone when faced with an immediate threat to their perks and status.

Can Democrats do anything about winning both the southern white and black vote? Can anyone convince you that someone socially and economically "right behind you" poses no threat to you? The only way I see is working towards bringing everyone's standard of living up together...very difficult indeed, but to do that requires valuing education, cooperation, respect, dignity -- traditional Democratic values.

You point toward the Northeast and Midwest as areas you want to concentrate on.

I don't think that you can do that without tackling the issue of the erosion of the (white) Catholic vote, a subject very dear to my heart. Unfortunately, it gives some on the left the willies when I discuss it on the internet.

And as for your 4th point- well, all I can say, in the best of Southern tradition, is bless his heart.

Hee hee... That boy, he just ain't right...

Unlike the self proclaimed progressive posters who have never lived in the South and are posting opinions about us--let me make this clear. Poor rural white southerners will never, as a body, vote Democratic until they feel that the Democrat party is worth voting for.

I can absolutely assure you that the elitist propaganda crap that is being posted here as representative of "what Southerners think" is precisely what Southern Republicans love to hear. It makes their job of rustling up Republican votes and Republican candidates so much easier.

Democracy is the art of consensus and leading by example. Blind denigration of a significant and growing region of our country is not a promising strategy for Democrats to take control of the federal government. There are no regions in our nation without warts, simply painting the South as some sort of bastion of ignorance is beyond stupid.

I cannot answer the question as stated, because I am not a conservative. I am not even a moderate. I believe that the more one learns about the history of race relations in all sections of this country, the more it becomes apparent that Dr. Martin Luther King was the greatest man in the history of the United States. Nobody else was even close. I am for most practical purposes a pacifist. I was never really convinced that the war against Afghanistan was completely merited. I never believed there were any WMD in Iraq. I always thought the war in Iraq was a fraud. I believe in nationalizing the health insurance business, the pharamceutical companies and probably everybody else in the healthcare industry. If we had a true left in this country, which has not been the case for many years, I would probably be described as a Social Democrat. I might be a Marxist, if I had not known some Marxists when I was in college -- they were just as bad as Bush and Rove.

When I said it "cuts both ways" I was thinking, for example, of a couple of people at this site who called Senator Lindsey Graham a "Huckleberry" when he caved on Bush's torture bill. I wrote that the term "Huckleberry" strikes me as an ethnic slur. I share the sense of betrayal that those writers expressed, but I think it is better to call it what it is -- betrayal -- rather than dismiss an entire ethnic group as ignorant and worthless. There were three prominent Republican senators who caved, and only one was singled out for the ethnic slur. If I were to disagree with Barack Obama about something and characterize him with an ethnic slur, you would rightly be all over me.

The idea of applying an ethnic slur to Barack Obama was intended to be so obviously ridiculous that nobody would take it seriously. If anybody picks this up as a legitimate way to characterize Barack Obama I will have totally, absolutely and irretrievably failed. That would be a nightmare.

At the same time I hope that raising this issue will be sufficiently disturbing to readers that they will understand what it means to call Senator Graham a "Huckleberry."

I appreciate the clarification and amplification. The Wesleys, for example, were Evangelicals, not Fundamentalists.

Getting off on a different tack, people tend to forget that the Women's Christian Temperance Union was allied with the Suffragettes. My maternal grandmother (who was from the Deep South) hated alcohol, for the very good reason that two of her brothers were alcoholics. But she also spent her entire life working to encourage women to go on to higher education.

Many people consider my grandmother to have been a crank, but I think that was because she was an educated woman with ideas of her own, in a time when that was not appreciated. She was also very religious, but I never heard her talk about religion as much as average people do today.

Right, but sometimes I think we go a little overboard with the work-ethic stoic thing and it becomes a convenient excuse. An easy example is the "space bubble" the farther north you go the larger it gets, something close to 3-feet in the GrandForks-EGF and Fargo-Moorhead regions.

I'm perfectly aware that Minnesotans can learn a lot about dealing with minorities from southerners. It's not all Klan country down there, far from it. Being Hispanic (family was in Texas before it was it's own republic) maybe I see it more than someone who is a white Minnesotan though I've lived in MN all my life until about 2 months ago.