You could probably spend your whole life arguing with Paul
Krugman but every once in a while the great Nobel Prize Winner
comes up with a doozy that can’t be ignored. (He won the prize
for international trade, not political analysis.)
Last week Krugman announced
the Republicans have become a permanent minority and it’s their
own fault. The reason is that the only issue Republicans have
going for them is race:
Forty years ago the G.O.P. decided, in effect, to make itself
the party of racial backlash. And everything that has happened
in recent years, from the choice of Mr. Bush as the party’s
champion, to the Bush administration’s pervasive incompetence,
to the party’s shrinking base, is a consequence of that
decision.
Does that surprise you? Did you know that in the midst of the
Cold War with the Soviets, welfare reform, budget deficits,
international trade, immigration, Islamic terrorism and financial
meltdowns, all we’ve really been talking about is race? (It you
want to find a race-obsessed tribe you could do no better than to
look among Krugman’s editorial-page staff at the New York Times,
but that’s another story.)
How to deal this argument? Here’s one approach. The other day I
came across a bio of Larry McDonald, the five-term Georgia
Congressman who died aboard KAL Flight 007 when it was shot down
by the Soviets in 1983. Here’s what Wikipedia says about him:
Larry McDonald was known for his conservative views, even by
Southern standards. [O]ne study named him the second most
right-wing member of either chamber since 1937. He . .
considered [Communism] an international conspiracy…a view later
echoed in the words of President Ronald Reagan who called the
Soviet Union an “Evil Empire”. In another sense, McDonald [was]
a precursor of the Reagan supply-side revolution….An admirer of
Austrian economics, he was an advocate of tight monetary policy
[and] a passionate advocate of laissez-faire or market based
policies.
His staunch conservative views on social issues attracted
controversy. For instance, McDonald is noted for using
amendments to stop government aid to homosexuals. He also
advocated the use of a non-approved drug Laetrile to treat
patients in advanced stages of cancer.
Now here’s something else interesting about McDonald. He was
a Democrat. In fact in 1983 just about every Congressman
from Virginia to Texas — the boundaries of what was once called
“The Old Confederacy” — was Democratic. On economic, social and
foreign policy issues they were probably the most conservative
constituency in the country. Yet all of them voted with the
Democratic Party and had been doing so for over 100 years. Why?
The explanation comes in one word — r-a-c-e.
The “Solid South,” which gave the Democratic Party its most
reliable base from the last half of the 19th century to the end
of the 20th century was there for one reason — because the
Democrats had fiercely defended the Confederacy during the Civil
War. After 1865, the Democrats were the party of “Rum, Romanism
and Rebellion” — meaning the anti-prohibitionists, the city
immigrants, and the former Confederacy. The Solid South gave
Woodrow Wilson the Presidency. (Wilson, originally from Virginia,
was virulently anti-Negro.) It formed the biggest electoral bloc
of the Roosevelt Coalition and gave the Democrats control of the
House of Representatives for half a century from 1954 to 1994.
All this was payback for the Democrats supporting the South
during the Civil War. Most Democratic governance during the 20th
century would not have been possible except for this historic
anomaly.
What happened in 1994 was that — under the guidance of
historically conscious Congressmen such as Newt Gingrich and Phil
Gramm — white Southerners finally forgot their Civil War
allegiances and joined their natural constituency in the
Republican Party. As Gingrich said at the time, “the Civil War is
finally over.”
White Southerners differ little in their political preferences
from the residents of Idaho or Alaska. They are rural and
small-town conservatives — which is why Sarah Palin played so
well there. The only thing that makes them different is that they
live amidst a vast African-American population that votes heavily
Democratic. This makes Southern politics highly competitive.
Blacks hold many elective offices in the contemporary South and
Presidential elections can be breathlessly close, as it was in
Georgia last year. The only wild card in this alignment is that
blacks tend to be socially conservative and are not
always willing to follow their liberal brethren on issues like
gay marriage and paying obeisance to the ACLU. Still, all this is
a great improvement from the days when the South was a one-party
region with Southern Democrats keeping African Americans off the
voter rolls.
A few years back, trial lawyers began suing insurance companies
and other large corporations for supposedly supporting slavery by
once doing business in the antebellum South. I wrote several
articles suggesting they sue the one American institution that
had benefited most from its support of slavery — the Democratic
Party. The trial lawyers, being the deepest pockets in the
Democratic Party, could pay the bills. No one took me up on it,
however, and I am willing to let bygones be bygones. The same is
not likely for Krugman and company.
The main political division in the country is now urban versus
rural, with educated suburban voters playing a swing vote in the
middle. Race has nothing to do with it — except perhaps that
African Americans vote 90 percent Democratic, the most lopsided
commitment by any major ethnic constituency. Still, all this is
not likely to prevent people like Krugman from beating their
chests in self-congratulations and declaring anyone who votes
differently from them a racist.
