CT Blue

Recently there was a special election for a Louisiana congressional seat. The results were somewhat shocking: a Republican who supported the expanded Medicaid benefits in Obamacare beat his mainstream (the “tea party” is now mainstream ) Republican opponent. (The district in question is scarlet red) It appears that even dumb poor Southern white people actually do want medical coverage.

Not an earth shaking development obviously, but it may just be that it presages a trend. For it occurs to me that there is an opening in the Southern branch of the Republican party for what I hesitate to call liberalism or progressivism, but something akin. The Republican Party has managed to leverage a racist message, overt or covert, into dominance in the South, while implementing policies that serve the interests of the corporations rather than the ignorant angry whites that vote for them. The fact is, these voters are not invested in the policies that their candidates support; they are just as like to support anti-corporate, pro-people policies so long as they can convince themselves that only they will benefit.

Back in the olden days it was not unusual for Southern Democrats to vote distinctly left of center and get elected and re-elected so long as they were reliably opposed to civil rights legislation. William Fulbright pops to mind. LBJ destroyed that wing of the party, along with the unmissed racist Southern branch, by destroying the Democratic Party's racist brand. The Northern and Southern branches had been in a fairly uneasy alliance since the New Deal, if not before. But, so long as you watched your tongue and didn't try to make it look like you were advocating things that might help black people, a Southern politician could lean pretty far left back then. Say what you will about Huey Long, but you can't call the guy a right winger, certainly not of the ilk we have today. I suspect that when his listeners heard him call for programs that would make “Every Man a King”, they understood without asking, or without him having to say, that the adjective “white” was understood to come just before the word “man”.

The Republican party's racist brand is now secure throughout the South, and, despite a few rumblings, the Northern branch of Lincoln's old party (history is full of ironies), to the extent it exists, seems uninterested in doing anything about it. So, there's room in the South for a Republican that appeals from the left to an electorate that is, after all, composed mainly of poor whites who can only claim, as Dylan observed, to “have more than the blacks”, which isn't much. At the moment, any Republican who comes along advocating programs for these people could gain a following, so long as he or she can convey the impression that only Christian white folks need apply. After all, the operative assumption is that all Republican Southern politicians are racists; they send that message in scores of ways, so that magic R will send the message all those Southern racists want to hear. It's not much, and it's certainly not optimal, but politics has always made for strange bedfellows, and at least a Republican of that ilk might make common cause with Democrats to do something for the little guy.