This is from an essay I wrote nearly a year ago. I wouldn't try to assert now all that I did then, but the essay is what it is. I was attempting to diagnose the disaster that Republicans had put themselves in, and predict where it could take them. Part I discusses the kind of Republican that I feel has taken over their party. Part II will discuss their takeover of the party. Part III discusses how this is a recipe for disaster if they aren't toppled by other Republican factions.
Part I
"the most American region"
Southern Conservatives sought a coalition in which they were center stage. This should not really be a surprise, as Lowndes attributes to Southern segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace the belief that "the issues he addressed were of paramount importance to the entire nation" because "the South was the most American region: that only this region could lead the struggle to safeguard the nation’s historic virtues," (Lowndes, 80). If the South is the truest America, then the preservation of the Southern way of life must be a high priority. The eternal insistence that their priorities come first led to the break-up of the original national Democratic hegemony, as free-soilers and others broke away and joined former Whigs and third party members based on the slavery issue, which Southerners were unwilling to compromise on. This insistence prevented Democrats from building a broad-based coalition through the end of the century, and the only times in which the Democratic candidate for president could win for the next century is when that candidate came from the Northeast, and mostly from New York, with its large number of electoral votes. This insistence led to the downfall of the New Deal coalition because they would not tolerate the direction the Democratic Party leadership was going on Civil Rights. As Lowndes tells us, "it dawned on southern political elites that being in a national majority meant that their sectional power was diminishing. The South became just one among many components in an alignment that included urban white ethnic and black voters," (Lowndes, 13). When they discovered that on the race issue they could no longer dominate the party, they left it.
When Strom Thurmond announced he was switching parties and supporting Goldwater, "his announcement stated his aim was equally to alter the course of the Republican Party, to commit the GOP to racial conservatism," (Lowndes, 73). Not only did Southern conservatives join the Republican Party, they co-opted it. As Lowndes describes the process, "[t]he most effective ground of the conservatives-in terms of both organization and newly infused political passion-was the South, where conservative operatives began to organize in earnest to take over the party for a Goldwater run in 1964," (Lowndes, 60). Significantly, a re-energized and well-organized Republican Party in the South could have a major affect on the party, as Lowndes tells us that "malapportionment of seats on the RNC gave southerners influence greater than their numbers," (Lowndes, 60). With the nomination of Goldwater made possible by the Southern conservatives, and Goldwater’s win in several Deep South states, Southern conservatives began to take a major, perhaps leading role in the Party.
This is significant. In 1956 Dwight Eisenhower, the Republican nominee for president, won Louisiana, and the Republican nominee in 1964, Barry Goldwater won the entire Deep South on a states’ rights platform, with Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. The last election in which any Republican nominee won a state in the Deep South had been during Reconstruction, when in 1876 Rutherford Hayes overcame a popular vote loss of 264,000 votes and won by one electoral vote in what has perhaps been the nation’s most controversial and disputed election, with both of Hayes’ Deep South state victories being among the controversies. Since 1964, the South has become more and more reliable for Republican candidates.
A list of the recent leadership of the Republican Party is a list of Southerners and their fellow travelers. The recent and disgraced former leader of the House Republicans was Tom Delay of Texas, his whip was Roy Blunt, of Missouri (which I consider, as a border state, to be thoroughly soaked in the marinade of Southern conservatism), and his predecessor Dick Armey became the first Southern Republican House Leader in 1995. Newt Gingerich of Georgia became the first Southern Republican House Speaker in 1995. Recent Senate Republican leadership includes Howard Baker of Tennessee, Trent Lott of Mississippi, Bill Frist of Tennessee, and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. In 1977, Howard Baker became the first Republican senate leader from the South since the position was made official in 1925. The first Southern Republican President was Dwight Eisenhower of Texas in 1952, and every Southern Republican president has been a Texan. The only previous Republican nominee for president from the South was John C. Fremont, originally of Georgia, in 1856. Many of the recent Republican presidential nominees have been Southern, including George Bush in 1988, and his son in 2000, both of Texas, John McCain (who was raised in Virginia) in 2008, and while others, such as Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, and some other leaders such as Dick Cheney, are not from the South, they have had similar positions in the past on race issues. And after all, since my argument is not that the geography of the South is the problem, but a philosophy which I call Southern conservatism, a philosophy which is not limited to the South, is the problem, I think what matters more is that Ronald Reagan was a staunch supporter of states’ rights to the extent that he began his campaign by making a speech about states’ rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where 3 Civil Rights workers were murdered (Lowndes, 160). Likewise, I find it significant that Cheney opposed the creation of a holiday in memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Tapper), and opposed erecting sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa (Marquis), while Dole locked the text of an anti-apartheid bill in his office so that the Senate could not act on it ("Mending Fences", 1). The party of Lincoln, though, had once been a stronger supporter of civil rights than the Democrats, with higher percentages of the Republican caucuses voting for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than Democrats (Zak), but this would change after the 1960s. "With the southern and conservative takeover of the GOP now complete," (73) Lowndes tells us of the Goldwater nomination, looking back now, "as opposed to the Republican capture of the white South, we may better speak of a southern capture of the Republican Party," (Lowndes, 6).
But as I referred to fellow travelers like Reagan and Cheney who are not Southern themselves, but fit well into the Southern conservative party, there is a group of voters outside the South who are similar who could perhaps be included in that faction. Lowndes describes how first George Wallace, and then Richard Nixon, tried to use race in a subtler way, by not appealing to white supremacy, but talking about how "federal legislation aimed at integrating unions would threaten job security," how "if an open-housing bill were passed, home-owners would be forced to sell to anyone," speaking to those "who were nervous about the changing racial makeup of their jobs and their neighborhoods" (85). This was part of an effort to reach voters not in the South, but in the North, including traditionally Democratic constituencies in the working class and Catholic populations, and particularly working class Catholics of non-Anglo-Saxon heritage. Lowndes describes how Wallace appealed to these people by trying to rebrand them, though they may be Eastern European or recent immigrants, as white (85-86). Nixon pursued these voters as well, as a means of finally breaking the New Deal coalition apart, as Lowndes says "Nixon also angled for alienated, working-class Democrats who were neither conservatives of the Goldwater stripe nor fully comfortable with racial liberalism" (116).
We may be seeing a new attempt to broaden "the social issue," in the Republican Party’s recent turn against illegal immigrants. Republican presidential nominee John McCain himself had sponsored a comprehensive immigration reform bill, but later stated that he would not vote for it if it came to the senate floor (Benen). This is symbolic of much of the party’s recent turn. Samuel Huntington, an influential social scientist, recently wrote that "Latino immigration threatens ‘Anglo-Protestant values’ which are the ‘creed’ of American culture" (MALDEF), and in addition writer John Feehery has theorized that "the anger towards illegal immigration is only partially explained by job security. The biggest reason that many Americans dislike illegal immigration is a fear of crime". It seems to me that the very same messaging that was used to unify whites for Wallace and Nixon in relation to desegregation is being used today for immigration. Because Latino immigrants and their descendants are broadly spread across the nation, this rhetoric about crime, jobs, and culture could have a nationwide appeal, and the particular concentration of Latinos in the Southwest could have the affect re-energizing the Republican Sun Belt coalition across the entire Southern tier of the nation.
Part I
Look for Part III tomorrow early afternoon, PST.