Kossack kissthespy in Alabama is very upset, and asks for help. See A Return to the Dark Ages? Make a Difference! (Please rec it.)
I live in Alabama, and for the first time in many months, I am actually terrifed for my life, liberty, family, and sanity
It's a good news, bad news story. First the good news.
We have a real chance at electing an African American governor in a state that once worshipped George Wallace...Republican Christian Conservatives are slinking into holes and under rocks, looking for any cover they can find, in an attempt to distance themselves from the manifold disasters of the last eight years....They've taken down their "Christ Lives" and "Repent!" yard signs, put away their Rush Limbaugh t-shirts, and finally removed those "W" stickers from their monster truck Chevys.
And the bad news.
I am terrified to find it returning, on a level that makes even the last eight years look almost friendly.
The Black Democratic candidate for Governor is Artur Davis. He has been leading opponent Bradley Burne in the polls for months.
Are you old enough to remember how it used to be in Alabama? Say in the 60s, when comedian Dick Gregory claimed that he got fired from the post office for putting mail to Alabama in the Foreign slot. Or before.
It is worth our while to take a brief look at how Alabama got to where it is.
Thomas Jefferson opened up a large part of the Louisiana Territory to slavery, creating the Deep South, that Down the River that was every slave's nightmare, and making the Civil War, pardon me, the War of Northern Aggression, inevitable.
Alabama joined the Confederacy, and lost, and then went with the Klan and Jim Crow.
Alabama lost again, in the 1950s and 60s, when Jim Crow was overturned and the FBI shut down Klan violence. Afterwards, even Gov. Wallace relented on segregation, but many people went with Massive Resistance for as long as they could.
The current junior Senator from Alabama,
Jefferson (Davis)
(Gen. Pierre August Toutant) Beauregard
Sessions
III
remains as a prime symbol of the prideful but finally doomed Unreconstructed Rebel tradition. His great-grandfather constructed this name during the Reconstruction era, and the grandfather and father thought the tradition worth extending.
The traditions of the so-called Southern Aristocracy, of playing every racial, ethnic, and economic group off against the others, of lily-white "Christian" church intolerance, and so on, are very much alive, even though the Klan and much of the other apparatus is dead or moribund. The Tea Party movement, together with the Birthers (Obama's birth certificate isn't a birth certificate), Deathers (Death panels in the Health Care bill), Tenthers (nullification of Federal law under color of the Tenth Amendment), and other purveyors of organized political fantasy, are going strong in the climate of fear that has the Republicans whistling past their own graveyard. So strong that they will soon drive every moderate out of the party.
We, and President Obama, don't have to get into it with them. As I have said here before, President Obama's actions are in accord with the Napoleonic maxim, "Never interrupt the enemy when he is making a grave error," just as with McCain and Palin and the rest during the campaign. (After the convention bounce, Mcain-Palin lost about 1.5% a day in the polls for the next two weeks.) Candidate Obama pointed out a few times that the attacks on him were insults to the American people, or on Muslim-Americans, and then left the people to figure out the rest. More than enough of them did.
On the other hand, the Obama campaign never let up on the ground game, knocking on doors, calling to every state, organizing ever more volunteers, making sure that people had rights rides to the polls if they needed them. So, too, you should think of making a donation or three in Alabama, or going there, or signing up to make phone calls. And of joining in other worthy fights, too, of course. It's a pity that there is no Democratic challenger to Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby for next year, when he will be 76. I would take such delight in giving him a scare, even if we couldn't turn the rascal out.
Still, the end is in sight. Racism and intolerance are losing political support as the old, rich, White men with their hands on the levers of power die off, one by one, and their cold, dead hands are pried off those levers by younger people who have increasingly grown up with blacks, gays, and all the rest of American society. It has taken two generations since the modern Civil Rights movement began to loosen the Good Old Boys Club hold on power enough to get this far, but the entire Old Confederacy and all the rest of the Bible belt is going through that change and will inevitably tip during the next generation.
Which still does not mean that we will be in a post-racial society. The German Nazi regime collapsed, but anti-Semitism hasn't gone away. There is still the Nativist strain that tells all immigrants to go back where they came from. (To which Native Americans have replied, "We'll help you pack.") Anti-black and anti-white prejudice will continue, along with anti-anybody-else-you-can-think-of. Gay-bashing and feminist-bashing will continue. But none of them will remain the political program of a national party. And when they can no longer win elections, the corporate funding for racism and intolerance will start to dry up.
The demographic transformation can be measured all over the US on issues ranging from gay marriage to the Cuban embargo. The graph of opinion on such matters vs. age is very nearly a straight line in many cases. They appear to shift downward at about 2% annually, a little faster on some issues in some places, a little slower in others. Health care is already running about even in the South, according to a Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll. It is only the built-in delay between public opinion shifting and electoral consequences, plus corporate money, that is keeping Southern politics from tipping on Health Care right now.
Everybody in Alabama can see the signs of the fading of the old ways that kissthespy described. We saw how some of the changes started to happen a long time ago in the book and movie Fried Green Tomatoes, and they can easily be traced in history and literature much further back, and forward to today. We have seen it in the headlines. We can see it here and there in Alabama politics. We can see it in Birmingham, which among other things was the first city in the US to buy One Laptop Per Child XO laptops for its schoolchildren. (I'll have more to say about that another time.)
Everybody sees it. Everybody knows. That means that the old anti-everything alliance is scared. It can see the writing on the wall. The Bible says that the original writing, "Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin" meant, "You have been measured in the balance, and found wanting. Your kingdom will be divided among your enemies." Amen, brothers and sisters. Were you wondering about those racists foaming at the mouth about Reparations? Well, there you go. They heard it from God himself.
When the end of a regime is near, when its ideas are utterly discredited and about to be abandoned forever. it always attempts to whip up a froth of persecution fantasies. It always attempts to rally all of its old forces, and to inspire them to new heights of ferocious loyalty. It always attempts to stifle and stomp on the new. So it should be no surprise that Alabama is temporarily going back again to the old climate of fear, bringing out the old symbols, repeating the old slogans and a few new ones. The entire Old Confederacy is there with them. Well, all of it that survives. There is much less of it in Virginia and North Carolina, which Obama won last year, and a lot more of it in Alabama and its neighbors.
Old-line Alabama is raring for a third go at the Union, the Yankees, and the Second Coming of Abraham Lincoln in the form of a mixed-race president. They face even worse odds than the previous two times, because now a modest majority of their own young voters have rejoined the Union mentally and morally as well as physically, mostly rejecting racism and intolerance, enough to put the entire state in the balance.
The problem, as in any conquest of the world by the younger generation, is that the older generation regards it as its duty to hold off their children until they have grown nearly as old and preferably twice as hidebound as their elders. But the problem for the older generation in Alabama is that they are failing more and more with each new generation.
So, yes, it's scary for our side, but these are the problems we want to have. We can't get through them and get over them if we aren't willing to bring them up. But these problems won't last as long as their supporters are trying to convince themselves they will. Think of this as a political bubble, like the recent tech and housing bubbles, that will grow and grow until it bursts and there is nothing left of it but wreckage.