Often you need to hit bottom before you can start working your way back up. We Southern Democrats are basically at that point. With control of only two of 22 legislative bodies, three of 11 governors’ mansions and precious few other statewide offices, Southern Democrats are an endangered species indeed. In 1969, Republican strategist Kevin Phillips argued that the South was “shaping up as the pillar of a national conservative party.” He was half right: Although Democrats have made great strides elsewhere, between 1992 and 2012 Republicans won the governorships and legislatures of all but two Southern states. The last Democratic presidential candidate to campaign seriously throughout the South was Lyndon Johnson. And this year, Democrats aren’t even fielding a candidate for Alabama’s U.S. Senate race.
The American South has a unique political culture, and as we approach the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, there is no better time to chart where that culture is heading. But it is not the Civil War years in particular that define our region’s politics so much as the 12 years that followed. Reconstruction, that fraught period in our history, rife with misunderstanding and mythical remembering, still haunts the South.
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Make no mistake. Politics in the South over the last century and a half has been dominated and driven by one thing: race. From the time federal troops left Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina in 1877—12 years after the end of the war—until today, race, to varying degrees, has been a political constant. From the establishment of Jim Crow laws through Plessy v. Ferguson, Strom Thurmond’s explicitly segregationist run for president, Brown v. Board of Education, Little Rock, Montgomery, Selma, desegregation and George Wallace, the thread is long and clear. Race. It is the subject of our great literature, from To Kill a Mockingbird to Faulkner to Friday Night Lights. It is the real topic of our everyday debates over everything from public schools and mass transit to health care and the minimum wage. And this Reconstruction hangover, this domination of a single, tormenting issue, has had a unique political consequence: one-party domination.
First, of course, it was one-party domination by Democrats, the party of resistance, of the anti-carpetbaggers. In fact, no other region of the country has ever been so completely dominated by one political party for so long—almost 100 years, so long that generations passed in which some Southern folks never even met a Republican. But all of that changed following the final implementation of Brown, the Voting Rights Act of 1964 and the Civil Rights Act of 1965. Those momentous steps toward racial equality birthed the modern GOP in the South. This was the new resistance: The modern Republican Party in the South, once again, was built on race and the anti-Washington Democratic backlash brought about by civil rights. Republicans now freely admit that the intent of Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” was to harness and stoke that backlash for electoral gain. And even if the party’s Southern wing has transcended some of this obsessive single-issue focus on fighting civil rights, it has never strayed too far from the principles laid out in Ronald Reagan’s seminal August 1980 speech at Mississippi’s Neshoba County Fair in support of “states’ rights.”
In effect, the South simply traded domination by one political party for domination by another. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.
Barack Obama’s election has shown the progress our country has made, while highlighting the struggles—surprising to many of us—that the South continues to face. But today, for the first time in a long time, the South is also changing. I am in my mid-40s, and my generation came of age and went to school in the middle of the great desegregation battles of the 1960s and ’70s. I grew up in Baton Rouge, La., and I remember desegregation and white flight like it was last year. Now, the children of desegregation have children of their own in school. We forget the passions that burned through the South back then, as Southern governors and school boards threatened to close schools rather than let children learn side by side.
But the world did not end, society did not collapse and we now live two generations into a racially integrated society thought unthinkable when my father and mother were teenagers in 1950s Louisiana. When I discussed marriage equality with my 11-year-old daughter, I had to explain that not long ago in parts of the country, African-Americans and whites could not legally marry. I might as well have been describing the conflicts between Henry Clay’s Whigs and Andrew Jackson’s Democrats. Her incredulous look makes me feel both old and happy. It is what progress looks like.
This is where the road back to power starts for Southern Democrats. Populism and economic inequality will be the battleground of the 21st century, and while it’s true that in the South these issues are still inextricably tied to race, it’s a different conversation than the one our parents had. It is more honest and more open, both about race and about its economic and social implications for our society. We are the only party that can have that frank discussion. Racial equality leads to economic opportunity. We should own this issue, whether we are talking to African Americans, Hispanics or whites.
This is something the Republicans—trapped by their base and their history—simply cannot do. And it is the core not only of their utter lack of support within the black community but also of their problem with Hispanic voters, the South’s fastest-growing demographic. Of the 10 states with the fastest-growing Hispanic populations from 2000 to 2011, all but two are in the South, with Alabama, South Carolina and Tennessee topping the list, and Hispanics are more than twice as likely to identify as Democrats than Republicans.
To win over these new voters, Republicans must change their understanding of their own history. The past year has shown just how hard that is. All Democrats must do is embrace our history.
Thanks to John F. Kennedy, Andrew Young, Lyndon Johnson, Barbara Jordan and a host of others, we can do this. We can end the discussion of race as an issue that has divided us since our founding and talk about race as the economic issue it is, with real implications for the present and the future. This is not to say that every campaign must begin with a discussion of race. Far from it. But we must internalize it, embrace it and acknowledge that racial equality—really the equality of and opportunity for all men and women, is at the core what we believe—at the core of our economic message; it has been the very foundation of our party since 1965. I for one am proud of it, and we can now win on it.
Step two for Democrats deals with another taboo subject: money.
For three decades, Southern Democrats have basically run against or away from Washington. And when that does not work, we have run a “the other guy is way crazier than me” campaign to brand our opponents as out of the mainstream. The domination of media by national cable news, the rise of the Internet and the slow death of local news have made bashing Washington, D.C., obsolete or ineffective. But taking down the other guy, while a fun way to campaign, is not a long-term strategy for sustained victory. Sooner or later, our opponents will come to their senses.