Department of Meaningless Historical Analogies: Civil War Edition (or, Racists Galore!)
Because I find less wrong with supporting John McCain in 2008 than seceding in order to protect the peculiar institution, I think that Andrew Sullivan’s statement
Recall that the map of the 2008 presidential election was almost identical to the map of the states in the Civil War, with now Northern-infiltrated Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida the only exceptions. And that, to my mind, is why we don’t just have a refusal to compromise; we have an essential refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the president or the Senate, because they are not controlled by the South. Heaven knows how this dynamic is made worse by having a miscegenated president. But I do not doubt that, somewhere in the psyche, it has to be.deserves a little fisking. Because if there’s anything that irritates me (other than calling a quotation a “quote,” or the way in which the passive voice is despised by journalism majors), it’s an historical analogy that only works when you want it to.
deserves a little fisking.
To begin with, in defense of the good Commonwealth of Kentucky(and Missouri and Kansas), three Union states backed McCain in 2008. Moreover,West Virginia, which, in effect, seceded from secession, also backed John McCain. That is, of the 35 states that existed by the end of the civil war, 28 allow for the mapping of Union:Confederate onto Obama:McCain; “almost identical” means eighty-percent.
In 2000, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, West Virginia, New Hampshire, and Kentucky were the only states to flip sides; that is U:C maps onto Gore:Bush at 29:35, or 83%. It was the same ratio in 2004, only substituting Iowa for New Hampshire. Indeed, George W. Bush carried the entirety of the Confederacy in both years. We can infer from this that he was the second coming of Jeff Davis.
But the analogy is a little messier. I can already hear retorts of, but Kentucky and Missouri were slave states! Fine—so were Delaware, Maryland, and D.C.; West Virginia emancipated its slaves upon entry to the Union. Going by the issue of slavery alone, 27 states map onto the issue in 2008 as in 1865, or 77%. In 2000, Kansas, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, New Hampshire, Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia. “flipped,” or 27 of 35 states; the same number, again, in 2004. (In all these cases, I’m not including D.C., we’re talking about States here—but its inclusion has no effect on the comparisons.) Apparently, Al Gore and John Kerry were defeated for being “lovers” of a particular term that I cannot repeat in this forum.
And then there’s this problem: the Confederacy only had eleven official members; 13 if insist on counting Kentucky and Missouri along with the flag, despite the states’ respective refusals to secede; fourteen if you count Oklahoma(which was then a territory). John McCain won 22 states in 2008. That is, only half the states that wanted John McCain to become President existed in 1865; and only eight of twenty-two were members of the Confederacy.
Is there a correlation? Yes. But I don’t think the numbers show you anything other than an anecdote. And there is certainly not enough to claim that there is a causal effect.
The point is: preferring John McCain to Barack Obama did not make one a racist in 2008; just as not approving of his job performance in 2011 does not make one a racist. This holds true even for those with the thickest Southern* accents. The Republican Party is the party of the South, yes—and of the Mountain West. I find this every bit as insulting as his claims that Kentucky backed Hilary Clinton over Obama because—wait for it—Kentuckians are racist. Claiming that the other side is not a legitimate negotiating partner, or cannot be taken in good faith, because 150 years ago the ancestors of some of the voters who elected them seceded is … well, I’ll let it speak for itself. But I think we can agree it’s not any way forward.
If the Republican Party is holding the economy hostage on the debt issue, there is far more evidence that they’re doing it because they are short-sighted political opportunists, or Randian True Believers, or politically naïve incompetents, or some combination of the preceding,** than because Barack Obama’s father was African and his mother was white. But then again, everything because a bit easier to comprehend, a bit easier to see the numerous ways in which you are right and they are wrong, when the other side is whistlin’ Dixie and all the True Americans are on yours.
*One minor thing: why is it that people act like there’s one “Southern accent” but acknowledge a whole variety of Yankee accents? Someone from Harlan does not sound like someone from Paducah, let alone the Gulf states. Just saying.
**In case you think I’m being biased, trust me when I say that my opinions of Congressional/professional Democrats are no kinder. I mean, Mitch McConnell might think that politics is more important than statesmanship, but at least he’s good at what he does.
Bonus Drive-by Truckers song for making it to the end of the post:
I’ll be fair. The modern base of the Republican Party thinks that any Democratic Presidency is illegitimate and has basically thought that since the mid-90’s.
I have no doubt that if Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Bill Richardson, or alternate-universe Matt Santos has won in ’08, they’d be doing the same thing to them.
So, no, the modern Republican Party as a political organization isn’t racist. It’s just a cult.Report
I’m not so sure the rhetoric would be the same. Specifically the “take our country back” / “radical-in-chief” stuff. I don’t remember much like that with Clinton, but political rhetoric in this country has changed a lot in a decade.
Specifically, I don’t think we would hear Hillary Clinton being called a food-stamp President, an anti-colonialist, and someone who’s variously trying to create some sort of stealth reparations (this has come up a few times; see the Pigford stuff). I don’t know whether Sonya Sotomayor would’ve been called a racist had she been nominated by Clinton. Note that Newt Gingrich is associated with three of four of these remarks, and he’s considered the brains of the operation.Report
Oh, no doubt there’d be different tactics. For instance, if Hillary was POTUS, you’d suddenly hear all these stories about Bill really being the one in charge in meetings, insane amounts of overanalyzation of what she wore to this meeting or that meeting, and believe me, there’d be no grudging respect of her foreign policy.
To be honest, I don’t think the political rhetoric has changed that much. Remember, the biggest talk radio host in the nation all but said the Clintons _killed_ somebody. What I think has happened is we now have a majority of Republican politicians who have gone through their political life in a world where liberals and Democrats are the enemy, unAmerican, and all the rest. Instead of throwing some red meat to the crazies to keep them quiet, the crazies are now being elected.Report
For instance, if Hillary was POTUS, you’d suddenly hear all these stories about Bill really being the one in charge in meetings
uh huhReport
Gingrich fell from GOP grace c. 1998 to the relief of all. It’s the 21st century, dude. Slime machine needs updating.
[You may have a point about “anti-colonialist.” But considering that’s what his father was—and vehemently—and BHO rose to stardom partially on his “Dreams From My Father” auto-hagiography, it’s not entirely unfair.]Report
Gingrich was getting 10-15% in national polls for the GOP Presidential race in _2012_ before his campaign imploded. He’s been pointed to numerous time by both current and former Republican political figures as one of the leading intellectuals in the party.
This idea that Gingrich hasn’t been somebody in GOP circles is just that latest revision history from the GOP, like all these Tea Partiers who always hated Dubya’ spending.Report
“take our country back”
It’s not hard to imagine that rhetoric being used on a white candidate: http://ind.pn/9e4LZW
But generally speaking, yeah, the nature of the criticism changes to suit the candidate. They wouldn’t call Barack Obama trailer trash, but they did refer to Bill Clinton that way.
On the other hand, a lot of the criticisms that were waged against Clinton, if applied to Obama, would actually seem racist (“They only call him a womanizer because they fear the black man stealing the white woman.” “When they call him ‘slick’, they are playing in stereotypes of black charisma.” and so on.
I am discomforted by a lot of the criticisms of Obama (in part because of the nature, in part because of the whole Respect The Office thing regardless of who the occupant is). But it’s more the nature of the criticisms than the ferocity that are racially tinged. It seems that every president is the most harshly criticized in history. Which is unlikely.
Newt Gingrich is the brains of what, now?Report
Bill Maher has it right: Not all Republicans are racist, but if you’re racist you’re almost certainly a Republican.
Sullivan’s historical analogy was stretched, but let’s not ignore the historical reality that Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” has yielded immense electoral returns.Report
let’s not ignore the historical reality that Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” has yielded immense electoral returns.
Let’s ignore, because it is not a reality.
Politicians run ad campaigns seeking votes. In Nixon’s case that meant ads featuring Roy Acuff singing campaign ditties. (“This time this time with leadership from Richard M. Nixon”). There is nothing sinister about that.
The decomposition of the Democratic Party’s advantage in the South began around 1952 and was not fully complete until around 1994. No sort of racial mobilization had any hand in it. (Something you would surmise just by looking at the ads and public positions of Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush). What happened was the loss of a sense that a Democratic affiliation was incorporated into one’s identity as a Southerner, at which point (white) Southerners could and did distribute their support according to other sorts of interests and preferences. If anyone in Mississippi was expecting Republican pols to reconstruct Jim Crow, they were disappointed.
Nixon’s campaign was not an important milestone in this process; Eisenhower’s was (he carried Southern states which had been solid for the Democratic Party for 70 years). Reagan’s was also a milestone of note. It was not an unusual opinion in the papers ca. 1976 that the Republican Party was doomed in part because it had failed to take advantage of the dissolution of the segregationist Democratic Party, leaving Jimmy Carter and William Waller and others to construct a non-segregationist regional party which had retained a sufficient bloc of support among all sectors in the South to continue to control the region. As late as 1975, there was not a single Republican in the Alabama legislature. The performance of Republican candidates in the South in 1980 contradicted this thesis.Report
Carter won every Confederate state in 1976. The timeline interferes with the thesis.Report
Again, your rationalization has one little problem – people in Nixon’s own campaign team have admitted they campaigned on racial fear. Every white person in 1968 knew what Nixon meant when he said ‘law and order.’Report
I think the “decomposition” of the Democratic party in the South began at least 4 years earlier, with the “Dixiecrat revolt” over Humphrey’s/Truman’s* civil rights plank and (after the bolt from the convention) Truman’s desegregation of the armed forces.
And Bush (I): Willie Horton. Even Lee Atwater admitted (later) that it had been racist.
*It was moved by Humphrey. I know he wasn’t VP until 1965.Report
Bill Maher has it right: Not all Republicans are racist, but if you’re racist you’re almost certainly a Republican.
Almost certainly not true in this messy world we live in. It also reflects the familiar nonsense that the only sort of contempt that matters in this world is that directed at the list of approved mascots within the Democratic Party. Partisan Democrats like Maher feel perfectly free to indulge in public contempt for a variety of communal groups, evangelicals foremost among them. The rest of us need not take seriously the pass you award yourselves.Report
I suppose Maher’s right if black folk can’t be racist. Otherwise, at a 90% Democrat clip, odds are there’s some there too.Report
name the president who said the following as if it were a bad thing. “there are universities in California that could fill their entire freshman classes with nothing but Asian Americans.” as if it were a bad thing.Report
@ Jake Collins
“Bill Maher has it right: Not all Republicans are racist, but if you’re racist you’re almost certainly a Republican.”
Spend some time in a blue collar bar below the mason Dixon line sometime. Every time you hear a joke about blacks ask the joke teller what party they belong to and then see if your theory holds true.
As I’ve said many times – i have two people in my family that use the N word on a regular basis. Both of them have voted Democrat since Kennedy.Report
Also, why the defensiveness about the Southern accent?
I have one, but I don’t fear being taken for an idiot… maybe JL Wall is thought stupid by Northerners because he says stupid shit?Report
I’m actually usually taken at first sight for a northern WASP rather than a Jewish Kentuckian; the second-most common question I get asked when first meeting someone (after, “There are Jews in Kentucky?”) is, “Why don’t you have an accent?”
Why the defensiveness? Because I’m from there, and I don’t appreciate seeing Kentucky shoved into some neo-confederate mold because it makes for a snappy line. If that means I defend the deeper South along with it on any given day, then so be it.Report
My wife and I get that *all the time* (about the accent, not Judaism). I have a bit of an accent (particularly if I am nervous or drunk), but not much of one and people are often surprised to hear where I come from.Report
The South seceded from the Dem Party over Acid, Amnesty and Abortion, not race.
BTW, of the Dixiecrats who filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964, only Strom Thurmond switched parties. The rest of the Dixiecrats [Byrd, Gore, Sr., etc.] remained Democrats in good standing until retirement and/or death.
And the two Republican senators from Kentucky voted for it, in case you were wondering, which you weren’t, because it doesn’t fit the narrative.
[Not you, Mr. Wall. Good catch on KY, and a very nice fisking here, and a tip o’brim atcha.]
[As for the current crisis, the debt thing, the truth will out. We wouldn’t want to ascribe this to right-wing terrorism until all the facts are in.]
[Heh heh.]Report
Except for 1948. But otherwise, point taken.
I think any argument about race and the Democratic/Republican alignment needs to take into account that things. move. very. slowly and incompletely.Report
tom van dyke July 25, 2011 at 5:40 pm
” The South seceded from the Dem Party over Acid, Amnesty and Abortion, not race.”
If we ignore everything prior to 1972, yes. In the real world, no.
As for the Dixiecrats, they were in a nice position – they weren’t going to be turfed out so long so long as they voted right-wing, and the Democratic Party was (and is) notoriously incapable of enforcing discipline, so why change?Report
Obviously, merely preferring McCain to Obama doesn’t make you a racist. But I think that Ta-Nehisi Coates basically nailed it in There Are No Racists.Report
This is inconsequential, but Missouri was essentially a tie, with McCain winning by fewer than 4000 votes (0.1%). Had the national electoral vote hinged on this result, it would’ve triggered a recount (Obama could’ve requested one in this case) including provisional ballots and whatnot. North Carolina might’ve been close enough for a recount as well, but probably not close enough for the result to be in doubt.
More relevantly (but still inconsequential), most Republicans in Kansas would be more than happy to let Lawrence, the Free-State capitol of Kansas, secede. But it’s not like anyone lives in Lecompton these days anyway.Report
I think looking at this at a state level is a mistake. Consider the red/blue county maps instead. New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois aren’t blue “states”; they’re some heavily populated blue urban areas separated by large red rural areas. California, Oregon and Washington aren’t blue “states”; they’re the blue coastal cities and vast red interiors. Colorado has dependably blue Denver, Boulder and mountain resort counties; dependably red rural counties; and the state-wide elections are swung by the Front Range suburbs. Which seem to be trending more blue as those suburbs begin to experience the problems previously regarded as being strictly problems of the core urban areas.
I can think of a number of reasons other than racism why “country folk” — even people living in the suburbs who think of themselves as “country folk” — tend to lean conservative.Report
Excellent point – this gives a much finer look at things.Report