A Response to “The Dream World of Southern Republicans,” by Howell Raines, New York Times – July 12, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/opinion/sunday/will-demographics-transform-southern-politics.html?_r=1
Sorry, Mr. Raines, but from my crossroads perch in North Carolina, this rosy forecast is mostly eyewash. I WISH it was so, but I don’t see it.
Raines is right about demographic change in the region. But does he think southern Republican white supremacist politicians are all illiterate bumpkins, who can’t read the same reports, and take potent countermeasures? Not a chance.
Two crucial facts that are shaping the South’s politics in a very different direction are, astonishingly, completely absent from this analysis. They are: Voter suppression, and gerrymandering. And they are not merely in play across the South: they are solidly in command.
Has Raines, a southerner himself, somehow forgotten that this is a time-tested formula down here? Consider: the previous version of this white supremacist combination that effectively shut people of color out of the political process across the region lasted for more than 60 years — that was THREE generations — a period when there were also major demographic shifts.
Now the formula has been adjusted, refined, and re-applied, with great skill. As a result, across the entire region, while nonwhite voting remains “legal,” it has been rendered all but meaningless, marginal and irrelevant.
Moreover, both efforts, especially voter suppression, continue to be pressed further, excluding more and more citizens from the franchise. Gosh, does this have anything to do with thwarting the effect of demographic shifts?
Does sweet tea have sugar??
I won’t say the situation is hopeless; but “bleak” does not do it justice. And barring the rise of some unpredictable earthquake comparable to the Selma voting rights movement, the new southern white supremacist GOP status quo looks from here in Carolina as if it will be very difficult to dislodge. Contra Raines, I could see it taking as many generations as the last one to dismantle.
The Confederate flag came down from South Carolina’s Capitol on July 10, and good riddance. But did that act reverse the state’s voter suppression efforts? Did it redraw any of the absurdly-misshapen legislative and congressional district lines, which only make sense as ways to minimize present –and future–black voting power?
Come on. Howell Raines, that’s just whistling Dixie.
The claim that voter suppression and gerrymandering are “solidly in command” deserves a citing or at least more development of the idea. We don’t all live in Carolina and don’t see it from your perspective. I would point out the surprising and unheralded success of the occupy movement. It was able to change the conversation in our nation from endless talk about deficits to a conversation about economic inequality and was, think, instrumental in Obama’s reelection. Obama did win Virginia and North Carolina in 2008 and Virginia again in 2012.