Paul Waldman is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America and the author of the new book, Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Can Learn From Conservative Success, just released by John Wiley & Sons. The opinions expressed here are his own.
Two weeks ago, The New Republic published an article detailing Virginia Senator George Allen’s rather peculiar history with the Confederate flag. While the story is complicated (and creepy in any number of ways), it suffices to say Allen had a fetish for Dixie growing up as a teenager—in Southern California.
But what is remarkable about the New Republic story and the discussion that followed wasn’t that a politician from a Southern state has a thing for the Stars and Bars. What was remarkable was the fact that Allen’s fervor-of-the-converted embrace of the Old South is being discussed as though it could be a liability for his presidential ambitions.
It is highly unusual to see commentators suggesting that voters might be turned off by a little too much Southern-ness, at least the brand of Southern identity that caters to the worst stereotypes of Southern culture.
What we normally hear—particularly with regard to Democrats—is just the opposite. Southern candidates are supposed to possess “authenticity,” to connect to regular folks in a way those Northern elitists just can’t. Most of all, they are supposed to be able to get the votes of Southerners themselves, who, we are told, are reluctant to vote for candidates not possessed of sufficient drawl.
The response of the Democrats to this regional prejudice has almost seemed designed to lose as many votes as possible. They ignore the South for four years and then send their presidential candidate down below the Mason-Dixon in October for a clichéd photo op at the Waffle House with a proclamation to the locals of the candidate’s love of NASCAR. Needless to say, Southerners themselves are underwhelmed by the half-hearted attempt to pay tribute to a few stereotyped tropes of Southern identity. Meanwhile the rest of the country looks at the candidate and sees a disingenuous panderer.
So what should they do? As I argue in my new book, Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn From Conservative Success , the answer is simple: stand up to the South. Stop telling Southerners what you think they want to hear. Stop worrying about losing votes you probably aren’t going to get anyway. If Democrats can do that, they might just do better than they thought they would.
The samurai treatise Hagakure , written in the early 18th century, explained that the samurai considered himself to be already dead. Because he did not fear death, his courage in battle grew. Democrats need to apply this lesson to their situation, and consider the South lost to their presidential candidates (down-ballot races are another matter). There are lots of progressives in the South, but they are simply outnumbered by conservatives. (As an illustration, in 2004, Bush won 85 percent of the white vote in Mississippi, 78 percent in South Carolina, 76 percent in Georgia, and 75 percent in Louisiana). Once Democrats no longer worry about winning the South’s electoral votes, they’ll find themselves liberated in ways that benefit them everywhere. Because nothing makes Democrats look weaker than their pathetic quadrennial efforts to pander to white Southerners’ insecurities and resentments.
Every region of the United States has its distinctive history and mores. In the South, perhaps more than anywhere else, there is supposed to be a set of local “values” that sets those who have them on a higher plane than other Americans. When was the last time you heard a candidate for office speak proudly of her “Oregon values” or “Maryland values”? But candidates often tout their “Alabama values,” “Georgia values,” or “Mississippi values” (and accuse their opponents of lacking them).
And the elite Washington press corps—very few of whom actually come from the South—have largely accepted the idea that Southerners are somehow possessed of more virtue than the rest of us. They see the South as the “real” America, where down-home folk with good old-fashioned values live, where contempt for people who live elsewhere is, if not utterly justifiable, then at least unremarkable. The flip side of this idea is that places where there are lots of Democrats are less American and less authentic. So George Bush can poke fun at Massachusetts every single day on the campaign trail in 2004, and none of them will suggest he didn’t want to be president of all Americans. But heaven help the Democrat who utters a discouraging word about Dixie. He will immediately be branded an out-of-touch elitist who can’t hope to connect to the heartland.
Not convinced? Try this thought experiment. Imagine if a liberal group had aired an ad in 2000 or 2004 telling George W. Bush to “take his tobacco-chewing, trailer park-living, NASCAR-loving, Field & Stream -reading, grits-eating, right-wing freak show back to Texas, where it belongs.” The outrage at the use of those stereotypes would have echoed from sea to shining sea. Not only would it have been an enormous controversy, but commentators would no doubt have returned to the ad again and again over the course of the campaign to demonstrate how out-of-touch Democrats are.
Yet just such an ad was in fact aired in 2004 in Iowa, by the conservative Club for Growth. The target was Howard Dean, who was told to “take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs.” No pundit argued that it showed how out-of-touch conservatives were by purveying unfair stereotypes of people who live in blue states.
The resentment some Southerners feel toward the rest of the country, and Northerners in particular, will not be changed any time soon, and certainly not by more vigorous pandering from the Democratic Party. That particular chip on the Southern shoulder, which says that snooty elitist Yankees are looking down on them, predates the Civil War. Democrats do themselves no favors by pretending to be sympathetic to those complaints of victimhood and tiptoeing around in desperate fear of giving offense. If they want their attempts to win votes in the South to stop costing them votes everywhere else, they need to start telling Southerners—the progressives who are inclined to support them, the conservatives who never will, and those in between who are suspicious—the truth as they see it.
The way to do so is to approach conservative Southerners without fear. If Democratic politicians hold beliefs that aren’t particularly popular in the South, instead of trying to fudge them, they should put them right on the table. “You don’t like that I support equality for gay Americans? Too bad, because I believe we’re all created equal, and I won’t use bigotry to win votes. I can give you lots of reasons to vote for me, but I’m not going to soft-pedal my beliefs just to tell you what I think you want to hear.”
That kind of firm stand would only lose Democrats the support of people who weren’t going to vote for them anyway. And it would show the rest of the country that they’re strong and principled.
In 1960, John F. Kennedy faced a serious problem among Protestants, particularly in the South, who were nervous that a Catholic president would listen to the Vatican instead of the Constitution. So Kennedy gave a speech before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, a group of Baptist ministers, explaining his beliefs on the separation of church and state (a speech that few politicians today would dare make, given the piety contests our elections have become). The audience was polite, but clearly unfriendly to Kennedy, who was not just a Catholic but a liberal as well. The speech was major news, and the Kennedy campaign later excerpted it in television ads.
What they understood was not just that Kennedy had made an eloquent argument for why his faith shouldn’t matter to people’s vote choice. The tense atmosphere showed Catholics the hostility many fundamentalist Protestants felt toward Kennedy, and by extension, Catholicism. Catholics were impressed with Kennedy’s gutsiness in walking into the lion’s den, and felt motivated to get out and vote on Election Day.
Kennedy knew that when he talked to a particular audience, the rest of the country was watching, too. The lesson for Democrats is that the way they approach the South—and whether in doing so they look strong and principled or weak and fearful—sends a message to other places in the country where they actually have some chance of winning.
