Maybe the Civil War Isn't Over

Over the past week, the symbolic and substantive enormity of Obama's election has been slowly settling in to the nation's collective consciousness. Commentators, including myself, have reached for the history books to lay down words about "what it means." (I settled on the triumph of good over evil.) The most obvious is marking a new chapter in America's checkered racial history. Some have observed that Tuesday was the final shot in the war that began on April 12, 1861 at Fort Sumter. (That would be the civil war in case those details don't ring a bell.) My friend Marc Cooper, in his LA Weekly column, quoted a friend saying "the hands that picked the cotton were the hands that are picking the next President," which sounded a little heavy, uh, handed -- until I saw this:

The Civil War might be over, but the War Between the States lives on. The good news is that the lingering resentments of that time might have finally lost their political power. Enough of the rest of the country has moved on, as is noted in this New York Times article, that the South is becoming politically irrelevant. And with it the GOP, which has staked its fortunes on exploiting the region's resentments. When half your congressional delegation is from the South, and the Southern Strategy is no longer working, you need a new idea. Let's see if Newt Gingrich or Bobby Jindal or -- gulp! -- Sarah Palin can come up with one.

Comments

[mandycat]

I come from a long line of Alabama natives and, trust me, the best thing we can do right now is to ignore white southerners as much as possible as irrelevant to the 21st century. They are intransigent, ignorant and impervious to logic. They like their politics and their religion pre-digested for them, hence the popularity of the GOP and the Religious Right. Thinking is for sissies. Christopher Caldwell predicted the Republican's dilemma in a 1999 article entitled "The Southern Captivity of the GOP." It took much too long for the rest of the country to notice that the GOP is indeed "too southern, too religious and too greedy" but better late than never.

[davism97]

I would even argue that the Civil war was an extension of the American Revolution because slavery remained an unresolved issue when the Constitution was written (it was North versus the South from day 1). In a way I'd say the American revolution never ended, and it's still uncertain if it'll succeed.

[proreality]

Just remember slavery was a symptom of a greater ideal. Aristocracy, that is the ideal the GOP clings too, the "better than" the chosen by god to rule over the "less than".

[Katie6383]

Wow, the comparison between those two maps made my jaw drop! Amazing. Thank you for pointing this out. I will be passing this information along.

[USA1776]

Anybody know where I can get a "Focus on your own damn Family" bumper sticker?

[girlwild]

Wow, those 2 maps are very telling and the similarities are striking. You could overlay the electoral map on the cotton map from 1860 and see an almost 1 to 1 correlation between the Democrat and cotton growing regions, where most of the black population lived and most likely still live. Thanks for posting this.

[Jesster]

Between "The Southern Strategy," the Cold War / Red Baiting "strategies, divisive (socalled) "Family Values" strategy and "the governement is the problem and the solution is to privatize and deregulate everything" doctrine - I think it's time that the GOP/right wing try some new ideas, instead of just trying to resell the failed old ones under the disguise of "more attractive packaging" (aka Sarah Palin.)