Surprise, surprise...

...The Republican Party really has become the party of the South.

The following graph breaks down by region the 'favorability rating' of the Grand Old Party:

I mean, it's not even close!

These data, culled from recent polling, were translated into graph form in a piece that appeared in The Washington Monthly earlier this month. I discovered it through a link posted on Andrew Sullivan's blog.

Sound the Death-Knell for Dixie (Part Two):David Brooks discovers GOP racism for the first time.

I'm going to talk a bit more about the politics of resentment. My reason is this: I continue to be amazed as to how simultaneously correct and naive recent comments by conservative journalist David Brooks on the future trajectory of his party have been. Brooks has predicted, both in his New York Times column and in his frequent appearances alongside Mark Shields on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer -- and I'm paraphrasing here but not exaggerating --, that it will take ten to fifteen years for the Republican Party to get its shit together intellectually and politically. The subtext of his commentary is -- and it's not as though he needs to say it -- that the GOP is being taken over by the pro-Sarah Palin 'grassroots' and all but ditched by its traditional (rich, suburban, etc.) base.

The columnist, conveniently, has failed to mention his own frequent and cloying forays into GOP-styled populism. In other words, Brooks could be said to deserve at least some of the blame for ushering in the party's new era. True, he is no Rush Limbaugh and has never sought actively to recruit the rural, anti-cosmopolitan, anti-elite, anti-intellectual, racist cadre, whose seeming ascendancy he now bemoans.

In contrast to the inbred hooliganism of Limbaugh/Hannity, Brooks -- to appropriate a device that appears in the concluding paragraphs of one of his recent columns -- commits a sin of omission. Until recent weeks -- around the time of the McCain/Palin rallies in which the GOP 'salt of the earth'-faithful screamed death threats intended for Obama, passed around an 'Obama'-labeled stuffed monkey toy and other racist knick-knacks, and called Obama a "terrorist," a "socialist," a "Muslim," and someone who "doesn't love this country the way you and I do" (oh wait, that last one was said repeatedly by Sarah Palin herself) -- I have never once seen Brooks point out that the GOP's cultivation of a mean-spirited, anti-intellectual, anti-urban, anti-elitism sentiment was beginning to lead down a slippery slope, which everyone could see in plain sight. Nope. Despite his supposed 'moderate' conservatism, not a single column inch. No, it took the advent of angry, racist mobs, televised and YouTubed for all to see, for David Brooks to level with his readers and finally admit that Palin was a cynical selection, condescending to the voters and dangerous for the country and to the office of the presidency. What gives, David?

To be fair, let's remember that for the last decade, Brooks has probably been too distracted to sound a note of caution regarding the GOP's ongoing brain drain and its inevitable consequences. Over the two terms of Bush/Cheney, Brooks has had a lot of neoconservative and neoliberal agenda-pushing to get through-- often by stealth, which eats up even more of a busy columnist's day. After all, the man's schedule was already so taxing as to include things like

• disseminating neoconservative and neoliberal ideology by masking it as snarky-but-lovable pop-sociology;
  
• applauding middle America for its unrefined taste (in more than one book whose title includes the word 'paradise');*
  
• being sure to time his fully formed policy stances in such a way as to perpetuate the illusion that careful deliberation and the measured weighing-of-options precedes their articulation;
  
• kissing the asses of Catholic people, in effect if not by design, playing 'good cop' to William's (both Kristol and Bennett) 'bad cop' in the pushing of neoconservative foreign policy adventures and the continued scorched-earth defunding of the domestic public sector;
  
• lamenting the disappearance of 1950's middle-brow reading culture, and other (pre-Palin) instances of the shameless peddling of cheap nostalgia;
  
• and panegyrizing George W. Bush's "self-confident" and "committed," leadership of the Iraq War -- as recently as July 2007, while enthusing over Bush's "unconquerable faith in the rightness of his Big Idea."

Jeez, David: you've managed to express what all of us feel deep down in our hearts, but what none of us could find the words to say: the rightness of Bush's Big Idea! So that's wherein lies George W. Bush's secret; how he pulls off being such a great and beloved president!

Brooks never had a negative word to say about Bush's neo-McCarthyist electoral strategy. Nor did he bother to wince along with the rest of us thinking human beings as we watched Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their crack squad of war criminals falsify intelligence, engage in character assassination of any/all figures of opposition, and censor dissent in the run-up to the Iraq War.

But no matter. Brooks appears recently to have updated his appraisal of George W. Bush, right about the time (early October, 2008) at which he felt compelled finally to come out and admit that Sarah Palin is BAD NEWS. Brooks made the following remarks at an event sponsored by the Atlantic Monthly, on October 9, 2008:

[Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican Party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at The National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he'd rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn't think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.

Brooks is none too pleased about what he calls -- euphemistically -- the 'populist' turn his party has taken. What he's describing is the Republican Party's descent -- encapsulated in the whiny and incoherent failure that was the McCain presidential campaign -- into a movement lacking entirely a vision of how to govern, in what way, and for what reason (and for that matter, whether or not governance should be dismantled entirely). In other words, it's turned -- decisively and demonstrably -- into a party that caters to resentments. And little -- if anything -- more than that.

As I remarked previously, the most recent example of this type of non-ideological, non-forward-looking politics that comes to mind is the phenomenon of the Dixiecrats, whose rhetorical dichotomies -- which are circumscribed as simple-mindedly as possible, in the interest of maximum versatility and in order to appeal to simple-minded people -- of local v. global, religious v. educated, upstanding v. immoral, are exactly the same dichotomies that McCain and especially Palin (or rather, her hard-Right/neocon Handlers) set out to tap into. What's interesting about this essential connection to Dixiecrat politics is that it's come -- in more ways than one -- full circle. I'll elaborate on this in a moment. (And this is subject to which I shall return in subsequent posts.)

You might ask: OK, Tom we've heard you sound off about the cultural politics of resentment and the GOP. And we get what you mean about the Dixiecrats: they were resentful of (1) the industrial/increasingly cosmopolitan North for everything from the Emancipation Proclamation to Reconstruction, LBJ and the Civil Rights Bill -- the latter being the last straw; (2) they hated black people and were resentful of any measure resulting in the shaking-up of the Southern caste system, particularly because measures that treated with dignity persons of color were seen as decreasing the status of poor whites. (Or whatever...those kinds of things.)

But, you ask, how does this example map onto the structure or modus operandi of the current Republican Party? I mean, we know that McCain's campaign -- particularly that shrill, none-too-bright woman who dressed to kill -- was speaking a coded -- and sometimes not-so-coded -- language of racism at rallies, and in advertising and propaganda. But, what resentments are the Republicans, specifically, tapping into?

Aha! I respond. That's just it: the great thing about resentment is that it doesn't need to be attached to something specific. This is what I was attempting to describe in a recent post, in which I pointed out that resentment is not an idea, but rather, a cluster of emotions, reactions and instinctive postures of self-preservation. And the laundry list of resentments -- particularly among rural, uneducated white voters -- to which McCain and Palin catered as -- eventually -- the exclusive centerpiece of their campaign needn't be pinned down in all that much detail in order for us to see objectively that it existed.

But just to demonstrate the extensiveness of this laundry list, let's try our hand at a thought experiment: let's just accept for the moment, arguendo, that I'm correct in saying that the racism that bubbled to the surface in dramatic fashion during the McCain/Palin rallies evidences the fact that there are lingering resentments among parts of the South (and rural north) connected straightforwardly to historical Southern secessionist and segregationist mentalities. Remember, there need only be a subconscious hint of this lingering attitude for my Dixiecrat thesis to have legs.

Now, let's take a step back and think of political attitudes that have developed more recently in the rural north and in the South (and perhaps, until this past election, in lower-middle-class [or extremely nouveau riche outer suburbs). Think of the decades of careful and well-funded Right wing inculcation and brainwashing that descended upon these areas. For instance, Rush Limbaugh, whose audience expanded considerably with the advent of the Clinton administration. More and more Limbaugh clones flood the AM airwaves across the fruited plains. Then comes Fox News. Then comes George W. Bush: even more divisive a figure, and even more than Clinton mired in the rhetoric, Doublespeak and umbrage-taking of the 1960's. (I will shortly be posting an item that fleshes out my thinking on the culture wars, particularly during the Clinton and Bush II administrations.)

Now: think of how simple a task it would be to attach myriad contemporary political issues to the coattails of these lingering resentments. Anyone among us can rattle off the obvious themes that map onto the basic structure: xenophobia, hatreds that often come along with especially ignorance saturated species of militarism, racism, reverse classism, resentment of the educated, various forms of anti-Semitism, suspicion toward people with credentials, distrust of people with accents, anti-feminism, fear of gays and lesbians, fear of gay marriage, disdain for people who are more educated than they are, disdain of academia generally (for its supposed 'liberalism'), disdain for 'mainstream media' generally (for their supposed 'liberalism'), and finally, much-stoked militant opposition to, quote-unquote, "activist judges," a specious concept in and of itself, and anyway, a concept which very few of those who fear it have any understanding at all.

So, basically, although it seems clear to me that the Dixiecrat political posture is the one that feeds Rightist populist rhetoric, the Republican Party can and does steer it in whatever direction it wants, in the service of any in a spectrum of ideological ends that has -- per se -- no material, cultural or political relationship to anything the Dixiecrats would have recognized or even comprehended. And -- despite Brooks's apparent surprise in noticing this -- the Republicans have been up to this for a long time.

So, among the poor and lower-middle-class racists whom McCain courted, the underlying resistance to Obama had to do with nothing more than the fact that he is black and has a funny name. But McCain's henchmen didn't need to say anything close to that, and they didn't need to THINK that in order to take political advantage of entrenched racist sentiment.

I had a history professor once who said -- cornily (but pithily) -- "there are no bad guys in history." There are no 'bad guys' in politics, either. There are just 'instinctive politicians', or 'tough politicians', or 'savvy strategists'. You see? The so-called 'elites' in the press have their own euphemisms, too; rhetoric that prevents the reporters themselves from having to think of it for the ugly thing it in fact is. How often have you heard 'mainstream media' praise Karl Rove for his

acumen at tapping into our nation's overflowing wellspring of religious- and racial-bigotry, and converting this bigotry into political capital.

See what I mean? Media inoculate themselves from harsh truths more rampantly than even voters do, and to a much greater extent than to which media inoculate their viewers. And Obama was an 'other'. That is all he needed to be, and strategically that's the only slight-of-hand McCain's people needed to pull off in order to court effectively the racist vote.

'We don't know about his history and background'. 'He needs to give the full story on his relationship with ACORN'. 'Why hasn't Mr. Obama come clean about the full extent of his relationship with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, with whom, my friends, and let us make no mistake, Mr. Obama so dangerously pal-ed-around'. 'Barack Obama: too radical for America'. 'Barack Hussein Obama'. 'That One'.**

This racist side of the GOP is by no means new. Whatever the psychological tricks that David Brooks needs to play in order to convince himself that he was not a willing participant in the GOP's longstanding Deal with the Devil: tapping into the voting power of this angry mob. Sure, this mob is resentful (as it had been previously) of quote-unquote liberal ideas, espoused and propagated by the quote-unquote liberal media, and forced upon our children by quote-unquote liberal academe. But it's also resentful of ideas, resentful of media, and resentful of academe. AND IT HAS BEEN, ALL ALONG. Every bit as much as it has been racist all along.

In an upcoming post, I will continue to discuss the reasons why I feel Obama's victory might possibly mark the end of Dixiecrat politics. But just to give you a taste of the sweet elixir of victory, let's return to the dismayed David Brooks, in conversation with Mark Shields and Jim Lehrer on the November 7 broadcast of The News Hour with Jim Lehrer [emphasis is mine]:

JIM LEHRER: Both of you, first to you, Mark, end of this week, three days after the election, any lingering pieces of wisdom that you have not shared with us up until now, in other words, something that struck you that has not been said?

MARK SHIELDS: Just a couple of quick things, Jim. One is that the Republican Party is facing a real problem in those four western states of Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Arizona. ... because the estrangement from the Latino community, which is a growing part of the electorate, and estrangement from westerners in general.

But the other thing is that the only age cohort in the entire electorate that John McCain carried were voters over the age of 65. Voters under the age of 30 voted 2 percent plus Democrat in 2000. They voted 12 percent plus Democrat in 2004 and by 35 percent in 2008. And you see it moving up the ladder to 30- to 44-year-olds, as well. So the formula I use is probably a little bit of an overstatement, but right now the Democrats, young Democrats, are moving from a room of their own to an apartment of their own hopefully to a home of their own, while Republicans are moving from their own home to the rest home to the funeral home. And...

JIM LEHRER: Oh, my.

MARK SHIELDS: And that's a problem for the Republicans.

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I guess I completely agree. If you're in a shrinking group, you're probably Republican. The growing groups are Democratic. The thing that strikes me -- and this has become a big debate, especially in the Democratic Party -- what sort of victory was it? Andy Kohut was on the program yesterday, said it was a victory for the middle. The middle asserted itself. That's how I read the returns, which suggests sort of a measured way ahead for Obama. Other people, however, say, no, it was a realigning election like 1980 with Reagan. It was a liberal victory. We should pursue a more liberal agenda, and interpreting that result has become a big debate.

JIM LEHRER: All right.

MARK SHIELDS: Oh, excuse me. Just one thing. Voters do want a more active government, a lot more than they did in 2000 and even 2004.

DAVID BROOKS: I disagree. But we'll get to that.

MARK SHIELDS: Well, those are the exit polls.

JIM LEHRER: Thank you, Mark. Thank you, David. ...

______________
* If the 2004 Plotz piece to which I have referred leaves you hungry for more fun at the expense of Brooks at his pandering worst, see these contemporaneous -- roughly speaking -- pieces by Nicholas von Hoffman (whose discussion of Brooks's tendency to flatter/legitimate the ignorance of the our country's vast uneducated populations is not dissimilar to the point I keep trying to articulate about the manipulative function of resentment in politics) and Michael Kinsley, from the latter of which I cannot resist quoting:

The Brooks sociological method has four components: fearless generalizing, clever coinage, jokes and shopping lists. ... Brooks defends his generalizations as poetic hyperbole ... When he says that a store in a suburban mall is ''barely visible because of the curvature of the earth,'' that is poetic hyperbole. When he claims that it is impossible to spend more than $20 for dinner in a Red Lobster, that is just wrong, and mystifyingly so. ... [T]he difference between sociology and shtick.
At the very least, Brooks does not let the sociology get in the way of the shtick, and he wields a mean shoehorn when he needs the theory to fit the joke. Among some of the formerly young, ''the energy that once went into sex and raving now goes into salads.'' O.K., that's funny. So is essentially the same joke a few pages later, when Brooks writes that ''bathroom tile is their cocaine.'' Except that now he's referring to a different one of his demographic slices, which undermines the claim to sociology. And when another joke surfaces three times, it undermines the shtick as well. The ''16-foot refrigerators with the through-the-door goat cheese and guacamole delivery systems''? Ha ha. A large Home Depot salesman ''looking like an S.U.V. in human form''? Ha ha ha. S.U.V.'s ''so big they look like the Louisiana Superdome on wheels''? Enough already.
''In America, it is acceptable to cut off any driver in a vehicle that costs a third more than yours. That's called democracy.'' True? Funny? Wouldn't the joke work just as well the other way? ''. . . a third less than yours. That's called capitalism.'' And if it works both ways as a joke, it must not work at all as a sociological insight.

These criticisms leveled against Brooks resonated in 2004, and -- comparatively-- this resonance has expanded by several orders of magnitude in November 2008. They underscore Brooks's tendency to be noncommittal, to equivocate and change his positions in a manner that smacks of tactical shifting. Plotz's discussion of Brooks's position(s) on the Iraq War -- which Brooks supported initially, along with many chatterers who were supposedly to his left, but more-or-less abandoned wishy-washily as a cause worthy of column inches when the issue became muddled and overcomplicated. These kinds of shifts, the tendency to evade personal accountability for having supported unambiguously a policy that ended up causing international chaos, the unprecedented scaling back of American civil liberties, the deaths of thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis, conforms to the kind of neocon modus operandi with which we typically identify intellectually dishonest neoconservative charlatans like the unrepentant sniffer-of-Palin's-panties William Kristol, for whose Weekly Standard the nominally and temperamentally more moderate David Brooks did, after all, write, before landing his New York Times gig.

But beyond even Brooks's occasional proclivity for baffling fence-sitting: cultural politics have sure taken a turn for the toxic (to say the absolute least) since 2004, hasn't it? His veneration of the armies of red-blooded, poor, uneducated, simple-minded "Joe Six-Packs" strewn majestically across fly-over country looks pretty fucking naive -- not to mention hypocritical and even dangerous -- in the era of Sarah Palin's shrill racism- and hate-fueled brand of borderline-fascistic populism, no?

So: David, when exactly did stoking the flames of regressive, repressive, reactionary, xenophobic, 'Know-Nothing' and (let's face it, fundamentally anti-democratic) populism switch from being optimistic/patriotic to being "anti-intellectual"?

Also, in retrospect, it's too bad about the "Louisiana Superdome on wheels" line, no? I mean, it's simple bad luck, and I'm not going to pin it on him. But it's awfully poignant, ¿non?



** Heh. Look. The expression 'the other' has such a effete/academic sound to it. But, in establishing the use-value of this term as a means by which to describe identifiable, real-world phenomena, need we look any further than this weird-ass phrase that was uttered by McCain in reference to Obama at the second debate of the general election? You're not going to find a more obvious example of the othering of one's political opponent than this. I mean, it's not even 'that guy' or 'my opponent'. An entire human being, collapsed into the unadorned, monosyllabic 'one'. And not 'this one': 'that one'. Now, lest we get in over our heads in the amateur-psychology/cultural studies department, before we attach too much significance to the utterance of this mind-bending phrase, it is also important to keep in mind that John McCain is a babbling old coot.

Sound the Death-Knell for Dixie (Part One)

Media are speculating about whether or not Barack Obama's electoral landslide represents a reconfiguration of voting alliances and the redrawing of the national political map. Is Obama's victory the end of the era of Culture War-besotted politics ushered in by Nixon's appeals to "the silent majority" (i.e. racists)? Have electoral demographics shifted such that we are putting behind us the politics of fear, hate and neo-McCarthyism behind?

Much has been made of the swift rise in populations within the ranks of the cosmopolitan, professional class in the large cities and suburbs in the Southeast and West. This population boom, combined with Obama's unprecedentedly robust ground game, are said in varying degrees to account for Obama's victories in formerly Republican-voting states like Nevada, Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, New Mexico, and even in states in which Obama failed to prevail, yet was surprisingly competitive, like South Carolina and Georgia.

(Map credit: FiveThirtyEight.com [updated 11/8/08])

To be sure, there are innumerable other factors, including strong turnouts -- and strong support for Obama -- among young voters, first-time registrants and, of course, voters of color. In the latter group, we mustn't neglect to include Hispanic populations, which voted to an unprecedented extent overwhelmingly Dem. (The GOP repelled these voters with its shrill anti-immigrant turn...a hard line to which McCain eventually -- and famously -- caved.) And no doubt high turnout among black voters helped Obama pull off the feat of prevailing in the state of Indiana: something that no Democratic presidential candidate had done previously.....that is, since Lyndon Baines Johnson's resounding defeat of Barry "Crazy, Nuke-loving Cracker" Goldwater in 1964.

We'll continue discussing LBJ in Part Two of this post. But first, let's return to the demographics of Obama's victory. Crucially, Obama outperformed preceding Democratic presidential candidates John Kerry and Al Gore in his support from among white male voters. Politico:

Obama performed slightly worse with white women, 39 percent of voters, than Al Gore did in 2000. McCain won the votes of white women, 53 to 46 percent, perhaps an indication of the historical [sic] candidacy of his running mate, Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska.

Obama compensated for the drop-off in white female support with the strong 41 percent support from white men. No Democrat since Carter had until Tuesday’s election earned more than 38 percent of the white male vote.

In 2000, white women split between the two parties while Republicans won white men by 24 percentage points. That white male gap was dramatically narrowed Tuesday to 16 points, a trend that began with the financial crisis, and one that allowed Obama to split the male vote overall. (Rest of the article.)

In other words, fears expressed among many in the chattering caste of the "Bradley effect" -- wherein there exists a disparity between how voters said they would vote and how they in fact did vote -- appear not only to have been misplaced, but at times reflected the reverse of what ended up occurring. In fact, in Ohio and Pennsylvania -- Obama was much more successful at capturing the white vote than any polls had indicated. Overall,

Mr. Obama lost white voters by 12 points, but that is the same margin Al Gore lost them by in 2000 and better than the 17-point margin John Kerry lost them by in 2004. (New York Times; here's the full article.)

And remember, we're talking about percentages here, not raw numbers. The expansion in nationwide participation that characterized the 2004 election, and again the 2008 election, means that by definition, the head count of Obama's support among these voters exceeds Gore's.

Where and who are these white men that are switching to the Dems? Well, the speculation to which my opening paragraph refers is in fact mostly correct. The Republicans are losing suburban and, as it were, 'ex'-urban (far-out suburbs [not 'far-out' in the psychedelic sense, but rather in the boondocky one-way-ticket-on-the-bridge-to-nowhere sense]). This trend is striking both in the newly blue states I mentioned above and in historically Democratic-yet-conservative states like Pennsylvania and Ohio.

This Washington Post piece is worth quoting at length:

Nothing demonstrates this reversal as clearly as the Democrats' ascendance in the suburbs and among the moderate, college-educated voters who dominate them. Obama won 50 percent of suburban voters, three points higher than Sen. John F. Kerry's showing in 2004 and the most by a Democrat since exit polling began in 1972, swelling his margins in a number of battleground states.

In Virginia, Obama offset losses in the rural parts of the state by not only winning Fairfax County, as Kerry did, but also the big outer suburbs of Prince William and Loudoun counties, home to many high-tech workers and government contractors. Obama visited Prince William County, which has been hit hard by the real estate bust, on the first day of his general-election campaign and the last, as well as in between. He also easily won the big Richmond suburb of Henrico County, a largely white community that Republicans had sewed up for years.

In Pennsylvania, Obama fared worse than Kerry in many steel towns around Pittsburgh. But he ran up such big margins in the formerly Republican suburbs of Philadelphia that he was able to run away with the state, by more than 10 points.

In Colorado, he gained 100,000 votes over Kerry in three big suburban counties outside Denver. In Ohio, he achieved a narrow majority in part by reducing the Republicans' margins of victory in the outer suburbs of Columbus and Cincinnati.

In Florida, he won partly by improving on Kerry's numbers among suburban voters in the Interstate 4 corridor between Tampa and Orlando and in Indiana and North Carolina, his showing with suburban voters improved by about 20 points in each state, far exceeding his gain among rural voters. Obama nearly carried the most iconic Republican suburb of all, Orange County in Southern California.

And what do these Democratic inroads in the nation's suburbs add up to for the Republicans, who'd formerly relied upon these politically moderate and economically middle-class voters to shore up their "fear of terrorism" vote and their "we're afraid of taxes" vote? Remember that even four years ago, George W. Bush continued to enjoy broad support from voters in those electoral districts. Apparently, the economic meltdown and Bush's continued neocon foreign policy shenanigans finally started to piss these people off. And good for them, say I, for articulating their displeasure.

But where did that leave McCain? Toward what audience was the fractured, intellectually and ideologically barren Republican Party of John McCain to aim its mouth-breather rhetoric and robo-calls? The Post article lays it out, and the brutal facts ain't pretty:

The Democrats appear to have built a majority across a wide, and expanding, share of the electorate -- young voters, Hispanics and other ethnic minorities, and highly educated whites in growing metropolitan areas. The Republicans appear at the moment to be marginalized, hanging on to a coalition that may shrink with time -- older, working-class and rural white voters, increasingly concentrated in the Deep South, the Great Plains and Appalachia.

That McCain (and Palin) embraced demagogic tactics, race-baiting and condescending, cynical fear-mongering wasn't -- as we all know -- an accident. The traditional GOP playbook insists that the candidate must first and foremost flatter its intended audience. And you can't flatter an audience on any but that audience's terms, irrespective of its median IQ.

As sure as eggs is eggs, you can't count on their vote unless you give 'em what they want. And if that group of voters tends to be rural, uneducated, racist, and excruciatingly provincial, well Sir, ya gotta serve up some good old-fashioned deep-fried nuggets of HATE. That's when you get all of the the Bill Ayers shit. And you know, calling people socialists and terrorists and such.

I will comment on this dynamic more fully in Part Two of this post, wherein I shall explore the Republicans' ineffective stab at creating an electoral majority out of these barely conscious redneck hordes, this strategy's rhetoric, and its persisting dialectic between "cosmopolitan snobs" and "real folks." (I shall argue that this dialectic constitutes little more than a half-baked update of the rhetoric and ideology of the secessionist -- and subsequently, segregationist, and eventually "Dixiecrat" -- South.)

One last point should be made before I conclude Part One. Although Obama's white support -- and particularly white male support -- was considerably weaker in the deep segregationist South, which is and was to be expected, Obama didn't perform all that badly among rural and blue-collar voters in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio; including in areas that are known to include communities infamous for their entrenched racism.

For example, there is much encouragement to be found in the strong support among union workers enjoyed by Obama in many battleground states. The AFL-CIO provided "key support" in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan, and even ratcheted up its efforts to get out the union vote in Colorado, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, according to this report:

Union voters played an important role in President-elect Obama's historic victory, delivering a critical bloc of support in swing states that helped propel Obama and other working family candidates to big wins last night, election-night polling released by the AFL-CIO today showed. Calling the victory in the presidential race and the expansion of majorities in the House and Senate a working families' mandate for broad-based economic change, AFL-CIO leaders vowed to continue the large-scale mobilization to push through broad economic reform....

...AFL-CIO union members across battleground states supported Obama by a whopping 68-30 margin, according to an election night survey conducted for the AFL-CIO by Peter D. Hart Research Associates....

So, although Obama's victories in these states had their foundation partly in his newly robust support among suburbanites, we cannot discount the impact of this refreshingly effective union activity, which anecdotal reports in Ohio and Pennsylvania declare to have actually changed the hearts and minds -- and raised the political consciousness of -- many white blue-collar workers who'd not initially been of the mind to countenance the presidency of someone named Barack Hussein Obama. That's very exciting, says me. Makes my bleeding heart bleed all the more.

I conclude Part One of this discussion with a sample of data appearing in this article on the impact of union voting initiatives:

• Obama won among white men who are union members by 18 points while losing that group by 16 points in the general public;
• Obama won among union gun owners by a 12-point margin while losing that group in the general public by 25 points;
• Union veterans voted for Obama by a 25-point margin. He lost among that group in the general public by nine points;
• Working America members voted 67-30 for Obama. Working America gun owners (33% own guns) voted 23 points for Obama; general public gun owners voted 25 points for McCain;
• Sixty percent of union members identified the economy and jobs as their top issue with 84 percent saying strengthening the economy was the most important factor in their vote.....

This is where the real fun begins:Pay attention to the Republican Party's excuses & explanations

I think that you can tell a lot about the health of the Republican Party by observing all of the excuses that its remaining apologists devise in order to explain away what appears to be a landslide victory for Barack Obama, as well as for several Democratic congressional candidates across the country. My diagnosis of the Republican Party is that it is in big big trouble.

Here's some of the spin and blame-gaming in which the Republican Party has been engaging and in which it will continue to engage:

• the voters are 'scared' about the economy, and they don't understand the economy all that well, so they're voting Dem as an act of panic;
• the media are 'liberal' and 'biased' and were 'in the tank' for Obama,
• and they never gave Sarah Palin a 'fair chance',
• and they never inquired about Barack Obama's real connections to William Ayers, etc.;
• Democrats encouraged and engaged in voter fraud;
• Democrats failed to insist upon the showing of ID cards at the polls.

This final allegation is especially infuriating and widespread, because it is essentially an index of the extent to which the Republican Party is fast hemorrhaging the cosmopolitan and suburban portions of its base.

What's left of the Republican Party at this point is, quite frankly, the Dixiecrat portions, which it absorbed into its ranks with the advent of Goldwater and then Nixon.

And, just in case anybody here doesn't know what the Dixiecrats were all about: they were the segregationists who never forgave the Democratic Party for having passed the Civil Rights Bill. In other words: racists.