Democrats and the South, Again

A post by Neil the Ethical Werewolf (and subsequent discussion in comments) clarifies in my own mind what I was trying to say here, and what I think Schaller was trying to say in the article I linked to originally.

The important thing here is that Schaller isn't really talking about geography per se, but about demographics and cultural values; he's really saying we shouldn't bother to go after the rural vote at this point. That's easily interpreted as 'forget the South' a) because the South is the most predominantly rural region, and (more importantly) the region where values identified as 'rural' predominate; and b) because Schaller himself muddles the issue, in the paragraph with which Neil took issue:

And it is this model writ large -- winning outside the rural areas and then taking a record of smart, progressive policies to rural voters for their inspection -- which ratifies the strategy of Democrats first building a non-southern majority, governing confidently and successfully, and then appealing to the South, the nation’s most rural, poor, and conservative region.

This is kind of an unfortunate bit because it makes it look like Schaller is talking about geography ('non-southern majority', 'appealing to the South'). If you substitute 'the cultural South' for 'the South' and 'non-rural' for 'non-southern', then the whole thing makes a lot more sense (and the passage quoted is more consistent with the rest of Schaller's piece).

In other words: it's not about writing off the South; it's about embracing values that appeal to people in the rest of the country, and represent a growing portion of the southern vote, rather than trying to appeal to the rearguard cultural values to appeal specifically to the South.

And that's what I was getting at with my Civil War litmus test. The homophobic, anti-woman, Dominionist constituency of today maps exactly onto the segregationist constituency of 40 years ago. Those are people we will never win over with anything like our current values, and it isn't worth trying.

[That's all, folks]