Post Mortem –

"The South Shall Rise Again,"
Only This Time Within The GOP

By Michael Bradley

In a classic twist of irony, the Grand Old Party may have outsmarted itself, and although on the surface it appears the Republicans are now riding high and the Democrats have been pushed aside on November 2nd, the reality is quite different.

That old refrain, ‘The South Shall Rise Again,’ was brought to life in the recent presidential election, but while the GOP is publicly smiling, even gloating, the victory for the Republicans is causing the party a great deal of internal indigestion and angst among its established membership, of which many are from families that have been GOP loyalists since Lincoln’s time.

It was, of course, some of those very established Republicans who went out of their way some years ago to woo the ‘Democratic Solid South’ away from the Democratic Party, thinking that by playing to reactionary value systems and invoking the politics of prejudice they could cleverly add to their voting base.

The GOP’s clever and cynical plan to incorporate the Democratic Solid South into Republican ranks by playing upon and embellishing Bible Belt theology and the overt prejudices of the old Confederacy worked, but it worked too well. The great irony is that the plan worked all too well: The South has risen and taken over the Republican Party.

Unlike the Democratic Party, which had struggled with its southern ‘solid south’ for most of the 20^th Century, as the party itself became more and more modern and progressive, the Republican Party took a regressive step backward in time during the 1960’s and encouraged southerners to switch parties. In the following years the south did just that, and with it came the kind of single-minded drive toward a Bible-thumping expansionist ideology that the country had not seen since the years and days before the Civil War.

There weren’t any public canings in Congress or elsewhere in recent history, but increasingly there was no possibility of compromise. The Republican ‘Old Guard,’ with their distinguished reputations and truly conservative values – fiscal restraint, patrician business ethics, and a desire to avoid international conflicts if at all possible – were undermined and exploited. The very term conservative became co-opted, serving to hide the same value system that drove the southern states to initiate the Civil War.

It was not the north that drove the south to break the federal Union; it was the south not being able to assure it got its own way, without compromise. And its own way involved much more than the retention of slavery; the south had developed an aristocratic elite that increasingly supported a political agenda based on ruthless expansionism.

The hope of the Confederate leadership was that once independence was won, the Confederate States of America would take control of the American Southwest and all of Mexico. There were even designs upon Canada and South America.

The Confederate elite supported the most reactionary value systems – including supporting fire and brimstone ministries – because that kept a balance between poor and middle-class whites and slaves, not because they themselves were ‘believers’ in preordained destiny, though they were happy to have the convenience of Biblical sources when needed. And the underpinning of such Southern values was always support for military might, which was illustrated by the fact that most of the southern ruling class sent its sons to military academies, not traditional colleges and universities.

So when the old-school Republicans from the party of Howard Taft began playing with the idea of engaging the Democratic Solid South, these descendants of the founders of the Party of Lincoln forgot their history and got more than they bargained for, yet what they got was what they sought. In another great irony, the party of Lincoln changed places with the Democratic Party, which had been the party of the South predating the Civil War.

The GOP cynically stepped away from its traditional values and consciously courted the vicious prejudices and narrow ideals of the Southerners who were still fighting the Civil War as the Civil Rights Movement overtook them. Perhaps the old-fashioned GOP stalwarts thought they could control the radical descendants of the secessionist Confederacy better than the Democrats by appearing to give them prominence in the party, since in the Democratic Party they were becoming increasingly isolated. If that was the mistaken concept, they have paid dearly for it.

In the late 1970’s, when Jimmy Carter showed that an open-minded yet pious Southerner from Georgia could win the White House on the Democratic ticket, the hard-core of the new Republican Solid South pushed the GOP into seeking a charismatic right-wing politician for the next presidential contest in 1981. The effort was helped by the hostage debacle in Iran, and by a severe recession, but their key to success was finding Ronald Reagan, a handsome, personable candidate with camera skills and a willingness to adhere to the values of the ‘New’ Republican Solid South, the New Confederacy, but without declaring himself a New Confederate.

All was well until twelve years later when in 1993 William J. Clinton showed that another Democratic southerner could break the grip of the New Confederacy, prompting a no-holds barred attack against Clinton in his role as the 42^nd president of the U.S.

By the mid-term elections of 1994 Georgian Newt Gingrich had led the New Confederacy to domination in the House of Representatives, using a program called the "Contract with America," in which very positive reforms were called for and supported by the public, but in the end it was a reactionary value system that was put in place.

As a result, the country endured some seven years of relentless attacks against Bill Clinton and his presidency, with countless Congressional hearings, special prosecutors, and a vast array of scurrilous propaganda, even going so far as to assert that the president was involved in the suicide of Vincent Foster. It can only be imagined how relieved the GOP’s New Confederates must have been when finally they caught Pres. Clinton in a human peccadillo, an affair, since all of the millions of tax dollars spent on Whitewater and other investigations had proven worthless.

It is important to recall that despite the most relentless GOP attacks since FDR, America enjoyed peace and economic health. In fact, Bill Clinton was the first Democratic president since FDR to win a second term and when his eight years had come to a close the country was enjoying the lowest unemployment rate in decades and the lowest inflation rate in thirty years. Pres. Clinton could also point to the highest home ownership rate in the nation’s history, dropping crime rates and reduced welfare roles, and perhaps most importantly, there was a national budget surplus.

But the New Confederacy’s politics of division were relentlessly poisoning the public dialogue and the national airwaves during all of those years, and the old-school GOP members were now in the background or pushed out altogether by the new southern radicals. And riding that wave of demagoguery was George W. Bush, the GOP Confederacy’s first full-blown candidate, a born-again absolutist capable of justifying all action in the name of ‘Christian values.’

After a GOP dominated Supreme Court gave Mr. Bush the presidency, the Democrats were surprised that his administration immediately began acting as though it had been given a mandate. But this should not have been a surprise, save for the fact the Democrats were still blind to the GOP’s internal revolution.

The New Confederates seized power with both hands, and after the incredible tragedy brought about on 9/11 by the unconscionably vicious attack of radical, fascistic Islam, the New Confederacy was given a chance for expansionism. It grabbed that opportunity with both hands as well, and now America is committed to Iraq.

A war started by the GOP’s New Confederates became the reason to re-elect the born again Mr. Bush, and that coupled with a fundamentalist sense that "the end times" are near, when the last battle of Armageddon may soon be fought between opposing religious forces – read Christianity and Islam – brought out religiously motivated voters under the umbrella of family values.

It is no surprise, given that fundamentalist underpinning, that the GOP’s New Confederacy has tossed away the GOP’s traditional fiscal constraints. Budgets are irrelevant when preparing for the greatest of conflicts, as are concerns over civil liberties and other political niceties that have been the hallmark of America since its inception.

So it is no wonder that for old-line Republicans the ascendancy of George W. Bush to an elected term as president brings a certain amount of queasiness and angst along with it. They are no longer relevant. Their party has been taken over, co-opted in the same manner that they sought to co-opt the Democrats by twisting the word liberal into a pejorative term. The old-line Republicans can’t even honestly call themselves conservatives anymore, since in their hearts they know that is just a cover for the radicalism of the GOP’s New Confederacy.

The greatest of all ironies for such old-line Republicans may be the quiet realization that true conservatism and a traditional adherence to democratic principles now rests with the Democratic Party, which after all still represents more than 50 million American voters, or some 47 percent of the electorate across the nation. George Bush didn’t win a mandate; he is president by the smallest margin of victory for a sitting president since Woodrow Wilson in 1916.

It might be time for principled members of the GOP to reconsider which party truly reflects their values.