Comments Elsewhere

“A friend of mine and I are thinking about starting up a community blog for southern Democrats, possibly called “Yellow Dawg.” It would be focused on trying to get the Solid South back — revisiting historical political trends, the FDR administration, etc. and trying to see how to reconnect Democratic party principles with the values of southerners.”

I’ll be interested to see it. But watch out about the “solid South,” rebuilding, etc. rhetoric. Until 1968 or so there was a solid Democratic South, but of course the reason it was solid was that the Southern Democratic party was unabashedly the party of militant white supremacy, and it was not until 1968ish that the combined effects of LBJ’s realignment and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party broke the back of the Klan primary vote. I’m all about the social justice tradition in the South, but the Democratic “solid South” isn’t it (not even vis-a-vis FDR and the New Deal–white Southern Democrats’ support for the New Deal was thoroughly intertwined with white supremacy, in the same way that their later support for “populists” such as Orval Faubus, Bull Connor, or George Wallace was.)

If we are going to build our presence in the South so that it’s worth anything, we won’t be rebuilding, at least as far as the Democratic Party goes. We will be making something substantively new.