Blumenthal: Look Away, Dixieland

US Democrats won't win in the South while they keep quiet on race


Everything seemed to be going so well for Howard Dean, the frontrunner in America's contest for the Democratic presidential nomination. Then he made a throwaway remark that changed everything: he wanted, he said, "to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks". Dean's error was to evoke the divisive Confederate symbol, hated by black Americans as standing for slavery and still upheld by many Southern conservatives as representing their "heritage". Because he was the frontrunner, other Democratic candidates seized on the opportunity to create a controversy, implying that Dean is racist. The immediate effect was to slow his momentum.

But, as with many so-called gaffes, his comment alluded to a fundamental political truth: the Democratic and Republican parties have traded places after decades of struggle over civil rights. The solid South of the old Confederacy, which once voted uniformly for the Democrats, is now the bastion of the Republicans.

(snip)

Dean's Confederate flag problem coincided with another, seemingly unrelated, difficulty - over a mini-series, The Reagans, commissioned by the television network CBS. The intersection was less odd than it appears; Reagan and the Confederate flag, after all, have long been for the Southern Republican party the equivalent of apple pie and motherhood.

(snip)

As the great novelist William Faulkner, of Mississippi, wrote: "The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past."

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