A Cracker Democracy

That is what we have become.

Ever since the population began to shift to the south, the crackers gained more and more political power. Since Goldwater's defeat in 1964, the only Democratic presidents have come from Texas, Georgia, and Arkansas. Even this year, we were so bent up on having a "southerner" on the Democratic ticket.

It is now at the point where high turnout among the more educated, progressive, and urban areas doesn't matter anymore. We are a nation controlled by crackers - a people who refuse to possess any sort of intellectual enlightenment and will support Bush no matter what. He is one of their own - a "Christian" man who, in the eyes of the crackers, is rightly waging a war on Islam. The fact that he is a "Christian" man renders all economic, financial, global, and domestic issues irrelevant.

Somebody told me a couple days ago that after 150 years, the south finally won the Civil War. They completely control the country now. As a result, they will turn back the clock on progress as a means to exact revenge. (Of course, I know all southerners are not like this and there are many great southerners here at DU, but those states are red for a reason.)

Unfortunately, my home state, Ohio, has slipped into the south. I live the Democratic part in the north (in Akron) and worked as a poll "challenger" all day on Tuesday to make sure everything went smoothly at the polling place, but we were outdone by the crackers in southern Ohio.

There always has been a schism between northern and southern Ohio. Northeast Ohio has a northeastern/New England influence, thus it is more progressive and Democratic. Toledo, a sibling of Detroit, is an automotive blue collar city. However, south of these cities is a whole different story. For a long time, Cleveland, Akron, Toledo, and Youngstown together had enough people to override the crackers and make Ohio a great blue state that proudly displayed economic strength that was admired by the nation and the world. However, when the manufacturing collapsed in the 70's and 80's, northern Ohio lost population to the southern part and the Republicans have controlled the state ever since.

I don't doubt that the Republicans stole Ohio. I don't doubt it for a second. But the Kerry team let it go for several reasons. First, Bush won the national popular vote, thus even if Ohio was reversed, it would not have changed the blue state/red state landscape and we would still have to put up with the same old crap over and over. If we're going to make any meaningful change, we are going to have to let the red states learn the hard way. Second, it would have been damn near impossible to prove Kerry had more votes even though common sense dictates otherwise. Blackwell would have thrown up every technicality possible to prevent counting the votes and the media would have sided with Blackwell.

It is tragic that we have to pay a huge price for others not making smart decisions. However, we have reached a point where we have no choice but to let the Republicans bite off more than they can chew and then choke on their own greed. Meanwhile, we must continue to build our base from the ground up, make sweeping changes in the Democratic Party, raise awareness on electronic voting machines, and never give up fighting for the issues we care so dearly about.

I was born and raised in the South - (N. Georgia) and have never lived north of the Mason-Dixon line, nor do I intend to.

Maybe I'm a 'cracker', but I'm also a Democrat.

The pubs played on fear - fear of terrorism, fear of a bad economy (remember, the media tells everyone the economy is 'recovering'), ... fear, fear, fear.

Most are too worried about recovering from natural disasters - how many northern states got hit by hurricanes this year? to pay attention to what's going on nationally. We're also worried about how to keep our jobs and pay for the kid's school/college.

Face it - the democratic party let the gop define the agenda and issued for the election, they also let the gop define who John Kerry is.

One of the best things the Democrats could do now is make Kerry the Senate Minority Leader - stick him in Bush's throat! Make bush deal with him!

We're not all Bush loving Christians. Some of us are just Christians - who really believe that Christ's only message was that we should love each other (even our enemies) and eschew violence.

Blaming the south for all of the red states is cowardly.

Wake up and smell the cow pattie.

It ain't got nothin to do with the south. There's some awesome southern Dems here in Florida.

"White cracker," or simply "cracker," was originally a pejorative term for a white person mainly used by blacks in the Southern United States, a usage that is now somewhat archaic. With the huge influx of new residents from the North, the term is now also used informally as a self-description by some white residents Florida and Georgia ("Florida cracker" or "Georgia cracker") to indicate that their family has lived there for many generations.

As an insult, "cracker" was typically invoked against a white American, particularly (though not necessarily) lower-income, uneducated rural men in the South. The term did not have quite the extreme derisive power of the word "nigger," presumably due to the vastly lopsided social situation between southern whites and blacks when the term was common.

There are various theories about the origin of the term "cracker." The term has been traced to the 1760s, when it was used by the Earl of Dartmouth to refer to frontiersmen who were "great boasters." It may be derived from the Gaelic "craic," meaning "entertaining conversation." Other theories include references to the slavemaster term "whipcracker" and to the 18th century practice of cracking corn to make liquor."


I'm southern, and I think you are right on the money. A cracker nowadays is a xenophobe with a southern accent, and Bush the ex-ra ra's whole southern affectation is to pick up these votes. Many, many of my relatives qualify. It's the mentality not the geography that is the key here, so I hope people don't knee-jerk, because the high-holy religiious crap is the pretty icing layed over the reality of their true mental state that you outlined.

Think about the last scene in easy rider, that's who these folks are.

"They'll talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedoms...but if they see a free individual, it's gonna scare 'em" (Nicholson's character from Easy Rider)

It's so true, THEY hate US, for not being imprisoned in a web of childhood parental and religious abuse. And they are gonna make us PAY. That's why abortion is such a sacred cow for them, it's an outlet of expression for the brutality of their childhoods, they over-identify with the aborted fetus, the fetus is THEM, it's their victimization, not the real child's that is the issue, which is why they don't adopt abortion into a statistical non-entity.

that during the civil war the Copperhead movement (stop the war and let the south do anything it wants to) was in basic control of southern Ohio and it looks like it still is today.