Will the risen South be the fall of the GOP?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 29, 1996 | by Michael Rust

Once a Democratic bastion, the South has been reincarnated as a GOP stronghold. Political pundits wonder if the Republican leadership's Southern power brokers can work with the rest of the country.

If, back in 1948, a time traveler -- one, say, with a taste for politics and an ear for Southern accents -- had set his time machine to revisit America at 16-year intervals, he would have followed a remarkable political evolution.

In the presidential-election year of 1948, "Dixiecrats" -- Southern Democrats angered by President Harry Truman's support of civil-rights legislation -- walked out of the Democratic convention in Philadelphia and endorsed South Carolina Gov. Strom Thurmond as the presidential candidate of "states-rights Democrats." Thurmond carried South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana that November.

In 1964, Thurmond was a Democratic senator from South Carolina and again broke with his party -- this time to endorse the presidential candidacy of Sen. Barry Goldwater, his Republican colleague from Arizona. (Within a year Thurmond would be the first Southern Democrat to cross the aisle and become a Republican.) Goldwater, one of eight senators to vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, carried the same four states Thurmond had won in 1948, in addition to Georgia and his home state.

In 1980, the fact that a Southerner, President Jimmy Carter, led the Democratic ticket made no difference as the South -- with the exceptions of Maryland and Carter's native Georgia -- went solidly for Republican Ronald Reagan, who had kicked off his campaign that fall in Mississippi, culturally as far South as he could get.

Now, 16 years after Reagan's victory, the transformation seems almost complete. Throughout the corridors of power on Capitol Hill, Southern accents predominate. Trent Lott of Mississippi has succeeded Bob Dole as Senate majority leader, while Don Nickles of Oklahoma has the No. 2 job of majority whip. Third in line is Thad Cochran of Mississippi, who chairs the Senate GOP conference. Connie Mack of Florida is chairman of the Senate campaign committee. In the House, of course, Georgia's Newt Gingrich sits in the speaker's chair. Texans Dick Armey and Tom DeLay hold the majority leader's post and the position of majority whip, respectively. A couple of blocks away at the Republican National Committee, Haley Barbour of Yazoo City, Miss., and Washington chairs the RNC.

This Southern dominance of GOP congressional leadership is "symptomatic of the geographic shift in the dominance of the Republican Party to the South but also to the West," says William Rusher, a fellow at the conservative Claremont Institute in California and author of The Rise of the Right. Reagan's dominance in the 1980s "was a tremendous signal" that the GOP was "taking its lessons" from the West, he tells Insight.

However, Capitol Hill's melodious Southern voices don't always have a soothing effect. "When you have Southern drawl after Southern drawl invading the ears of Midwesterners, North-easterners, Californians and even those in the Rocky Mountain states, day after day, you paint a picture of a Republican Party that seems to come out of the Confederacy," warns Michael Dubke, executive director of the Ripon Society, an organization for GOP moderates.

There is no doubt that Republicans are looking south and counting on picking up a majority of the 29 open Democratic House seats -- most in the South -- to keep their majority. And there's good reason to feel that way. In the 11 states of the old Confederacy, Republicans now hold six of 11 governorships, 12 of 22 Senate seats and 59 of 101 seats in the House of Representatives -- a dominance not seen since Reconstruction. But at what price does this success come? Some have wondered if the last few years have seen a Republican takeover of the South, or a Southern takeover of the GOP.

"What's happened is the Dixiecrats have moved into the Republican Party and taken it over, instead of simply being the junior members of this coalition," says Michael Lind, author of the recently published Up From Conservatism. Lind, a onetime figure in conservative journalistic and policy circles, broke rather noisily with the right a couple of years ago and now decries what he sees as the "Southernization" of the conservative movement as well as the Republican Party. In this view, GOP "culture-war" rhetoric is a reprise of the Bourbon South's efforts to distract poor white voters from economic issues, while GOP economic efforts are an attempt to make the old nonunion, low-wage South the model for the country. The Dixiecrat power bloc has returned, he argues -- within the other party.

There's a twofold secret to Southern success, Lind tells Insight. "First of all, it's having long-term members in Congress." Having killed campaign-finance reform, the Southern GOP leadership will never allow term-limits legislation to pass, he predicts. "That's the key to Southern domination in seniority." The other aspect is the funneling of federal money. Like the Dixiecrats of old -- who valued agricultural subsidies as strongly as they denounced the minimum wage -- Southern Republicans "are actually bringing more money into their states than those states are paying in taxes."