How The Democrats Gradually Lost Dixie - And Why It Didn't Have To Happen: Introduction

 

On the op-ed page of The New York Times in March of 1972 a prominent Democrat running for President gave an analysis as to why he was running:

“Once the Democratic Party reflected true expressions of the rank-and-file citizens. They were its heart, the bulk of its strength and vitality. Long ago it became the party of the so-called intelligentsia. Where once it was the party of the people, along the way it lost contact with the working man and the businessman. It has been transformed into a party controlled by intellectual snobs…”

As political perceptions go at the time and as a foreshadowing of things to come, this was a warning on the scale of Eisenhower’s farewell address about the military industrial complex more than a decade before. I have little doubt it was given less attention to by its audience and the main reason was the author: Alabama Governor George C. Wallace.

One person who no doubt ignored it the most was George McGovern. His campaign for President represented the ideological opposite of Wallace’s: Wallace represented the far right of the Democrats; McGovern the far left. When two weeks later Wallace won the Florida primary with an astounding 42 percent of the vote – and McGovern finished in last with 6 percent – it should have been a more visible message to the political establishment. The ‘intellectual snobs’ and ‘intelligentsia’, particularly in the media, chose to see it as a sign of either an aberration or in the case of Hunter Thompson, as a sign that Florida was politically irrelevant. (He wrote as much in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, yet another sign of his failures as a political journalist.)

Wallace spent his primary run mocking McGovern at most of his rallies while McGovern took the approach of pretending Wallace was someone he could ignore as an obstacle to the Democratic nomination. At one point, according to Theodore White he joked that he would deal with Wallace by making him ambassador to South Africa. Every other political candidate acknowledged Wallace was a threat; McGovern basically didn’t talk about him.

The reason he could afford to do this was because of his approach to the primaries. In what was the last time in campaign history this would be possible McGovern’s approach to the primaries was to contest certain ones but ignore others. This meant putting up only a token presence in states like Indiana and West Virginia and not even putting his name on the ballot in states like Tennessee or North Carolina. It’s worth noting that up until May 15^th, the day Wallace was shot by Arthur Bremer and his campaign was suspended Wallace’s run had gotten him far more votes than McGovern. Wallace had gotten 3.3 million votes to McGovern’s 2.1 million (and Hubert Humphrey’s 2.6 million.) It was only because Wallace’s campaign was less professional then McGovern’s that he was not more of an obstacle: in multiple states the Wallace campaign didn’t file for delegates and it severely cost him throughout the run. In Wisconsin, he finished a surprise second to George McGovern, beating Humphrey. In Pennsylvania, with almost no campaign presence he finished second to Humphrey. Because of the flaws in his campaign even though he trailed Wallace by more than 1.2 million votes on May 15^th, he was substantially ahead in delegates with 560 to Wallace’s 324 and Humphrey’s 311.

The attempt on Wallace’s life ended his run for the Democratic nomination. It also dealt a vital blow to any chance McGovern had for beating Nixon. Wallace’s presence was something that McGovern was counting on and that Nixon feared.

McGovern was known for refusing to deal with Wallace at the Democratic convention where the ‘Stop McGovern’ campaign was willing to do so. This was not done so much out of nobility but strategy. A key plank of the McGovern campaign for the general election was Wallace being turned away from the Democrats and then running as a third party candidate. McGovern assumed that, just as in 1968, Wallace would split the Southern vote with Nixon and as with Humphrey, give me a fighting chance for a victory in the electoral college.

  Nixon viewed Wallace in a similar vein but he was far more concerned about Wallace’s strength in the North. Wallace had taken nearly 12 percent of the vote in Ohio, 10 percent in Michigan, 8 percent each in Illinois and Pennsylvania and 9 percent in New Jersey. Humphrey had carried Pennsylvania and Michigan as a result. He also feared how it might affect him in California which only his allure of the native son had helped him carry.

After Wallace’s shooting Nixon was certain he would get Wallace’s votes and that would carry him to victory. And he was right: he took 49 of 50 states that November. His biggest margins were in the Deep South, where he carried the five states Wallace had won in 1968 – Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Georgia and Mississippi by margins ranging from 66 percent to 78 percent in Mississippi.

 

THESIS

 

When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed LBJ famously said “We just handed the South to the Republicans for a very long time.” He foresaw that the African-American vote would desert the Republicans and move to the Democrats as well as the fact that the South would become rich territory for the GOP going forward.

Sixty years later few can doubt the truth of that prophecy. But there is a difference between how the far right views the former issue and how the far left views the latter. The GOP acknowledges it has a problem but other than token efforts its made real effort to change things on a policy wide because they are afraid of scaring off its base. The Democrats also acknowledge that they have a problem but it is telling that extreme left would rather create new states – DC and Puerto Rico – then even consider making an effort to organize in the existing ones.

I should mention, in case I’m asked, that I believe that the District of Columbia and perhaps Puerto Rico (in the latter case, it’s not clear that’s a consensus) are entitled to full and equal representation. But I am also smart enough to know that the reason that Democrats are in favor of it has little, if anything, to do with fair and equal representation. I’m familiar with proxy battles between both sides by now and no matter how much you want to argue otherwise the loudest voices arguing for their representation are as cynical and full of double-speak as the one’s against it.

Wallace was a horrible individual but no one could deny his political acumen. As I wrote in my series on him last year Wallace was the first of a long line of politicians – almost all of them conservative – who were able to win votes in both primaries and general elections because the public perception of the Democratic Party was exactly how he phrased in his op-ed. McGovern’s campaign was built on many aspects of the Democratic coalition today but it also played in to leaving out the working man and in favor of the intellectual snob. Many of those who worked for McGovern would no doubt have considered that a virtue and no doubt still believe that McGovern was cheated out of the Presidency because of Richard Nixon and all of his dirty tricks. Nixon and Watergate basically gave the left an excuse to argue that they hadn’t really lost the 1972 election but that Nixon had stolen it. This ignores several major realities – not the least of which was their own incompetence running the campaign at the convention – but as I’ve come to see, the extreme left is just as good at ignoring reality as the extreme right is.

What is worth noting -  and what this series will attempt to enlighten – is that the Democratic Party’s loss of the South was not pre-ordained the moment LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act. On the contrary while the GOP gained immense strength in the South in the elections for President, on the state and federal level the Democratic Party had a strong foothold even in states Wallace and Nixon would carry. They would maintain that hold on the South until the end of the 20^th century when it was finally diminished to a fraction of its strength. And as electoral history taught us while the Republican regained control of the White House for five of the eight Presidential elections starting in 1968 and extending until 2000, the three that they won were one by products of what would be called ‘the New South’. Jimmy Carter  of Georgia and Bill Clinton of Arkansas were, critically, both governors of states that had gone for Goldwater in 1964, Wallace in 1968 and Nixon in 1972.

The problem that the Democrats had as a national party from the 1970s to the end of the century was the divide between what was then called the liberal wing and their more conservative Southern wing. One must remember that the left wing has historically held the South in contempt since the era of slavery. The major fights in the Democratic Party from the 1930s until the 1960s was between the northern liberals and the southern conservatives. Because the Democratic Party was essentially a Southern institution from the end of Reconstruction to the start of the Depression in both houses of Congress they had leadership and managed to keep Jim Crow in place even after the left began to make an inroad in the party with FDR’s landslides. The numbers began to shift in the left’s favor in the 1960s and by the early 1970s they were in the majority in the Democratic Party.

But there had always been a bigotry between the liberals of the North and the conservatives of the South in the Democrats and that animosity never went away even after the Civil Rights Bill was passed. The left could never see that the South was changing before their eyes and that was certainly true with both Southern Democrats they elected President. There has always been a divide between the left’s desire to lose disastrously in a noble cause – as they did far too often in their races for the White House starting in 1968 – rather than pick candidates who could win and have to govern.

What these articles will illustrate is how the South began to change with the passage of the Civil Rights act in ways the Democrats in the North weren’t willing to see and indeed many won’t even with the benefit of hindsight. It will illustrate how the two Southerners who became President were viewed with contempt by both the party leaders and the media that may very well have not been directed to the members of the liberal wing of the party – and that it helped cripple one of them and did much to hurt the other in the eyes of history. Both men did bring the abuse upon their own heads but their birthplace never helped.

By showing this I hope to show a story the far left doesn’t want to be told because it negates their perception of the South as a third-world country they’d rather visit less than the actual third world. The left needs to comprehend that the South will not disappear much as they would like to ignore it and that despite their best wishes a national party can’t be solely a party of intellectual snobs and ignore the working man. This is a lesson that the nation needs to learn and I think it has to start with the South. Pretending the parts of the country we don’t like will go away if we ignore them is not something any nation can do and expect to have a future. We have to learn from our mistakes or were just going to keep repeating them.