It's My Party (8 page)

Industrialization? True, the South is a great deal more industrial today than it was as little as one or two decades ago.
Yet even now much of Dixie remains heavily agricultural. Put yourself in the middle of the most industrialized, Yankee neighborhood
in the South that you can find. You still won’t have to drive more than an hour to find a place where farming continues to
be the main source of income and Yankees remain rare. (Even in Yankee clusters, it’s a good question whether the northerners
have more influence on the southerners who surround them or the other way around. My cousin, Tom, and his wife, Marsha, moved
from New York to a suburb of Memphis when their children were little. Now adults, all three children speak with a Tennessee
accent and root for Ole Miss.)

In spite of all the changes it has undergone, the South remains a place set apart, possessed of its own culture, different
from every part of the country. I suspect that two distinctively southern traits in particular had a lot to do with the region’s
entry into the Republican fold. I learned about the traits from books, not firsthand experience. But they fit with everything
I know about the South. Both traits go back—far back. According to David Hackett Fischer, the author of
Albion’s Seed
, a study of colonial America, they date from at least the seventeenth century. The first is a love of the military.

As Fischer explains, the first settlers in the South were comprised of two groups. One was aristocrats, displaced after the
Puritans defeated Charles I. The other was border-country people, inhabitants of the fierce, lawless regions between England
and Scotland. Each brought with it a military tradition. They bequeathed their love of the military to the entire region.

While at the outbreak of the Civil War the North possessed few military academies, the South was dotted with them (including
the Virginia Military Institute, or VMI, which became famous a few years ago when a court ordered it to go co-ed and it at
first resisted). And during the Civil War itself, as Fischer writes, “the south was superior to the north in the intensity
of its warrior ethic.” When a Yankee like me looks at Pickett’s charge, the exposed Confederate advance across open fields
at Gettysburg, he sees only slaughter. Plenty of southerners I know see gallantry.

Even today the southern military tradition remains powerful. The nation’s armed forces draws a disproportionately large number
of officers from the South, and at one point during the 1980s the South boasted an astonishing ninety-one military bases,
more than any other region. When the Democratic Party adopted a dovish stance during the Vietnam War, southerners found the
stance offensive—George McGovern, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1972, lost worse in the South than in any other
region—while finding the Republican emphasis on national strength correspondingly attractive.

The second trait is regional pride.

Derived, like love of the military, from the first settlers in the South, this trait precipitated the Civil War. Even after
he was elected president, after all, Lincoln promised to protect slavery where it already existed, merely preventing its expansion
into new territory. If it had accepted these terms, the South could have preserved its way of life, conceivably for decades.
Yet, as Fischer writes, “The Republican victory [of Lincoln] was seen… as an affront to southern honor.”

A century later the affront to southern honor arose from forced integration, rising taxes, proliferating federal regulations—in
a word, from the Democratic Party and its Great Society. (The Great Society may have been launched by a southerner, President
Lyndon Johnson of Texas, but the principal support for the program came from up North.) The South disliked getting pushed
around by northern liberals almost as much as it had disliked getting pushed around by northern abolitionists.

Steeped in military tradition and a sense of regional honor, the culture of the South is thus a conservative culture. Southerners
still put their hands over their hearts when they sing the national anthem. For that matter they still know the words to the
national anthem. They look up to veterans and down on federal bureaucrats. They’ve gotten used to hearing the rest of the
country snicker at them, resigning themselves to it as the price they have to pay to preserve their ways. But let the rest
of the country start ordering them around, in the person of a federal judge or an official of the Environmental Protection
Agency, and southerners will bristle. Sooner or later people like that were bound to start voting Republican.

My friend Barry Germany summed it up. When I told him about all the changes in the South that Haley and the Black brothers
cited, Barry replied, “That may all be true. But the reason the South went Republican seems simpler to me. The Democratic
Party just got to be too liberal for folks down here.”

* * *

Although at the state and local level, the South remains largely Democratic—the legislatures of nine of the eleven states
of the Old Confederacy remain in the control of Democrats—in national politics, the South has been reliably Republican for
nearly three decades. The Old Confederacy has supported the Republican presidential candidate in every election since 1968
except one, the election of 1976, when it voted for the southerner, Jimmy Carter, over the northerner, Gerald Ford, but even
then by a modest margin. From 1980 onward, the South has given Republican presidential candidates larger margins than has
any other region of the country, including the Rocky Mountains. Even in 1996, when the Republican presidential nominee was
Bob Dole, the least compelling Republican candidate since Alf Landon, the South stuck with the GOP, permitting Dole to sweep
the region, not that it did him much good. In Congress, too, the GOP reflects the disproportionate support it receives from
its southern base. Although the South accounts for just 20 percent of the country’s population, in 1998 it sent to Congress
39 percent of all House Republicans.

If when I was a boy the GOP’s favorite anthem was “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” today the GOP is whistling “Dixie.”

Not everyone cares for the tune.

There is a school of thought that the South is bad for the GOP. The South, this school holds, is too pro-gun and pro-military,
produces abrasive leaders in Congress, such as Congressman Dick Armey and Tom DeLay of Texas and Senator Jesse Helms of North
Carolina, and generally accents its politics the way it accents its speech—in a way that jars on everybody outside the South.
Worst of all, the South is the home of the religious right.

The argument was best stated in an article that appeared not long ago in the
Atlantic Monthly
. The article disturbed me, partly because it was entitled “Why the GOP is Doomed,” and partly because it was written by the
journalist Christopher Caldwell, whom I know to be an astute political observer. “There is a big problem with having a southern,
as opposed to a Midwestern or a California, base,” Caldwell wrote.

Southern interests diverge from those of the rest of the country, and the southern presence in the Republican Party has passed
the “tipping point” and begun to alienate voters from other regions.

The most profound clash between the South and everyone else, of course, is a cultural one. It arises from the southern tradition
of putting values—particularly Christian ones—at the center of politics… [Non-southerners] are put off to see that “traditional”
values are now defined by the majority party as the values of… denizens of two-year-old churches and three-year-old shopping
malls.

Televangelist Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority may now be defunct—Falwell shut down the controversial organization in 1996—but
the majority in the South still likes to think of itself as moral. When that attitude gets mixed up with politics, the anti-southern
school believes, it strikes everybody outside the South as sanctimonious.

I grant the observation—Republicans in the South do indeed place moral values smack in the middle of their politics. On the
Web site of the Republican Party of Texas, for example, you’ll find a page that contrasts the beliefs of Republicans with
those of Democrats. “Republicans,” the page asserts,

believe the traditional family and the values it fosters are the foundation of American society and their preservation is
essential to our Nation’s continued success. Democrats believe American society must redefine its values and the role of the
family to fit new lifestyle concepts, which have resulted from the 60s counter-culture movement.

If “good people” had been substituted for “Republicans,” while “sinners,” “reprobates,” or “degenerates” had been substituted
for “Democrats,” that passage could have been preached from any one of a thousand pulpits across the South. As a mandate for
policy, the passage is so vague that it can be read as calling for everything from revisions in the federal tax code (an end
to the marriage penalty, perhaps, or an extension of the child care credit to mothers who remain at home) to new state laws
regulating divorce (an attempt to strengthen the institution of marriage by repealing no-fault divorce statutes). Yet its
moral stance is clear. The correct setting in which to raise children is that of a marriage between a man and a woman. Same-sex
marriages, the adoption of children by homosexuals—these are to be opposed. This stance does indeed make many outside the
South—even many Republicans—queasy. In California as I write, signatures are being gathered to place the Protection of Marriage
Initiative on the ballot. The initiative would define marriage as a strictly heterosexual union. Yet although the California
Republican Party has endorsed the measure, leading members of the Party, including Congressman Tom Campbell, who is running
for the Senate, have denounced it.

“Republicans,” the Texas GOP asserts further down the Web site page, “believe human life is sacred and worthy of protection.
Democrats believe there should be no restrictions on abortion.”

This passage, too, leaves a great deal to conjecture. Does it represent a call to outlaw abortion outright? Or to make exceptions
in cases of rape and incest? Yet the passage’s pro-life tenor is of course unmistakable. It is also out of keeping with opinion—even
Republican opinion—in much of the country outside the South. In the Northeast, Republican governors George Pataki of New York,
Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey, John Rowland of Connecticut, and Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania are all pro-choice, as is
Pete Wilson, the former Republican governor of California, in the West.

I grant, as I’ve said, that Republicans in the South place moral values smack in the middle of their politics. Yet the more
I think about it, the more I admire them for doing just that.