[Dish] Bob Moser: ‘Reclaiming the South’

Courtesy TIMES BOOKS

Author, reporter and editor Bob Moser

by Adam Lynch
August 27, 2008

Bob Moser, who has reported for The Nation and Rolling Stone, and served as the editor of the tough Independent Weekly in North Carolina, has written a book on the manner in which the Democratic Party lost the once-solid South. In “Blue Dixie: Awakening the South’s Democratic Majority” (Times Books, 2008, $25), Moser, a North Carolina native, proposes that the loss was only temporary, and is already tottering on its last legs.

What were Democrats up against when Republicans implemented the Southern Strategy?
They were up against a backlash that southerners were experiencing after the Civil Rights Movement. The Republicans exploited that ruthlessly, of course. There had always been a white bloc vote in the South in support of Jim Crow laws, and the Republicans basically reconstructed, on cultural terms, a new white bloc vote in the South. This was with coded racial appeals and with a whole set of moral and cultural issues that Democrats had difficulty dealing with.

The political philosophy of many southerners was sort of a populist philosophy. There were two parts to that: There was a sort of cultural populism and an economic populism, and the Republicans basically took the cultural populism and transformed campaigns and elections into referendums on cultural issues. Democrats did not pick up on economic populism in the South, and didn’t, I think, understand it.

But for decades, Democrats had come off as your preacher, your teacher, your fellow Masonite, your struggling farmer.
Well, they did, but when southern Democrats basically started to run Republican-lite candidates, the Democratic identity got blurred. I was talking to some folks out in the street and asking somebody what being a Republican stands for. Most people will give you a quick answer. It may not be an accurate answer, but people think they know what the Republican Party stands for, and it’s a few clear principles: faith, values, low taxes. That’s about it. But if you ask about Democrats, you’re probably going to get a big, blank stare and a lot of contradictory and fuzzy ideas. I think part of that is because the Democrats, nationally, have withdrawn from the South, starting in the 1980s. Al Gore and John Kerry didn’t run a campaign in a single southern state—except for Florida—not a staffer, not a single campaign appearance. If Al Gore had spent a little extra money in Tennessee, things would be really different right now. Look at the results: Tennessee, Louisiana and West Virginia were very close in 2000, and it was obviously close in Florida.

But how do you bust up such staunch loyalty?
Look to the young voter. You have a lot of young voters who aren’t going to get very excited about a Democrat who sounds like a Republican, and getting turnout from those voters will not be very easy. There is a philosophical change coming, a call for good government, for better regulations on businesses, for stronger environmental policies, and there’s much less cultural conservatism, even among younger evangelicals.

But why does it have to be a generational change? People over 50 are losing their jobs, too.
There’s still the backlash generation to deal with. That generation is dying, but the vestiges of it, people who’ve grown up steeped in the politics of Southern Strategy are still holding onto that view of politics. Republicans start elections now, in many ways, the way Democrats used to start it: with people assuming they’re one of us, that they’re regular people. Nationally, Democrats have done a lot to contribute to that.

Where is there room to grow?
The two key things in southern politics are race and religion. There are challenges here for Democrats, but also opportunities. There’s a rising generation of evangelicals who are going to be a swing vote. Most of them are registering as independent, and that’s a huge shift. These are people who are still staunchly pro-life, but they’re not antigay, and they’re not inclined to be really out there on the front lines of the anti-abortion movement, either. There’s a real longing there for purpose-driven politics. It comes down to generations again. The new generation is sneaking up on us. The under-45 generation is a pretty large slice, and they don’t vote the way older people do.

Signed copies of Bob Moser’s book are available at Lemuria Books.