Dixie Shtick
by Alan Wolfe
TNR
Obama buries the Southern strategy.
Post Date Wednesday, November 05, 2008
There can be no beginning without an ending. Everyone seems to agree that Barack Obama's victory marks a new chapter in American political history. What is not so obvious is that it ends not just one era, but two.
First, of course, Obama's victory brings the movement toward racial equality that grew out of the Civil War to its logical political conclusion. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, by guaranteeing every citizen equal protection of the laws, institutionalized modern liberal democracy as we know it. But its promise remained long unfulfilled. Women did not achieve equal citizenship rights with men until 1920 and the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. And it would take until 1965 before the Voting Rights Act made it possible for African Americans to put the ideals of the Fourteenth Amendment into actual practice throughout much of the South.
It is one thing for African Americans to have won the right to vote. It is another for an African American to win 52 percent of the national vote. It has been only 43 years since 1965. That one country could experience so much racial progress in so short a period of time is testimony to its resilience and openness.
Still, the forces that have long opposed racial justice and equality in this country are by no means dead. The single most disturbing aspect of last night's election is the transformation of the Republican Party into the party of the Confederacy. Yes, Republicans remain strong in states such as Wyoming and Idaho, and Obama won Virginia and is leading in North Carolina. But both these latter two states flipped to the Democrats because they contain large numbers of white professionals who moved there from other parts of the country and because blacks came out to vote in such force. Long-time Southern whites, by contrast, opposed Obama--those in the Deep South most of all. Despite having lost the Civil War and having been instructed by the laws of the land to treat members of both races equally, large parts of the South resisted--and they continue to resist.
(More here.)
TNR
Obama buries the Southern strategy.
Post Date Wednesday, November 05, 2008
There can be no beginning without an ending. Everyone seems to agree that Barack Obama's victory marks a new chapter in American political history. What is not so obvious is that it ends not just one era, but two.
First, of course, Obama's victory brings the movement toward racial equality that grew out of the Civil War to its logical political conclusion. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, by guaranteeing every citizen equal protection of the laws, institutionalized modern liberal democracy as we know it. But its promise remained long unfulfilled. Women did not achieve equal citizenship rights with men until 1920 and the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. And it would take until 1965 before the Voting Rights Act made it possible for African Americans to put the ideals of the Fourteenth Amendment into actual practice throughout much of the South.
It is one thing for African Americans to have won the right to vote. It is another for an African American to win 52 percent of the national vote. It has been only 43 years since 1965. That one country could experience so much racial progress in so short a period of time is testimony to its resilience and openness.
Still, the forces that have long opposed racial justice and equality in this country are by no means dead. The single most disturbing aspect of last night's election is the transformation of the Republican Party into the party of the Confederacy. Yes, Republicans remain strong in states such as Wyoming and Idaho, and Obama won Virginia and is leading in North Carolina. But both these latter two states flipped to the Democrats because they contain large numbers of white professionals who moved there from other parts of the country and because blacks came out to vote in such force. Long-time Southern whites, by contrast, opposed Obama--those in the Deep South most of all. Despite having lost the Civil War and having been instructed by the laws of the land to treat members of both races equally, large parts of the South resisted--and they continue to resist.
(More here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home