You should be reading Orcinus. No, no: in addition to of Nobody Knows Anything, not instead of. Just get up 5 minutes earlier every day.

Orcinus has an interesting entry about the Republican party’s Southern Strategy and another entry about how the Republican party no longer has the Big Tent—frankly, it’s hard for me to imagine they ever did, but all I know of the Republicans is Reagan-Bush-Gingrich, so there you go. Anyhow, the “Southern Strategy,” for those of you’ve been dead recently:

The Southern Strategy was developed to take advantage of the upheavals of the southern structure (Bass and De Vries, 1976, 22-33). The major goal of the Southern Strategy was to transform the Republicans’ reputation as the party of Lincoln, Yankees, and carpetbaggers into the party that protects white interests (Klinkner 1992; Bass and DeVries 1976; 22-23). Thus, subtle segregationist threads are sewn in to the tapestry of the Southern Strategy.

The upshot of this move to the right and assumption of the right-wing, segregationist elements of the South is the Republican Party we have today:

What I didn’t realize, of course, was just how much havoc the devil’s pact by Nixon, in signing on to the Southern Strategy, would wreak on the party itself. But it became immediately manifest by the late 1970s that the conservative movement — which was more of a Trotskyite ideological movement than genuine conservatism, in my estimation — had taken over the party’s larger machinery.

I don’t think there’s much debate that the Southern Strategy has completely altered our political landscape (and, as it probably goes without saying, has done so for the worse).

So here’s my question:

Why is the conservative/reactionary Southern white male vote so goshdarned important?

I’m sorry if that’s a completely naive question, but for the life of me I cannot understand why this regional group has had such a large effect on the rest of the nation. Why did the Democrats (until the Civil Rights movement) and then the Republicans pander so hard to them? Are they a much larger voting bloc than I imagine it would be? Is it the money of reactionaries like Richard Mellon Scaife?

Any pointers to discussions of this subject would be most welcome.

Darin and I went out to dinner tonight at the Four Oaks over in Bel Air—too slow, too expensive, for food that wasn’t quite to the level it needed to be, but we got two hours to talk to one another, something we haven’t had enough of lately, so that was good. For the first half hour we were just about the only people in our room of the restaurant. Then two other parties were seated. Then 20, 30 minutes before we left a party sat at the table behind us.

And the meal was almost completely ruined for me, because I couldn’t help overhearing what these people were talking about.

…About how wonderful the President’s budget proposal is.

…About how convincing Powell’s speech at the UN was.

…About how wonderful this war in Iraq is going to be. (Let me help you out on this—no one who was eating at this restaurant knows anyone in, let alone has children in, the armed forces. It’s an economic strata thing, in case you’re wondering.)

…About the “spoils of war.” Said gleefully. Really, really gleefully.

It’s hard for me to believe that people who have enough brainpower to have autonomic body functions working can fall for the bullshit streaming out of Washington.

Maybe they were part of the extremely tiny percentage of people out there who are making out like bandits from the Bush Kleptocracy.

Darin kept squeezing my hand and saying, “Talk to me. Don’t listen to them. Talk to me.”

I can’t decide whether it’s a victory or not that I didn’t stop by their table and give them a piece of my mind.

This isn’t a political journal—basically, when it comes to screeds about politics you can find about fifty blogs in my list o’blogs over there that can do it much, much better than I can (and I’m not talking about the ones listed under “The Right”).

But I draw your attention now to an editorial in The Guardian newspaper, a reaction to the recent State of the Union:

We know, of course, that the pomp of the state of the union address barely hides another reality: an economically divided, unequal and uncertain country, with a substantial anti-war movement of its own, and whose citizens remain sceptical about their president’s wider strategies. Despite warm words about helping the poor with a system of “mentors”, and a big chunk of money to fund research into hydrogen cars to help the environment, his old conservatism shone through, with calls for an end to abortion. When he spoke of bringing forward his massive tax cuts, it was notable that only half of Congress rose to applaud: stone-faced Democrats sat that one out.

and this:

For Bush, the world community at the UN is interesting; but not very interesting; and certainly not essential.

He is the only person in the world who can afford to think this way. He has the muscle that no one else comes near to possessing. His menaces and his stare are easily mocked, but they are also impressively scary. I would not have liked to have been an Iraqi general watching that speech. We caricature today’s America as a flabby, divided and sentimental empire, led by an idiot; but it is also, at moments, the warlike republic of old, with a self-certainty no other country has known for generations. Today the UN is the flag and theory of the world order: but America, like its Coke, is the real thing.

I haven’t read anything similar on the pages of American papers. In the political blogs, yes, but not by leading opinion makers.

For Tony Blair it’s very different. Britain has not yet been attacked in the same way; indeed many people here believe attacking Iraq makes terrorism at home more likely, not less. The anti-war chorus is growing ever louder, both outside and inside the Commons, where the prime minister’s insistence yesterday that British troops would only be committed to war by “our government, our House of Commons, our country” was met with roars of disbelief.

I would love to have a country where the reported leader was made to face some opposition instead of getting softballs lobbed at him. Where he couldn’t hide behind the weaselly non-answers of his Press Secretary. Where pundits could ask hard questions without being asked why they hate America so much.

Can you imagine our Congress reacting with roars of disbelief, rather than scripted applause?

Didn’t think so.