Rick Perry and the Faustian Bargain

I've been asked to comment on the issues raised by Texas Governor Rick Perry's statement last week about his state seceding from the Union. My basic reaction recalls an old analogy: when you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas. The Republican Party, by hitching its wagon to a Southern strategy, has morphed into a quasi-regional and sectarian party. It has reaped electoral advantage from that but has paid a great price, as has the country. This is what the one-time party of Lincoln has inevitably become after taking the path of common cause with that still only partially reconstructed region and its revanchist attitudes.

To begin with, Gov. Perry talked out of both sides of his mouth. While giving an interview after speaking at one of those "Tea Party" anti-tax rallies last week, Perry established his context and apparent ignorance of the outcome of the Civil War with, "Texas is a unique place. When we came into the union in 1845 one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that." He then backtracked a bit before sending a tantalizing signal in southern code speak, "We have a great union and there's absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people who knows what may come of that?" Rally goers listening to the Governor responded with enthusiastic chants of "Secede! Secede!" Click here to listen to the MSNBC audio on Talking Points Memo.

Only in that region of extreme "solutions" to any issue could such sentiments be voiced by the governor of a state. Only in that region could an American politician of stature intimate any sentiment but horror at the very thought of revisiting a dismemberment of the union for any reason. The violent and irretrievably selfish impulses implicit in Perry's construction fall on fertile ground only among the adherents of the imaginary realm romanticized in Gone With the Wind. Never mind that the other viewpoint just won an election by nine and a half million votes. If our opinions do not prevail, they glower, Washington is thumbing its nose at the American people and the nation itself must be sacrificed on the altar of our presumption.

Richard Nixon committed his campaign to a "Southern Strategy" in 1968. Ronald Reagan emphatically repeated it in 1980. The bargain was cemented in 1994 in congress by Newt Gingrich and his "Contract for America." Over the ensuing 12 years the GOP veered farther and farther to the extreme right, capturing overwhelming dominance in Old Dixie without completely losing its hold in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions. But in the process, Old Dixie captured the party itself. The moderates were driven out of it. When difficulties mounted to a crescendo by 2006, these moderate areas finally turned on an ideology they had never fully bought into, and the Democrats regained the strong majorities they had enjoyed through most of the Twentieth Century.

Things have come full circle now. Fully relieved of their one-time reliance on a Democratic Solid South (1844-1964) it is the Democrats who are the national party of the future and big ideas and the Republicans who are the party of states rights and limited vision. Lincoln has long since stopped spinning in his grave. It is Jefferson Davis, Theodore Bilbo and George Wallace who are the soul mates of Rick Perry and the GOP of today.