The Deep South, The KKK, And The Republican Party

In light of the right-wing Republican reaction to defending voting rights of minorities and its blatant racial politics (see "Strategy, Southern") for the past 45 years, the findings of this study published in the American Sociological Review should come as no surprise:

“The wedding of the Klan’s mainly working-class constituency to the Republican Party was no simple feat in light of the strong appeal that Republican candidates hold for wealthy and upper-middle-class white southerners,” the authors argued. 

White working-class southerners were more receptive to Republican economic policies because they had already broken ties to the Democratic Party due to its position on civil rights, they argued. 

“The Ku Klux Klan did not succeed in defending Jim Crow, but, through its similarly polarizing character, played a role in linking its working-class constituency to a political party [Ed.: the Republican Party] that strongly opposes proactive intervention of the federal government to produce greater racial and class-based equality,” the researchers said.

The article is worth a read (but you can't read the study without a subscription to the Review, unfortunately). The researchers were David Cunningham (Brandeis), Rory McVeigh (Notre Dame), and Justin Farrell (Yale). (UPDATE: Occasional Silver Spring Bureau Chief Brian has helpfully supplied us with this site where you can read the study.)

This is why we are in great sympathy with what Michael Tomasky had to say about the loss of Mary Landrieu's seat in Louisiana in particular, and in general with the fact that the Democratic Party really doesn't exist in the Deep South anymore:

It’s lost. It’s gone. A different country. And maybe someday it really should be. I’ll save that for another column. Until that day comes, the Democratic Party shouldn’t bother trying. If they get no votes from the region, they will in turn owe it nothing, and in time the South, which is the biggest welfare moocher in the world in terms of the largesse it gets from the more advanced and innovative states, will be on its own, which is what Southerners always say they want anyway. 

We would rather the Deep South change, but barring that we can't continue to let the centuries of ignorance, intolerance and hatred that have found their way into the DNA of the Republican Party, thanks to its Southern base, drag the rest of America down.

BONUS:  Charles P. Pierce has a different opinion, as does Ed Kilgore (both worth a read, as always.)