It's much more benign and rational than meets the eye, as Major demonstrates. Still, it always irks me when people fail to recognize that it was the Democrats who held sway in the South from Reconstruction up until the last 30 years or so. You can argue that it's the same breed of people who switched sides to the Republicans, which many did at the time (let's keep it in context), but I'd challenge anybody to objectively link that attitude to a significant number of members in the current Southern caucus; the argument some are conveying smacks of regional bias, and I'm not one to deny the Deep South isn't a sh*t hole, but those two conclusions aren't directly related. Why do you think the South was far and away the most cohesive and effective political bloc for so many years? Because everybody labelled them, often correctly, but always in a blanket fashion. It does no good to slander them, because that's just going to provoke more legislative confrontations. I hate these games. If you really want to know about Southern Politics and Republicanism, read "The Rise of Southern Republicans" by one of my personal mentors, Merle Black, which he co-wrote with his brother Earl. He's the leading authority on Southern politics.
The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past. --William Faulkner 1964 is within my lifetime. The last Confederate soldier died 3 years before I was born. The last mass lynching was 15 years before I was born. The last single lynching killed Michael Donald in Alabama in 1981. Donald was a random target chosen in retaliation for a black man not being convicted of shooting a white policeman in Mobile. This ain't history. Ideas and attitudes don't go away in less than a generation. Many of the same people who supported Jim Crow and voting discrimination and argued that the country is not ready to give equality to all its citizens are still alive and still in the public life. So, Stupidmoniker, I would think 300 years is about right.
