A hundred and fifty years ago, the United States was at war with itself: not metaphorically, in the way that has often been true, but literally.
Two large and growing armies faced each other in northern Virginia, with other forces scattered west of the mountains, in the first year of the American Civil War.
Politically, there was no doubt about how the country divided. The north was led by Abraham Lincoln, the first and greatest Republican Party president; the south was the Democratic Party’s heartland, and while many northern Democrats supported the war effort, the party took decades to recover from the stigma of being responsible for secession. In the tactless words of one of their opponents, they were the party of “rum, Romanism and rebellion.”
Fast forward to today, and the political map looks eerily similar.
Compare, for example, the presidential election of 2008 with that of 1896 or 1900: the pattern is the same, but the party labels have swapped over. With a black man in the White House, the deep south is almost as solid for the Republicans as it once was for the Democrats.
And now, for perhaps the first time since George Wallace in 1968, a true son of the Confederacy is in the running for the presidency. Texas governor Rick Perry, who at the weekend announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination, has already shot to favouritism; Intrade this morning quotes him at 38.7, ahead of Mitt Romney on 30.9 and the rest back in single figures.
I’m inclined to think that a lot of this is a novelty effect, and that Perry’s star will wane over the next few months. Trying to combine establishment credibility with an appeal to the party’s crazy wing risks satisfying neither: those who want sanity will go for Romney, while the crazies will stick with Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin. But I could be wrong about this.
In any event, it’s remarkable that Perry has as much credibility as he has. Granted Texas has enjoyed economic success under his stewardship, you would still expect that a deep southerner who has explicitly defended the right of secession and aligned himself with hard-line Christian fundamentalists would ring alarm bells in the rest of the country.
Ross Douthat, who in saner times would himself be tagged as a crazy, put it this way in The New York Times: “What Perry doesn’t have, though, is the kind of moderate facade that Americans look for in their presidents. He’s the conservative Id made flesh, with none of the post-partisan/uniter-not-a-divider spirit that successful national politicians usually cultivate.
“Imagine if the Democratic Party nominated a combination of Al Franken and Nancy Pelosi for the presidency, and you have a sense of the kind of gamble Republicans would be taking with Perry.”
But this is what the Republican Party has become. For the past three years it has defined itself as the anti-Obama, and if your vision of apocalyptic evil is a well-educated, softly spoken Black moderate from Illinois, then it’s no surprise if you end up in the arms of someone such as Rick Perry.
I think Matthew Zeitlin in The New Republic gets it exactly right:
“If Rick Perry is nominated, in other words, we will probably finally see the campaign that conservatives have been wanting since the day Obama got the Democratic nomination. And it’s sure to be ugly.”
It won’t be as ugly as 150 years ago, when this contest was fought out on the battlefield. But if the south is still out for revenge then Perry could be its chosen instrument.
To quote The Onion:
“The South will rise again, find the remote and settle back down on the couch”
Paul Krugman has a good examination of the alleged successes of the Texas economy under Perry here.
Charles, if you are going to quote one conservative NYT columnist you should quote a liberal NYT columnist (and Nobel laureate of economics) on the same topic: (selected extract)
[(nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/the-texas-unmiracle.html?_r=1&src=ISMR_HP_LO_MST_FB)
The Texas Unmiracle
By PAUL KRUGMAN Published: August 14, 2011
Mr. Perry will claim that he can restore prosperity to America by applying the same policies at a national level.
So what you need to know is that the Texas miracle is a myth, and more broadly that Texan experience offers no useful lessons on how to restore national full employment.
It’s true that Texas entered recession a bit later than the rest of America, mainly because the state’s still energy-heavy economy was buoyed by high oil prices through the first half of 2008. Also, Texas was spared the worst of the housing crisis, partly because it turns out to have surprisingly strict regulation of mortgage lending.
Despite all that, however, from mid-2008 onward unemployment soared in Texas, just as it did almost everywhere else.
In June 2011, the Texas unemployment rate was 8.2 percent. That was less than unemployment in collapsed-bubble states like California and Florida, but it was slightly higher than the unemployment rate in New York, and significantly higher than the rate in Massachusetts. By the way, one in four Texans lacks health insurance, the highest proportion in the nation, thanks largely to the state’s small-government approach. Meanwhile, Massachusetts has near-universal coverage thanks to health reform very similar to the “job-killing” Affordable Care Act.
So where does the notion of a Texas miracle come from? Mainly from widespread misunderstanding of the economic effects of population growth.
For this much is true about Texas: It has, for many decades, had much faster population growth than the rest of America — about twice as fast since 1990. Several factors underlie this rapid population growth: a high birth rate, immigration from Mexico, and inward migration of Americans from other states….
…..
But what does population growth have to do with job growth? Well, the high rate of population growth translates into above-average job growth through a couple of channels. Many of the people moving to Texas — retirees in search of warm winters, middle-class Mexicans in search of a safer life — bring purchasing power that leads to greater local employment. At the same time, the rapid growth in the Texas work force keeps wages low — almost 10 percent of Texan workers earn the minimum wage or less, well above the national average — and these low wages give corporations an incentive to move production to the Lone Star State.
So Texas tends, in good years and bad, to have higher job growth than the rest of America. But it needs lots of new jobs just to keep up with its rising population — and as those unemployment comparisons show, recent employment growth has fallen well short of what’s needed.
If this picture doesn’t look very much like the glowing portrait Texas boosters like to paint, there’s a reason: the glowing portrait is false.]
@Jaywhar @1.27 pm
Oops, I only noticed your post after writing mine.
My guess is that Perry will be the Republican candidate. Pawlenty is out, the saner wing of the Republicans won’t accept the batshit crazy Bachmann, the crazy Christian wing of the Republicans won’t accept relative liberal and Mormon Romney (who in another black mark set up a health care system in Mass. that was the model for Obamacare) which leaves Perry as the only person who could bridge both groups.
He still scares hell out of me…