A regional party of the South

In an excellent article in the Guardian, Sidney Blumenthal describes how BushCo has succeeded in turning the Republican party into "a rump regional party mired in the swamps of Dixie".

The concession by George Allen today confirms that James Webb has won in Virginia, a victory that gives the Democrats a majority in the Senate, completing the party's sweep of both houses of the Congress and ratifying the repudiation of President Bush and his policies, especially in the Iraq war. Bush's radical presidency was the number one issue in the mid-term elections. Republican candidates lived in fear that they would receive calls from the White House suggesting that the president wanted to campaign for them.

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The once eagerly sought presidential photo-op had become the kiss of death.

Before the spotlight turns to the repositioning of the president, the appointment of a new secretary of defense and the machinations of the new 110th Democratic Congress, it is worthwhile to sift through the extraordinary election returns, which contain the makings of a further realignment of American politics in the presidential election of 2008 and beyond.

Bush's radical presidency consolidated the grip of Southern conservatism over the Republican Party. He completed the "Southern Strategy" launched by Richard Nixon in 1968 in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, a strategy that assimilated the Dixiecrat George Wallace third party into the Republican ranks. Over time, the strategy that was supposed to be an add-on to the traditional GOP engulfed it. Bush finished the project that Nixon began. Karl Rove, his chief political aide, hypothesized a permanent national majority rooted in a Southern Strategy in which the rest of the country was an add-on. But in his quest for realignment Rove has left a rump regional party mired in the swamps of Dixie. What purpose does Rove with his scenarios of polarization now serve Bush?

After the mid-term elections, the GOP has become a regional party of the South. And, in the future, Republicans can only hold their base by asserting their conservatism, which alienates the rest of the country. More than ever, the Republicans are dependent upon white evangelical voters in the South and sparsely populated Rocky Mountain states. The Republican coalition, its much-touted "big tent," has nearly collapsed.

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The Democratic Party that has advanced from the 2006 elections reasserts the Solid North, with inroads in the metropolitan states of the West, and, like the GOP of the past, challenges in the states of the peripheral South such as Arkansas, Tennessee and Virginia. This Democratic Party has never existed before. It is a center-left party with wings that can flap together. The party's opposition to the Republicans on economic equity and social tolerance are its defining characteristics. The pace of this realignment is uncertain, but the underlying dynamics are not. That the Senate fell to the Democrats in Virginia is telling about the weakness of the Republicans and suggestive about the future.