Giving Credit Where It's Due

Defenders of Howard Dean's Confederate flag remark have been reminding us that Dean has been using a line about white folks with Confederate flag decals on their pickups for months without kicking up a controversy before now.

But David Neiwert, whose Orcinus blog is a good source on current far-right extremist movements, did take notice this past March:

Dean makes an error in staking out this argument, an unsurprising
one, I suppose, for the son of a stockbroker: He presumes that rural America is
monolithic. But in truth, like most American subcultures, it has its own
internal divisions. And if you had to explain it in a simple sound bite like
Dean's, that division nowadays is between the folks who have Confederate flag
stickers in their back windows and those who don't.

The latter -- the
decent, civility-minded, neighborly people of common sense and good will who
make up the vast majority of rural America -- are the Democratic party's natural
rural base, the people who have most felt abandoned by the party's urban focus
in the past 20 years. They are the people that Dean, or whoever carries the
party's banner, needs to bring back into the fold.

The former -- the
neo-Confederates and Patriots, the right-wing extremists and the unregenerate
racists and segregationists, all of whom are the people most likely to put a
Dixie sticker in the back window -- are the people who once upon a time made the
Democratic Party the acknowledged home of the nation's unreconstructed racists.
They are the people who fled the party in the 1960s for the welcoming arms of
the Nixonite Republican Party.

Dean should not be courting this faction
of rural America. Even if he provides them with a brilliant plan to ensure
health care for all of them, they will reject it and him in the end anyway,
because their hatred of "gummint" ultimately knows no bounds.

Well put.

There's an embarassing sideline to Dean's foot-in-mouth moment. The White Citizens Council - formally the Council of Conservative Citizens - has invited Dean to speak at their national convention. Yuck!