Go South, Republicans!

Gene Lyons shares his view of the Southernization (in the most reactionary sense) of today's Republican Party:

Just once I'd like to see one of these Confederate Republicans acknowledge how much more their states receive from the Treasury than they pay in taxes. (For Louisiana, it's $1.45 for every dollar paid; for Mississippi, $1.77, etc.) But then what's a little hypocrisy among free lunch conservatives? Jindal also mocked an (imaginary) $8 billion earmark for a high-speed railway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Then he turned right around and solicited funding for a Baton Rouge-New Orleans line.

Back before free-lunch hypocrisy became gospel, Louisiana had a social structure like Guatemala's-low taxes on the wealthy, a beaten-down middle class and sprawling poverty. Economically, GOP doctrine consists of ignoring the obvious. Show me a low-tax, "pro-business" paradise like the Deep South before World War II, and I'll show you poverty, disease, illiteracy and stagnant opportunity.

Alternatively, try finding a wealthy country anywhere on earth with the economic policies the Jindals, Limbaughs and Huckabees recommend. They simply don't exist. Hence, the current nearhysteria on the right. We haven't seen its like since the 1960s, when many white Southerners panicked over the prospect of racial integration, the John Birch Society flourished, and billboards depicting "Martin Luther King at a Communist training school" lined rural highways. [my emphasis]

This is not just snark. The real-world model for the Ayn Randish, Limbaughist dystopia that is now the Republican vision for the United States is the segregationist governments of the post-Reconstruction Deep South.

The highlighted passage reminds us how its anything but "anti-South" to be concerned about Southern reactionaries like Louisiana's Bobby-the-Exorcist Jindal, Arkansas' Mike Huckabee (lately of FOX News) and Mississippi's Haley Barbour. No one stands to benefit more from Obama's recovery policies and long-term health and economic-development plans. It's a point that the Democrats need to keep pounding by pointing out the positive effects of those programs in the South and keep it constantly in front of the voters that the Barbours and the Jindals actually oppose those beneficial programs.

Tags: gene lyons, us south