I am perpetually flustered how facilely Northerners dismiss the South by making the equation South=Racism and not thinking any further. Yes, its history of slavery and Jim Crow weigh on the region (they weigh on the rest of the country too, only in different ways). But the recent reaction to the candidacy of James Hart, an openly eugenicist running as a Republican for Tennessee’s 8th Congressional District seat, is an exercise in regionalist projection that does Northern liberals (of whom I guess I’m now an honorary member) no favor.
Hart is about as odious as they come (check out his political platform). But to read liberal blogs you’d think that the man represented the secret soul of the Republican party. Or worse, the not-so-secret soul of the state of Tennessee. To wit,
It’s surprising that Kerry is able to stick close to Bush in Tennessee polls, considering the popularity James Hart, a self-proclaimed racist and supporter of eugenics who’s running for Congress.
Or, here’s the usually with-it Kos:
This is a safe Democratic seat, so Hart is nothing more than an embarrassment for the Republicans. It is a nice reminder of what the “Southern Strategy”, taken to its extremes, can produce.
Look, James Hart isn’t popular; he didn’t even win a contested primary. He saw that his district had a veteran Democratic Congressman so entrenched that no Republican politician bothered to run, so he ran. Unopposed. The Shelby County GOP (Memphis and Memphis suburbs… a lot of District 8 is rural, but those Northern blogs act as if Tennessee had no cities, or Democrats for that matter) freaked out when they realized the disaster that Hart represented and put a write-in candidate forth, to no avail. The guy represents no “Southern Strategy”, he represents a racist nut who decided to run for office and the unpleasant fact that there are still too many people (any!) who might vote for such a racist nut. Just read his economic platform (an anti-capitalist screen that’s a cross between William Jennings Bryan and Lyndon Larouce), and you can see Hart really doesn’t represent the Republican Party, except in the sense that a reactionary will generally pick a conservative affiliation over a liberal one.
None of which to say there isn’t a Southern Strategy. Trent Lott’s appearance at Strom Thurmond’s birthday celebration was one protracted nudge-nudge, wink-wink, all the more shamefully because it took Josh Marshall a week or so of hammering on the issue before people treated it like the scandal it was. But if people can’t read the difference between that incident and Hart’s candidacy, then that speaks poorly to their grasp of racial politics. Maybe they’re too just eager to feel superior to people in Tennessee.
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