Robert L. Terrell

A great deal rests on the outcome Tuesday’s Democratic primary election in Texas. Conventional attention is focused on the race between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. However much Clinton and her supporters contend that she is an authentic agent of change, chances are that any change associated with a decisive victory for her will be marginal. On the other hand, if Obama wins there is a good chance that the United States is headed for a transition of the national political order that could have revolutionary ramifications.

The overall significance of the Texas primary, can probably be best understood within context of the titanic struggle for the soul of the south that has been waged on and off since the late 1870s and the end of Reconstruction. The most recent segments of that ancient, acrimonious struggle have their roots in the tumultuous period when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the 1965 Civil Rights Bill. Upon doing so, President Johnson is reputed to have observed that it was the right thing to do for the United States. But, he noted, his doing so would lead to the destruction of the Democratic Party in the South for at least a generation. He was right. And that’s how important the south is to presidential elections.

The South lost the Civil War. As a result, southerners have subsequently tended to define their identity via loss and grievance. Because slavery and race were at the core of the issues for which the south fought, until relatively recent times the region has tended to be dangerously racist and socially conservative. It is rural, highly religious and conservative in most social matters. Excepting a few metropolitan areas such as Atlanta, Durham and Dallas, the region tends also to be extremely poor in comparison with much of the rest of the nation.

But there is an emergent New South, and it consists of educated whites in search of a new identity, blacks and Latinos who love southern culture and intend to stay, and educated, liberal people from a variety of races and nationalities who have moved into the region from other sections of the nation and world. These factions have begun to work together, and they are fighting to represent the South in matters large and small. Most important, they want to move the region’s identity and politics beyond race, sexual orientation and the Bible.

In any event, with the signing of the 1965 Civil Rights act events were set in motion that led to the Republican Party taking complete power in the South. The old Democratic Party, of which President Johnson was a member, has been neutered. The term used to describe the methods used by Republicans to bring about this transformation is “the southern strategy.” That “strategy” was based on the use of some of the most vile, racist tactics employed in the United States since the Civil War era. And for the most part, those tactics were consistently designed to appeal to the worst racist instincts of white southerners.

Richard Nixon initially employed the strategy, and every Republican presidential candidate since has used it to good advantage. Ronald Reagan was a master in the use of the party’s southern “strategy” via his apocryphal tales about so-called fat, black “welfare queens.” Such tales uttered before all-white audiences engendered powerful racist responses, which the Republican Party gleefully used to organize and expand its political clout across the South. Homage to the “strategy” involves symbolic acts such as speaking at universities that oppose racial integration, denouncing Affirmative Action, calling for more “law and order,” promising to appoint more strict-constructionist federal judges and honoring heroes of white resistance to racial integration. Trent Lott’s much maligned homage to Strom Thurmond was a classic example of the genre.

However, there is good reason to believe that the Republican Party’s southern “strategy” has begun to unravel. This is critically important because the party has become so dependent on white southern voters that it can’t win national elections without them. Thus, it is almost certain that the Republican Party’s leaders are currently alarmed because McCain is not winning big in the South. Moreover, the old segregationist faction, frequently referred to these days by deferential members of the see-no-evil mainstream media as “social conservatives,” has begun to demand that Huckabee be put on the ticket or they are going to boycott the upcoming November election. Without their support, McCain is toast.

In addition, Barack Obama’s striking primary victories in the South Carolina, Georgia, and semi-southern locations such as Iowa and Missouri, has to be engendering rising alarm among Republican strategists. Heretofore, at least since Lyndon Johnson’s signing, it was inconceivable that a non-white person could win a significant statewide political race in those previously viciously, racist states. Thus, Obama’s unprecedented victories are the first clear, unambiguous indication that the long touted, but late arriving, “New South” is here at last. As indicated above, we will know a lot more about all this after Tuesday’s primary in Texas. If Obama wins big, it will probably mean that the moment for generational change has arrived. It will also mean that the people of the United States will be free, for the first time in a generation or more, to think in terms of what we might do if presented with the opportunity to enact fundamental social and political reforms.