LOL. Yeah, wrong link. The unions are solidly democratic, but Republican strategy has eroded them to meaninglessness over the past 50 years. You say cause, I say effect. That's really what we're arguing about - I'm arguing that the politics on the ground create effects like the New Democrats, while you're arguing that the New Democrats are the cause of "nobody talking to the working poor." Fact of the matter remains - outside of the megachurches, outside of the South, outside of rural concentrations of "values voters", the poor vote Democratic same as it ever was.
The poor vote Democrat, the poor an white vote Republican. Democrats are the not-(as-)racist party, they're the party that isn't actively trying to make life worse for anyone who isn't white. They don't have to do a thing to address working class interests as such and they'd still get the votes they get by as least not being actively hostile. Admittedly, I'm more familiar with the politics of the South, since I live here. But the churches pretty much are the politics on the ground here. They're where the civil rights movement organized, and they're where the right organizes. In the town my father comes from the only place you'll meet a concentration of democrats is the Freemasons of all things, and as much as the conspiracy nuts would like to believe otherwise, they're more about charity than politics.
Right - the place where the 1 percenters convinced the poor to fight a war for slavery 150 years ago. The place the Democrats effectively lost when they supported desegregation. That's the whole battle - the Republicans picked up those votes by banking on hatred because they were up for grabs. My grandfather was a 32nd degree mason. From Bastrop County Texas, no less.
W. J. Cash, in 1940: But the South was still voting Democrats into House and state governments until the 90s. The Democrats lost the South's presidential votes with the Civil Rights Act, but it wasn't until Newt that the South went solidly Republican. Wikipedia has nice tables of presidential and gubernatorial. It took the Republicans Party a long time to really take over here, and I think it's naive to chalk their eventual success, decades later, up as a direct result of the civil rights movement.Proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal, swift to act, often too swift, but signally effective, sometimes terrible, in its action -- such was the South at its best. And such at its best it remains today, despite the great falling away in some of its virtues. Violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism and too narrow a concept of social responsibility, attachment to fictions and false values, above all too great attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values, sentimentality and a lack of realism -- these have been its characteristic vices in the past. And, despite changes for the better, they remain its characteristic vices today.
In the coming days, and probably soon, it is likely to have to prove its capacity for adjustment far beyond what has been true in the past. And in that time I shall hope, as its loyal son, that its virtues will tower over and conquer its faults and have the making of the Southern world to come. But of the future I shall venture no definite prophecies. It would be a brave man who would venture them in any case. It would be a madman who would venture them in face of the forces sweeping over the world in 1940.
And not to repeat myself: 1) dixiecrats 2) Southern Strategy 3) DOMA et al. Taken more broadly, the South is an area where the rich have systematically coerced the poor into voting against their best interests for 200 years. The Contract with America only sealed the deal. A lot of that was the fact that the Democrats they were voting for were shitheels like Strom Thurmond and George Wallace.