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Cythereal posted:Florida would probably turn into a blue state without much effort if we had an actual Democratic party in the state. I've been to supposed conventions for it in this state, and it's a bunch of suspicious old men who have no interest in genuine progressive ideas or putting in any actual effort. The GOP dominates Florida by default, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's a similar situation in other Southern states. A similar thing happened in NC. Democrats kept essentially one-party control nearly 40 years after the Civil Rights Act and the ensuing realignment, but a series of ethics violations and mass retirements among the remaining senior elected officials and leaders in 2010 caused the rest of the party to fold up like a cheap tent. And now they're looking at least a decade of rebuilding against an obscenely well-funded machine, their only saving grace the incompetence of a Republican leadership that's never been in the position of actually running things in anyone's lifetime, and who are mostly just trying to bilk as much public money as they can and give their church and golf buddies as much business as possible before demographics inevitably put them out of office again if Democrats actually bothered to field candidates.
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Jul 8, 2014 04:05
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Grand Theft Autobot posted:If we can move past race, can we revive the Southern Left? Who are some actual good leftist Southern politicians? They don't have to be currently holding office, but at least seeking office or acting positively to bring the left into power. Someone like David Price or Jim Moran is about the furthest left you'll get in terms of actually elected to office.
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Jul 8, 2014 04:41
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Naked Lincoln posted:I don't know much about their specific policy positions, but what about people like Julian Bond, Morris Dees, or Jim Lewis? Both are pretty doctrinaire liberal Democrats for the most part. Moran voiced support for UHC during the ACA mess.
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Jul 8, 2014 05:44
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AstheWorldWorlds posted:Well you mentioned earlier there is a (artificially induced?) cultural divide between northern and southern progressives and/or leftists? I'm curious as to what you meant by that because as a Northeasterner I never considered the south to be a region where leftism or progressivism is currently very strong, though I am aware it was historically a foundational contributor to left politics in the United States. Would some southerners care to elaborate on why this is the case, or alternatively, that this is not the case and leftism/progressivism still runs strong in these regions? I ask because if it is the case that left politics are still strong in the south then northern leftists like myself are making a serious error in their judgment regarding national allies. It really depends on the individual state, each with their own history and what level of action you're talking about. In a nutshell progressives aren't as prominent politically in part due to the logistics of getting elected to office at a level beyond county dog catcher and the tendency of the rapidly dwindling number of Dixiecrats to still vote Dem at the state level and lower for sometimes decades post-Civil Rights, but also because of the influence of business interests, the black church, etc. You can't really talk about southern politics without mentioning race, but it's not a simple Manichean thing; the transition of the GOP in the south into the dominant white interest party it is today was a long and messy process. Even today in some state and local level Democratic party meetings you'll find 85 year old white supremacists socializing and working in close conjunction with card-carrying NAACP members. If you want a much more in-depth discussion Alexander Lamis' Southern Politics in the 1990s covers the later part of the post-Civil Rights realignment in the south state by state. Also there's a number of progressive groups like the Institute for Southern Studies, SPLC, plus state orgs like Better Georgia, Blue Virginia, NC Policy Watch, etc. some of which have their poo poo together better than others.
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Jul 8, 2014 07:02
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HonorableTB posted:Directly south are the twin metro areas of Macon and Warner Robins, which are both heavily conservative due to the military presence at Warner Robins Air Force Base, which is basically the only thing keeping those two cities alive and thriving. Actually Obama carried Bibb County 60-39 in 2012, while Houston County had the opposite result.
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Jul 8, 2014 18:02
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The Whole Internet posted:Same goes for Houston, Nashville, Dallas, and Charlotte. The center cities might have a democratic majority but the metro overall is very conservative in each case. Atlanta is remarkable for being a major southern city that's liberal enough to cancel out its suburbs. Cities that go further than that and actually take a good bite out of the state's republican majority would be places like Austin and Raleigh. Banking centers tend to attract a more conservative crop of newcomers than tech centers--which tend to be blue islands. Don't forget all the halfback retirees. nutranurse posted:But yeah, I do get your point. I know some civil war reenactment people (living in Maryland puts you in a really good spot to travel around to the various battle-sites nearby) and outside of the really overzealous ones (who you definitely can spot a mile off) most of the people involved are just enthusiasts who would never actually apply a critical eye to the history that they are reenacting. I would argue that this is a huge problem, though. A lot of it is a function of what kinds of history they're exposed to. Even "official" forms like museums, historic sites, etc. engage in if not outright whitewashing (like the Charleston Museum and Charleston in general), a lot of selective omission or at least putting too much focus on the wealth and military aspects of southern history to the exclusion of just about everything else. And even then, it's more often than not an extremely facile approach that's largely uncritically celebratory. In that environment where people's conception of history consists entirely of cataloging pretty items and fancy houses and retelling the exploits of rich dead white guys, it's inevitable that approach filters down through more populist expressions. Alec Bald Snatch fucked around with this message at 20:53 on Jul 8, 2014 |
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Jul 8, 2014 20:46
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nucleicmaxid posted:Stephen Colbert famously killed his Southern accent because of the depictions of Southerners in media. I've done the same, as have a lot of Southerners that I know who identify as liberal. It's a generational thing, urbanization, plus the influence of mass media. A whole lot of southerners born after about 1970-1980 have minimal accents at best.
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Jul 9, 2014 02:43
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justsharkbait posted:Atlanta has been doing serious work over the last several years to clean up the city. My generation are moving to the city or north of the city, and the racism in the city area is dying off fairly quick. There is still a lot of racial tension south of Atlanta, and the further sough you go it gets very obvious. They're definitely gentrifying. Atlanta's currently the whitest it's been in over 20 years. Of course all that means is they're pushing minorities out to the suburbs, and all the costs associated with living out there.
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Jul 9, 2014 02:59
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Jastiger posted:Do you think removing a lot of military bases from the South would help or harm the region culturally? For certain the used car lot, rent-to-own furniture, and methed-out hooker industries would take a hit. That's a huge part of southern culture and heritage, but not irreplaceable. The Lord provides. People with few other prospects would still join the military at the rate they normally do assuming nothing else changes other than moving all the bases elsewhere. Think about it though, you want to adequately train our fighting forces to murder brown people at the behest of our corporate overlords in the world's shittiest shitholes, so where else in the contiguous US is more appropriate for the task? Alec Bald Snatch fucked around with this message at 06:26 on Jul 9, 2014 |
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Jul 9, 2014 06:21
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Talmonis posted:There's a reason we in Maryland refer to southern PA as "Pennsyltucky". Few things are more confusing to me than people living in Gettysburg who fly confederate flags. Gettysburg is a bit silly, but a lot of Appalachian migrants who came north via the hillbilly highway in the early 20th century to work in factories adopted a larger southern cultural identity to band with former southerners who'd moved there generations prior.
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Jul 9, 2014 21:36
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Kinda surprised at the number of states in the positive column. That's probably a function of decreased federal allocation to states overall though. It's a stupid argument because it's immaterial which states receive more or less money than the federal government happens to take in within specific geographic boundaries. It's not like federal revenue in Maine is any different than federal revenue in New Mexico. That's the whole point of having a federal government in the first place.
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Jul 9, 2014 21:51
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Talmonis posted:It's usually in response to Republican declarations of Red State superiority. Yeah I know. It's still stupid and coming from people who should know better.
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Jul 9, 2014 21:54
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