Dems, It’s Time to Dump Dixie

[MisterP]

114. prima facie the thesis is crap, but we definitely can't let ourselves be lashed to the likes of

Landrieu and Roorda and Manchin à la Ahab just because "waaah, we NEED to run conservatives in the South because they won't win otherwise": that sounds reasonable, but it just leaves the country with either a losing conservadem or a winner who derelicts their duty so hard Nancy Grace complains, or who brings night to the Cumberlands again (this is the trap Joe Bageant would fall into)

the party officialdom and its dancing poodles can't ever admit that a conservadem CAN even lose! they're wedded to saying that we have to follow, rather than lead the voters, but this is only rhetorical: even if shallowly, 70-90% of Americans want gun control, peace, HSR, cheap education, reasonable tariffs, green energy research and adoption, and a real economy rather than one suspended by flatulence à la the Brothers Grunt; the national leadership says we can't "push ideology" on the "vast moderate middle" of the country but at the same time they don't listen to anything they want or need: it's the perfect political machine, where the poor are obligated to provide the votes but the rich are the ones getting all the kickbacks

the Southern Strategy definitely has put many whites and middle class off-limits to any sort of Dem party that deserves to survive; there's an economistic move to downplay social justice in favor of economic issues, but they're not opposed--after all, who's the more socially-liberal? neoliberal Rahm or radical Sawant?