Paul Krugman elucidates on the southern strategy, how it worked, why it fooled the nation about conservative ascendacy and why, over time, it’s doomed.

THat’s quite a lot to fit in one column. But he’s right. It’s why, as late as 2004, I was still hoping Democrats could win without winning a single Southern state. I wanted Southerners to sense that their political clout, which dominated the the past 2/3rds of a century, was gone, forcing them to change their positions to build new alliances.

As Krugman suggests, that change may come simply because the racists are changing or getting old and dying. I’ve been predicting some major shifts in electoral votes by the year 2016. But that will require some serious shifts in thinking among the village elders, even the Democratic ones. Because they’re still talking DLC game plans which were always about countering racism and regionalism. They painted it as a need to reject liberalism, but it was liberal desegregationists that they really meant.

And how has it fared? Well, all three Southern Democrats who headed the Democratic ticket won four of the five races they were in, though one was taken away by the Supreme Court in 2000, so there’s been some validity to it. Yet urban areas have been shifting to the left, even in the South, so states like Missouri and Arkansas and Florida have remained in play while Virginia and North Carolina draw ever nearer. Cities like the once reliably conservative Houston have become rising Democratic bases with changes in their demographics. THe last Northern candidate drew the second largest number of actual voters in history, breaking a record that had stood ince the landslide election of 1984, 20 years earlier.

Let me ad, too, that there are other states outside of the South that also have responded to racist appeals, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, Oregon and Indiana among them. Half of them have shifted leftward, too.

The GOP hasn’t remained oblivious to the trends. The old racist Southern base used to demonize Catholics and Jews, for example. But the Rapturist religious right has moved to embrace conservatives in those religions via Armageddonist creeds. Had they not done so, they could not have held onto all the influence they’ve wielded in Republican politics for the past 40 years.

The rising tide of xenophobia fueled by Republicans now for short term gains, could certainly result in a longterm backlash by Latino voters, if Democrats are smart enough to capitalize on it. Yet signs of division between the Democratic House leadership and the Hispanic caucus recently aren’t so encouraging. It’s why I continue to call for Democratic presidential contenders to stop downplaying the immigration issue and hope it will go away. Attack the Republicans for advancing hate under the same guise of law and order that was used when they were fighting equality for Black Americans. This is where courage of conviction can reign supreme over poll and Village consensus driven campaigns.