You Can't Say That on Television

Rick Perlstein has a piece in TNR arguing that Democrats should seek to marginalize the GOP by demonizing the South as racist. He repeats Thomas Schaller's argument that Democrats should forget about the South, but right now are afraid (or not allowed) to do so.

The very heart of his argument is a taboo notion: that the South votes Republican because the Republicans have perfected their appeal to Southern racism, and that Democrats simply can't (and shouldn't) compete.

[snip]

What's more, if Republicans have succeeded by openly baiting a region of the country not really American (the latte-swilling Northeast), Schaller says, "The Democrats need their own 'them,' and the social conservatives who are the bedrock of Southern politics provide the most obvious and burdensome stone to hang around the Republicans' neck." Democrats should cite "Southern obstructionism as a continuing impediment to the investments and progress the country must make in the coming century." There's just one problem: You can't do that on TV.

Oh you can't, can you? Look, there's a sliver of truth to the argument that Democratic strategists aren't allowed to openly inveigh against the South. But if it's not done directly, it is done indirectly in all sorts of ways. The left is constantly making snooty inferences about the dumb, backwards Southerners, whether in references to NASCAR, homophobia, trailer parks or yokel accents--there's a reason the coastal pundit class is often referred to as "the elites." And if they haven't gone after an explicit anti-Southern strategy, they've gone in the back door and frantically attacked religion instead, often implying a link between such critiques and the religiously dominated South. Perlstein and Schaller act as if they're breaking taboos by advocating a brand new, hard hitting strategy, but for the most part, they're merely telling Democrats to be open about what they're already doing.