Free It's My Party by Peter Robinson Page A

military bases,
     more than any other region. When the Democratic Party adopted a dovish stance during the Vietnam War, southerners found the
     stance offensive—George McGovern, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1972, lost worse in the South than in any other
     region—while finding the Republican emphasis on national strength correspondingly attractive.
    The second trait is regional pride.
    Derived, like love of the military, from the first settlers in the South, this trait precipitated the Civil War. Even after
     he was elected president, after all, Lincoln promised to protect slavery where it already existed, merely preventing its expansion
     into new territory. If it had accepted these terms, the South could have preserved its way of life, conceivably for decades.
     Yet, as Fischer writes, “The Republican victory [of Lincoln] was seen… as an affront to southern honor.”
    A century later the affront to southern honor arose from forced integration, rising taxes, proliferating federal regulations—in
     a word, from the Democratic Party and its Great Society. (The Great Society may have been launched by a southerner, President
     Lyndon Johnson of Texas, but the principal support for the program came from up North.) The South disliked getting pushed
     around by northern liberals almost as much as it had disliked getting pushed around by northern abolitionists.
    Steeped in military tradition and a sense of regional honor, the culture of the South is thus a conservative culture. Southerners
     still put their hands over their hearts when they sing the national anthem. For that matter they still know the words to the
     national anthem. They look up to veterans and down on federal bureaucrats. They’ve gotten used to hearing the rest of the
     country snicker at them, resigning themselves to it as the price they have to pay to preserve their ways. But let the rest
     of the country start ordering them around, in the person of a federal judge or an official of the Environmental Protection
     Agency, and southerners will bristle. Sooner or later people like that were bound to start voting Republican.
    My friend Barry Germany summed it up. When I told him about all the changes in the South that Haley and the Black brothers
     cited, Barry replied, “That may all be true. But the reason the South went Republican seems simpler to me. The Democratic
     Party just got to be too liberal for folks down here.”
    * * *
    Although at the state and local level, the South remains largely Democratic—the legislatures of nine of the eleven states
     of the Old Confederacy remain in the control of Democrats—in national politics, the South has been reliably Republican for
     nearly three decades. The Old Confederacy has supported the Republican presidential candidate in every election since 1968
     except one, the election of 1976, when it voted for the southerner, Jimmy Carter, over the northerner, Gerald Ford, but even
     then by a modest margin. From 1980 onward, the South has given Republican presidential candidates larger margins than has
     any other region of the country, including the Rocky Mountains. Even in 1996, when the Republican presidential nominee was
     Bob Dole, the least compelling Republican candidate since Alf Landon, the South stuck with the GOP, permitting Dole to sweep
     the region, not that it did him much good. In Congress, too, the GOP reflects the disproportionate support it receives from
     its southern base. Although the South accounts for just 20 percent of the country’s population, in 1998 it sent to Congress
     39 percent of all House Republicans.
    If when I was a boy the GOP’s favorite anthem was “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” today the GOP is whistling “Dixie.”
    Not everyone cares for the tune.
DIXIE CONTRA MUNDUM
    Journal entry:
    Today I played a word-association game with a friend who, because he has in-laws in the South, wishes to remain anonymous.
     I named regions of the country He