Why Southern Democrats can't win

 

I’m not in the business of giving electoral advice to Democrats. Unlike Chuck Schumer, who went out of his way to tell us what we had to do on immigration or face a blow-out in 2014, I enjoy blow-out elections like 2010 and 2014. I am in favor of at least a two-party system because having lived in one-party paradises in DC and Maryland I can tell you nothing corrupts so absolutely as one party being in perpetual control of government. The modern Democrats are, however, not an acceptable alternative. Nothing would make me happier that the Democrat party simply going away because the Democrats and what passes for “values” in the Democrat party run contrary to logic, economics, and Western Civilization.

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But some times a bit of delusional nonsense floats by that demands commentary. For instance, via Huffington Post, Southern Democrats Urge a Return to Party Basics:

Southern Democrats are joining others in the party who say that a return to advocating to lift people out of economic hardship and emphasizing spending on education and public works will re-energize black voters and attract whites as well.

“It’s time to draw a line in the sand and not surrender our brand,” Rickey Cole, the party chairman in Mississippi, said. He believes candidates have distanced themselves from the past half-century of Democratic principles.

“We don’t need a New Coke formula,” Cole said. “The problem is we’ve been out there trying to peddle Tab and RC Cola.”

Cole and other Southern Democrats acknowledge divisions with prominent populists such as Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is expected to run for president in 2016, and Massachusetts [mc_name name=’Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)’ chamber=’senate’ mcid=’W000817′ ]. Yet they see merit in pushing stronger voting rights laws, tighter bank regulation, labor-friendly policies such as a higher minimum wage and other familiar party themes.

To put it politely, the Democrat party is a non-entity in Mississippi and, to paraphrase George Patton, Cole knows as much about winning as he does about f***ing.

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As I see it the Democrat party has four problems that make Cole’s vision problematic.

All elections are national.

It is simply not possible for parties to tailor their message to specific states. If the candidate has held a national office (like, for instance, [mc_name name=’Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR)’ chamber=’senate’ mcid=’P000590′ ] of Arkansas), no matter what his personal beliefs may be he can either vote with his party and president or he can be pushed to the side. [mc_name name=’Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA)’ chamber=’senate’ mcid=’L000550′ ] can’t run as a populist, small government candidate by touting her nearly lockstep support for Obama. This cuts both ways, of course, as Republicans found in 2006 when they tried to distance themselves from President Bush. But, being a conservative, I would contend that national party priorities is a much bigger drag on Democrats running at state level than it is on Republicans.

If a Democrat, say in Cole’s Mississippi, did emerge from a Democrat primary in favor of free markets, free people, and a strong and confident America he’d still be swamped by the national party’s message of division, racial spoils, and weakness.

The Democrat party is in-your-face counter-cultural in the South.

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Going back to the “bitter-clinger” quip by Obama in 2008, the contempt the Democrats show for cultural norms provides a strong headwind for any efforts. Cole himself notes this

Cole, the Mississippi chairman, acknowledged that any new approach won’t close the party’s gap in the South on abortion, same-sex marriage and guns, and said Democrats intensify that cultural disconnect with “identity politics.”

While the party’s positions on gay rights, minority voting access, women’s rights and immigration are not wrong, Cole said, “those people who don’t see themselves in those groups say, ‘What have the Democrats got for me?'”

He seems to assume these positions can simply be messaged away but they can’t. They are real and the are tied to every Democrat’s tail like a string of tin cans.

The Democrat party is that it has become the party of government largesse.

Democrats are antagonistic to personal liberty in economics as much as they are opposed to it in the sphere of religious beliefs and even personal opinions. One needs look no further than Obama’s vapid “Life of Julia” narrative during the 2012 campaign to see what the Democrats desire. People dependent upon the government for education, food, housing, child care, health care, employment, retirement, and turned into bio-fuel on the way out. This kind of philosophy is foreign to most Americans and it certainly runs counter to being friendly to working families because the taxes used to pay for this cradle-to-grave care comes from family disposable income and with this largesse comes government control.

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The Democrat party hates America.

The Democrats’s vision of America is something like the late Yugoslavia. A smorgasbord of races, ethnicities, languages, cultures, and religions that either hold each other at arms length or actively hate each other and do so as a matter of government policy. We know bi-lingual education results in kids who are bi-stupid, utterly unschooled in two languages and unable to function in an English dominant society. Bit Democrats persist in fighting cultural, or at least linguistic assimilation. Cole’s “stronger voting rights laws” are just a softer way of describing grievance mongering. The Democrats tried pitting men against women in the last election. The Democrats approach elections by trying to create interest groups and then set them against each other. Their policies and legislative agenda is based on creating an ever increasing series of rights for various affinity groups at the expense of non-group members and society.

Not only does the hostility to the nation permeate the Democrats’s domestic agenda (see Obama’s immigration order)  it is the driving force in our foreign policy.

This is not the way a nation can operate and survive.

And these are not the core values of a party that is serious about winning elections outside the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards.

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