Justin Raphael: Dems' duty: Make the South dream

As the Democratic primaries head south, flannels will be traded in for tank tops, SUVs ditched for pick-ups, Red Sox caps discarded for Rebel-flagged trucker hats and sensible politics abandoned for absurd pandering. But the front-runner, John Kerry, is not having it. At Dartmouth, Kerry said, "Everybody always makes the mistake of looking south." This was the political equivalent of fuzzy math -- you just can't win without the South.

Such a courtship seems to be akin to courting the girl who dumps you because of spite -- she never comes back, even though you bought her gifts. The rest of America gave the South almost a century of slavery as a dowry for national matrimony. It paid the anniversary present of a free hand in Jim Crow after the disputed Hayes-Tilden election of 1876. The nation even gave child support in the 20th century: virtual control of the Senate and almost all the benefits of war mobilization.

All the while, the region was allowed an affair with the most wretched form of racist inhumanity. And then, when it was caught cheating in Birmingham and Selma, it asked for a restraining order: Don't bring a Democrat here, unless he's willing to sell out. Not much of a model for all those in the Bible belt yelping about marriage.

Democrats, however, continue to go after the now solidly Republican South, dabbing their toes in the tidal wave of the "values debate" and moderating its message, the latter being the right thing for the wrong reasons. But even John Crowe Ransom and the agrarians who protested the ascension of Northern industrialism knew the impossibility of, in effect, segregating the South: "Nobody now proposes for the South, or for any other community in this country, an independent political destiny."

Yet that is precisely the present demand below the Mason-Dixon Line, and the irony is as striking as the low-country humidity: Southerners who have spent centuries getting government off their backs so they can ride on those of blacks now demand that government come to them.

But if, as the agrarians wrote, "the South is a minority section that has hitherto been jealous of its minority right to live its own kind of life," surely it would not object to an illumination of that lifestyle. Southerners continue to live a lower standard of life than the nation as a whole, and their schools are among the worst in America, making it unlikely that the former statistic will change much.

Yet, decades ago, the South sold its soul to the party that prevented anything resembling its fulfillment. Its majority created by those dissatisfied with a party that believed in human rights, the GOP continues to stray far and wide of any solution befitting the Southern renaissance Ransom and others had in mind.

It was Jefferson, a Virginian, who asked whether those who have trouble governing themselves should be trusted with the government of others. Democrats, then, should not let the politics of a nation be dictated so extensively by those who cannot even unite over a flag long defeated, never mind in the cause of eradicating social ills long ignored or justice still awaiting victory.

But if the South refuses to surrender and Democrats should not raise the white flag to its demands, it remains the case that they cannot abandon the battlefield. Though Democrats will have trouble in the South as long as it propagates the lingering spirit which sent it to the Republicans in the first place, it was an Arkansan, Bill Clinton, who said that campaigns must be about the future. Indeed, the Democratic Party -- that not only of Kennedy and Roosevelt, but that of Jefferson, Jackson, Calhoun and Lyndon Johnson -- has always been about an American tomorrow, not a regional past.

The South, then, is not unimportant for Democrats; it is too important for either the carpetbagger politics of liberal condescension or those of Johnny Reb lite. Neither will befit the Democratic fortunes or integrity, not to mention destiny, that are at stake in the South. The region's antipathy will test not merely the Democratic Party's ability to win, but the validity of its credo: that visions of a shared future of opportunity and freedom will resonate not because they indulge a sectarian prejudice, but because they harness the progressive aspiration of every human being to have the liberty of hope -- one long deprived of children in Atlanta and Mobile, Ala.

So Senator Kerry, as you go south do not fear that the emblem of victory is the stars and bars, that to win you must let the South convince you to let its people lose again. Dixie's own nightmare of Sherman lives on, but it is the duty of Democrats as the party of the future to get the sleepy South to dream again. That is something worth winning for.

Justin Raphael is a sophomore American history major from Westport, Conn. Uncommon Sense appears on Tuesdays.

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