Bacon's Rebellion

It’s been 40 years since Richard M. Nixon came up with the “Southern Strategy” so aptly named by political analyst Kevin Phillips. Nixon took advantage of the once solidly Democratic South by playing upon upheavals caused by integration and civil rights and Southern conservative disgust with 1960s cultural change.

The GOP lock on the South helped presidents including Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush. It also helped the GOP win Congress in 1994 along with innumerable state contests.

But if you read Sunday’s New York Times, Republican influence on the South is waning seriously and has been for years although not many have noticed. Barack Obama’s big win in North Carolina last week only underscores the changing politics and demographics in Dixie. Donkey successes reverberate through Mississippi, South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee and elsewhere.

Writing in the Times, author Jack Bass notes: “The story is most dramatic in Virginia, which in 1976 was the only state in the South that failed to back Jimmy Carter for president.” While Virginia Republicans still dominate in Congress, Democrats have won back-to-back governorships and are likely to take a U.S. Senate with Mark Warner.

“The trends suggest a region in transformation, with dynamic economic growth, an expanded black middle class, the arrival of millions of white migrants, the return of scores of thousands of African-American expatriates, and an emerging native white generation with little or no memory of racial segregation. The result has been greater tolerance, an expanded pool of talent, and growing openness to new ideas,” according to Bass.

When intolerance raises its ugly head, it is now beaten down. Witness George Allen’s loss in the Senate to Jim Webb after his ill-thought, racist heckle of “macaca” to a dark-skinned Virginia. Grinning, cowboy-boot-wearing Allen had been a perennial favorite whose “Aw, Shucks” demeanor seemed to play well in the Old Dominion. Well, not any more.

This is enormously positive change. Yesterday, for Mother’s Day, I took Mom out to a restaurant in a shopping mall in Henrico County’s West End. She was getting pretty tired of food in assisted living, so we went expensive. I was pleased to see that many of the families enjoying the pricey holiday specials were African-American. It was a scene hard to imagine 25 years ago when I last lived in Richmond.

Well, white women may not rule yet, but they will. Give them 25 years. Think of Hillary Clinton as a leading indicator: It doesn’t look like she’ll win the 2008 Democratic nomination, but she’s paving the way for the next generation.

I got a glimpse of the next generation at the Phi Beta Kappa induction ceremony at William & Mary held in the Wren Chapel yesterday. One of my daughters, I’m proud to say, was among the 43 graduates honored. (Some 40 other students were inducted as well last fall, bringing the total to seven percent of the senior class.) Phi Beta Kappa represents the cream of the crop: students who demonstrated either outstanding leadership or academic abilities.

Two thirds of the inductees last evening were women. Nearly all were white. One young woman had a Vietnamese name; two honorees had what appeared to be Hispanic surnames but were pigmentally indistinguishable from the rest. (For those interested in regional disparities, out-of-state students were well represented among the group, but most of the Virginia students came from Northern Virginia.)

William & Mary is one of the nation’s leading universities, and its top-performing students are likely to ascend into the ranks of the business, professional and political elite (unless they pursue graduate degrees in arcane, dead-end fields like linguistics, grrrrr, but I won’t mention any names). Of course, W&M is only one school, and it may not be typical of what’s happening nationally. Virginia has a relatively small Asian population, and I suspect that students of East Asian and South Asian ancestry, like white women in Virginia, may be over-represented among the academic elite elsewhere.

Regardless, of the major demographic groups here in Virginia, white women are attending college in the greatest numbers. And, it appears, they are excelling in the greatest numbers. Young white women are entering the adult world best equipped with the cultural attributes and educational backgrounds required to succeed in an increasingly global, knowledge-intensive economy. Some people may take pleasure at the impending comeuppance for white males, who will be hard-pressed to maintain their traditional dominance, but for anyone hoping that Virginia’s top ranks will make more room for minorities, the Phi Beta Kappa indicator does not look promising.

Perhaps the last Installment on “Supercapitalism”, by Robert Reich. If I missed some key point of the book, please advise and I’ll post again.

The issue is money and influence. Power to move power. It’s as old as governments are in ancient civilizations and as American as apple pie. The difference in the transforming Information Era economy is how much money there is to influence politics and who has access to vast sums of money.

Sidebar: (I didn’t think that big money could matter that much in the very short election season following Rep. Jo Ann Davis’s untimely death last year. Old party horse that I am, I was shocked still to find out how much money could be spent in the 3 weeks I was a politician running for her seat – and how much huge money meant to key activists.)

Consider the problem of scale – big money. The money won’t go away. Prohibiting the sale of alcohol would be more effective (and we know how that worked) than every foolish attempt to ban money from politics. Money can’t be separated from power anymore than sex can be taken out of prostitution.

Virginia can’t fix the dysfunctional federal electoral legislation, like McCain-Feingold (or the extended Voting Rights Act for that matter). Yet, our Commonwealth can keep and improve the openness and easy access to information for our elections. Sunshine is the best disinfectant.

Consider the problem of concentration of power – who has the money. It can be very wealthy persons, corporations, unions, or advocacy groups (ostensibly yet laughably ‘non-profit’). If it is impossible to prevent them from using their accumulated wealth, then perhaps the remedy is to redistribute the resources they are willing to spend to buy power. Tax every contribution, fund-raising events themselves, services and the assets of every registered lobbying organization. Tax like a Democrat with a grudge.

If you tax at a high rate you increase the opportunity cost to pay to play for power. The government can use those taxes for more audit capabilities to the point of diminishing returns. Perhaps, the rest of the taxes could be put into a pot for a vox populi – to pay for public access multi-media. The rules for access, obviously, will open and close doors for participation in the political process.

As long as humans remain human, buying influence will be part of politics. The real issue is how legislation and moral suasion shape “who gets what” – which is Lasswell’s classic definition of ‘politics.’

Begin with electing Virginians to Congress who will repeal the worst and most odious election laws. Then, push towards openness, freedom and accountability in the pursuit of paying for power. Consider the taxing and redistribution of the resources spent on influence.

Virginia boasts of many fine medical centers including the Medical College of Virginia, the University of Virginia and others. Doctors’ offices in metro areas are chock-a-block with diagnostic and surgical devices that can do in seconds what used to take hours.

So, it comes as a bit of a shocker to realize that in some parts of Virginia, life expectancies for women are actually declining. That is the case in mountain areas such as Radford and Pulaski. In 1983, females living in those areas could expect to live 84 years. By 1999, according to The Washington Post, it had dropped by 5.8 years to 78.

The trend in those spots of the Old Dominion was repeated in other sections of the U.S., notably in the Deep South around the Mississippi Delta, in some parts of the Upper Plains and in the Southern Appalachia coalfields not far from Pulaski and Radford. All in all life expectations for females dropped in 1,000 counties in the U.S. This is from a recent report put together by researchers from the University of Washington, The University of California, San Francisco and Harvard.

A big reason for the declining female mortality rates: diet, sedentary lifestyles and a lack of decent medical insurance. Besides super-sized fries, soft drinks and Double Whoppers, the mountain ladies also like cigarettes and beer. This adds up to weight gain, which in turn leads to what one local general surgeon calls the “Five Fs” – “female, forty, fertile, fair and fat.” The oversized ladies are prone to diabetes, vascular and heart issues and cancer.

Is it time to get serious about mandated health insurance with some kind of government intervention? I think so. Do you?