WAYWARD DOWN SOUTH. Several Tapped commenters have asked me to respond to Bob Moser's recent piece in The Nation, "The Way Down South." Logistics and schedules permitting, Bob and I will be debating his piece and related issues next month at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I will also have a short, 700-word reply to Moser's article in a forthcoming issue of The Nation. In the meantime, you can listen to the radio debate Moser and I had last week on WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show.
Moser is a good man with great intentions, but I'm not persuaded by his arguments that economic populism will make Democrats competitive again in the (white) South. The two main counterclaims I make in both my Nation reply and the radio debate are: (1) that racially-polarized voting among poorer whites limits the appeal of economic populism -- if that weren't true, white and blacks in Mississippi, the poorest state in the union, would already be voting quite similarly rather than as divergently as they do; and (2) because unions are the critical conveyers of economic populist messages, and almost all southern states are ranked -- as they have been for seemingly forever--among the 15 least-unionized states, populism work least and last in the South. The situation is more complex than this, of course. But these are significant obstacles, in my view. Anyway, listen to the radio debate and judge for yourself.
--Tom Schaller
