With Mary Landrieu’s defeat, the Democrats have now lost almost the whole of her region. A number of them have taken it badly, saying they are too good for the South to want them and should bid the whole sinkhole goodbye.
Thus Michael Tomasky damns the “prejudice-infested place she comes from,” which he finds wanting in “tolerance, compassion, civic decency, trans-racial community” and all else that is good. He calls it a “nuclear waste site of choleric resentment.” “Forget about it,” he urges his party. “Forget the whole thing.”
And fair enough when one thinks what the region has done, what with electing and re-electing non-whites to high office and attracting millions of people from northern, more liberal venues who flee high taxes, low growth rates and/or urban blight.
Landrieu blamed her woes (and Obama’s) on the grounds that the South hasn’t been friendly to non-whites and women, which Tomasky insists has been true. But it has been friendly enough to Bobby Jindal, son of Indian immigrants elected governor twice in Louisiana; to Nicki Haley, daughter of Indian immigrants elected governor twice in South Carolina; and to Tim Scott, the first black Southern senator since Reconstruction, who in his race for his House seat in South Carolina defeated one of Strom Thurmond’s sons.
In the Palmetto State, home of John C. Calhoun, Fort Sumter and Thurmond, one of the three top political leaders lacks a Y chromosome, and only one — Lindsay Graham — boasts the pasty white skin of the redneck contingent. Scott got his start when he was mentored by the white manager of a Chick-fil-A restaurant, who taught him how to think, act and talk like a businessman: just another benighted white southern person who will stop at nothing to keep black people down.
As for compassion and transracial community, one can look to New York, in the very core of enlightened blue country, and Ferguson, Mo., a border state, but lucky enough to have to have Democrats such as Sen. Claire McCaskill and Gov. James Nixon to help justice and reason prevail. In each of these places, an unarmed black man was killed by a white policeman who was not indicted by a grand jury. Racism was charged, protests broke out. Ferguson saw mass destruction of many small businesses.
In Mobile, Ala., in 2012, a white teenager was shot dead by a black policeman, though the boy was not only unarmed but also was naked and weighed 135 pounds (about half the size of either Eric Garner or Michael Brown). The grand jury in Mobile County acquitted the officer. Nobody rioted, nothing burned down and the black policeman is back on the job. Nobody threatened him, and no helpful newspaper published the name of the street that he lived on. In which part of the country does “transracial community” reign?
In other areas, the South is not lacking in what progressives hold dear. It has more middle-class jobs and more affordable housing, and income inequality is much more pronounced in prime liberal redoubts — New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco — where huge checks are cut for Obama and Hillary and progressive values hold sway. These areas lean to a feudal economy, where millionaires are served by a large servant cohort, while small businesses have trouble starting, being squeezed by onerous taxes to fund public unions and too many nit-picking rules.
We need more toxic waste dumps like South Carolina, and fewer Detroits, which are not found in Dixie. The left sees the world upside down.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
