In the late 1930’s, Jonathan Daniels, a young Southern liberal who was editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, set out on a journey through the South to “discover the South”. He published his observations and conclusions in the book A Southerner Discovers the South.
Daniels wrote these words that foreshadowed today’s Republican Party:
“In the cotton counties along the river in Mississippi, where there are three black skins for every white one, the gentlemen are afraid. But not of the Negroes. Indeed, the gentlemen and the Negroes are afraid together. They are fearful of the rednecks . . . who in politics and in person are pressing down upon the rich, flat Delta from the hard, eroded hills. They may lynch a Negro; they may destroy the last of a civilization which has great vices and great virtues, beauty and strength, responsibility beside arrogance, and a preserving honesty beside a destructive self-indulgence.”
—Jonathan Daniels, A Southerner Discovers the South (1938)
This excerpt from Daniels’ 1938 book mirrors, in a way, what happened to the Republican party. While Daniels overly romanticizes the southern aristocracy’s virtues, the GOP’s degradation beginning with the influx of segregationists exiled from the Democratic party bears an eerie symmetry — the segregationists and un-reconstructed Southerners who fled the Democratic Party for the Republican Party are today’s rednecks. While Daniels’ “rednecks” were the hill country dirt farmers, today’s rednecks include not only the descendants of Daniels’ rednecks, but also a majority of Southern whites from across the entire income, wealth, and education spectrum.
The Tea Party revolution was merely the last step in destruction of the Eisenhower Republican party by the forces of racial resentment, religious extremism and ignorance – abetted by plutocracy cloaked in the smoke and mirrors of “trickle down” economics
Now, the entire party has reached the predictable result, ruled by a dangerous idiot it dares not cross. They can only try to cheat to stave off the inevitable reckoning as the majority of Americans recoil from their creature and them.