And guess what region they represent? Hint: It’s not the Northeast, the Midwest, the Mountain States, or the West. Sidney Blumenthal:

Nixon’s strategy was to revitalize the Republicans as a party by assimilating Southern Democrats and ethnic suburban white-flight Catholics in reaction to a post-New Deal Democratic party tainted by antiwar dissent, minority protest and countercultural experimentation - “amnesty, acid and abortion,” as Vice President Spiro Agnew captiously put it.

Nixon’s Republican majority was the template for Reagan’s consolidation. Reagan’s grin replaced Nixon’s scowl, but the strategy was basically unaltered. Watergate had only temporarily derailed the project.

Blumenthal is far too generous to the Republicans here. Watergate is no aberration. In fact, the long-term Republican project of replacing Constitutional governnment with an authoritarian system began with Watergate, flowered with Reagan’s Iran-Contra affair, and reached fruition under Bush, where the “inherent authority” of “unitary executive” is used to place Bush above the law.*

Blumenthal continues:

Unlike Nixon and Reagan, the native and transplanted Californians, or George HW Bush, the Connecticut Yankee with shallow roots in the Texas political soil, George W. Bush was the first elected Southern conservative in American history. (The two previous Southern conservatives, John Tyler and Andrew Johnson, acceded to the presidency by the deaths of presidents and never won election in their own right.)

And, if the criminal Bush regime is indicative of Southern conservatism generally—to be charitable, perhaps Bush is a more virulent Texas strain—we can only hope He is the last.

By 2000, California had been lost to the Republican coalition through the party’s social conservatism and hostility to Hispanic immigrants. Without California, the Republicans became ever more dependent on their Southern base. As the Southern influence grew, traditional moderates from other parts of the country were assailed as “Republicans in name only,” though they were the original Republicans.

George W Bush became the first Republican ever to become president without winning California.

Without California, Bush’s coalition was invariably narrow and his conservatism a product of his constricted Southern orbit. While Bush presented himself as the true fulfillment of Reagan, resolving the political tensions of his half-breed father, the idea of Reaganism without California was utterly novel.

The strategies of Karl Rove were dictated by the felt necessity of operating within cramped political boundaries as much as by arrogance fed by a craven press corps.

In January, when the 110th Congress is sworn in, it will be the first Congress since the 83rd Republican Congress (swept into office on Eisenhower’s coattails) in which the majority party in both chambers is a minority party in the south. While there will be southerners in the Democratic Congress, their presence is not that of a unitary bloc threatening progressive legislation.

The region’s political power rested on the seniority of the congressional barons who controlled the chairmanships of the committees. But that Democratic Party is gone with the wind. Now, as political scientist Thomas Schaller has calculated, the House Republican Conference is 43% southern, more disproportionate than when Dixie ruled the Democrats. As the Democratic majority has become more national than ever, the Republicans are more dominated by their conservative base. Their southern strategy, perfected by Bush and Rove, has become a downward spiral.

A downward spiral… How satisfying.

Then again, I wonder what my fellow Correntians Xan (from Tennessee), Tom (from Missouri), and Sarah (from Texas) think of this analysis?

NOTE * Bush I appears to be the exception here. There is no equivalent that we know of to Watergate, Iran-Contra, or… or… Bush’s entire apparatus of authoritarian rule under Bush I—that we know of. To me, that signifies that Bush I got away with it. One can’t help but wonder whether that’s the real point of putting Gates in Rummy’s seat. Remember, the fundamental goal of the criminal Bush regime over the next two years is going to be to consolidate their authoritarian gains—and get away with as much loot as possible, of course.