Now, the following quote is an example of the kind of garbage -- I call it "Christopher Caldwell's crap" -- that the RiNO elitists have been dining on for 20 years. It's an instance of Caldwell's being quoted and reverenced in a liberal blog article in 2005, seven years after his original article appeared, the key passage being this one:
The Republican Party is increasingly a party of the South and the mountains. The southernness of its congressional leaders .... only heightens the identification. There is a big problem with having a southern, as opposed to a midwestern or a California, base. Southern interests diverge from those of the rest of the country, and the southern presence in the Republican Party has passed a "tipping point," at which it began to alienate voters from other regions.
Source: Digby in Hullabaloo, "Southern Fried", Dec. 2005.
The point of interest here is that Caldwell is a Neoconservative, and neocons are demonstrably, reliably, and quotably visceral detesters of everything Southern, country, Middle Western, outdoorsy, or self-reliant. They despise that stuff -- their idea of relevant is debating, for 55 minutes, the best way, as some Seinfeldian wag once said about New Yorkers, to get from Columbus Circle to Battery Park.
Therefore it would be just as valid to question Caldwell's cultural and policy preferences, as it is for him to derogate Southerners as universal moral and social pariahs. But of course, he's writing the article, and the Atlantic Monthly edited and published it in 1998. (I have a dead-tree copy of the original.)
Notice, too, that Caldwell, like many antisemites, makes it "all about X", that is, none of the many things Democrats did to win the White House in 1992 and 1996 is here discussed -- rather, it was all because of Southerners being let run around loose by the grownups, in Caldwell's structuring of the issue, that the GOP has lost its core, lost many adherents, lost seats and statehouses, lost, lost, lost. Oh, woe betide our country, that has so many Southerners in it!
He does make a reference to loss of focus on shrinking government, and the moral loss the GOP suffered by exposing itself as a party of big government, big budgets, and bigtime crony capitalism after all -- but how that's Bubba's fault, he does not elucidate, nor does he clarify how, if these sins of the "Pigs at the Trough" -- who were the Bush/Yacht Club wing of the GOP -- were so damaging morally to the GOP's message, how it is then that the Party is too Southern and too socially conservative, rather than too Wall Street, too uptown, too banker-ridden, too Porcellian-at-the-trough.
good post