There is still today a Southern Baptist Church. More than a century and a half after the Civil War, decades after the Methodists and Presbyterians reunited with their Yankee neighbors, America’s largest Protestant denomination remains defined, right down to the…
Last year’s mid-term elections marked the end of a decades-long transition as white Southerners abandoned the Democratic Party en masse. For a decade or so as this process gained momentum, it looked as though the South might, for the first…
Mississippi’s first Governor was a Democrat. Apart from the period of occupation after the Civil War, every subsequent Governor of Mississippi was a Democrat across a stretch of nearly 200 years. With a handful of caveats and outliers, that pattern…
Of the four inescapable realities that Republicans are forbidden to acknowledge, climate change is by far the most lethal. After so many millennia of expanding dominance, nature has set a trap for us that we are uniquely ill-suited to avoid.…
Why do smart Republicans say stupid things? It’s the central political question of our era and it demands an answer. In London Monday Bobby Jindal built an entire speech on the idiotic premise, already disavowed by Fox News, that European…
In 1973 the Illinois Legislature was the first in the nation to create an official holiday for Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday. That same year, the Texas Legislature responded to calls for a celebration of MLK’s life and work in…
Jeb Bush is being treated as though he is the presumptive frontrunner for the GOP Presidential nomination, a semi-official title that all GOP nominees take on about two years out from the election. In fact, it looks as though it…
Democrats are seeing a steady erosion of their traditional support among low and middle-earning white families. That drift contributed heavily to the outcome of the 2014 mid-terms, but it has been in motion since the Civil Rights Acts of the…
Over the past two decades Texas, specifically Austin, has developed into a legitimate contender to Nashville as the second pole in the music world. Much of the credit for this development comes from an unusually tight cooperation between the state…
When Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio spoke at the funeral of slain New York City police officers, thousands of officers in attendance turned their back on him. Since then they have engaged in a series of work stoppages. Their grievance?…
GOPLifer 