Retiring Republicans Leave Behind Polarized Party

Phil Gramm of Texas made it three for the road last week when he joined fellow Southern Republican icons Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina in announcing he would retire from the Senate after this session. As they leave the stage, the three men symbolize the forces that carried the GOP to dominance across the South--and lately sapped its strength, in mirror image, outside of Dixie.

For its first modern incursions into the South, the GOP rode the midnight rail of race. In the 1960s and early 1970s, when Republicans won their first Southern offices since the Civil War era, the engine was opposition to the federal civil rights laws, busing and the dismantling of separate-but-equal segregation.

The second wave of the GOP advance in the South began in the late 1970s and has never really slackened. From the narrow initial focus on race, Republicans have marched Sherman-like across the South behind a broadly conservative message on spending, taxes, moral values and national defense. Opposition to Washington has succeeded opposition to civil rights as the principal force powering their growth.

Thurmond, Helms and Gramm--all former Democrats--personified this evolution. Race defined Thurmond’s appeal in the formative years of his career. First elected as the Democratic governor of South Carolina in 1946, Thurmond quit the party to run as the independent Dixiecrat candidate in the 1948 presidential election after the Democrats (goaded by a young Hubert H. Humphrey) adopted a strong civil rights plank in their party platform.

As a Democratic senator, Thurmond eight years later led the drafting of the Southern Manifesto, in which 100 of the region’s U.S. senators and House members pledged to oppose the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision desegregating the schools. To his lasting shame, Thurmond vigorously filibustered the landmark civil rights bills of 1957 and 1964.

At every moment when the South had to choose between the future and the past, Thurmond chose the past. But when Congress--by approving the civil rights and voting rights acts under President Johnson--forced the South to renounce its segregationist tradition, Thurmond, paradoxically, pointed the way to the region’s political future. When the civil rights bill passed, Thurmond became the first prominent Southern Democrat to quit the party and join the GOP.

Helms, first elected to the Senate in 1972, functioned as a bridge between the GOP’s two Southern generations. His agenda extended, panoramically, beyond race. Abortion, gays, feminists, the Soviet Union and China, the Panama Canal treaty, the United Nations, flag-burning, “indecent” art--all fell in his sights. He offered a conservatism uncompromising in its intensity and unbounded in its scope.

But with Helms, race was never far below the surface. He led unsuccessful crusades to ban school busing, prevent the establishment of the holiday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and block the extension of the Voting Rights Act in 1982. And for years, Helms figuratively stood in the courthouse door to block President Clinton’s effort to appoint a black judge to the all-white federal appeals court that included North Carolina.

Gramm, first elected to Congress as a Democrat in 1978, wasn’t averse to using polarizing social issues either. In 1984, when he first ran for the Senate after switching to the GOP, he pummeled his Democratic opponent for taking money raised at a gay male strip club. But race was never part of his message. The bottom line for Gramm was opposition to taxes and federal spending; he first made his mark in Washington by co-sponsoring President Reagan’s tax- and budget-cutting bills. When Gramm ran for president himself in 1996, he proposed to eliminate not only the Education Department, but all federal education spending.

Like Thurmond, Helms and the other first-wave Southern Republicans, Gramm began with a rural base. But Gramm’s vote has followed the interstates: his broadly conservative message on government and national defense (and, not incidentally, his muted tone on race) allowed him to capture the fast-growing suburbs around cities like Dallas and Houston. It’s that growth into the Southern suburbs, primarily around a small-government message, that’s keyed the second wave of the GOP sweep throughout the region. “That’s become the bedrock of the Southern Republican Party,” says Atlanta-based GOP pollster Whit Ayres.

Today, these three Southern Republican pioneers leave with their party safely ruling their old roosts. At the state level, the Democrats have staged a mini-revival that’s allowed them to win the governorships in four Deep South states, but Republicans now control three-fifths of the South’s U.S. House and Senate seats--even more than they held after the GOP landslide in 1994. In 2000, Bush won every Southern state, holding Al Gore to an anemic 43% of the vote across the region.

The hard part for the GOP has been selling the rest of the country on the politics that work in the South. As the national Republican Party has increasingly embraced the culturally conservative, anti-government values of the Southern GOP, it has alienated once-sympathetic voters elsewhere, particularly in the big suburbs along the coasts and in the upper Midwest. Democrats now hold most House and Senate seats outside the South; Bush lost 71% of all electoral votes at stake outside of Dixie. Recent polls show Bush’s approval rating running considerably lower outside the South than in it.

In a way, it’s surprising that Bush has found himself in that situation. As Texas governor, he joined other state-level Southern Republicans in moderating the anti-government politics symbolized by Southern congressional Republicans like Gramm. But in the final stages of his presidential campaign, and through his presidency, Bush has tilted back in Gramm’s direction, emphasizing tax cuts, denouncing big government and even portraying the shrinking of the federal budget surplus as a blessing because it will prevent new domestic spending. The result has been a presidency that owes more to the post-segregationist Southern Republican tradition than Bush’s “compassionate conservative” rhetoric promised--and is accordingly polarizing the electorate much more than Bush hoped.

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: https://www.latimes.com/brownstein.