It's My Party by Peter Robinson Read Free Book Online Page B

Patrick’s Day in
     parochial school. Every year Mom sent my brother and me to school in little green bow ties.”
    My cousin Dave, Irish Catholic—and a Democrat. I had always thought Democrats were either willfully ignorant or perverse.
     What other explanation could there be? Now I knew. Like Dave, people could be Democrats to honor the ways of their own tribe.

Chapter Three
T O L IVE AND D IE
IN D IXIE
    Journal entry:
    The South may be the new Republican heartland, but it still feels foreign to me. Taking off from Atlanta not long ago, I noticed
     that the city’s skyline contains as much glimmering glass and steel as that of Boston. Then I made the mistake of continuing
     to gaze out the window as the plane gained altitude. Outside Atlanta and its immediate suburbs, as far as I could tell, lies
     nothing but acre upon acre of scrub trees and red dirt. When I tried to imagine what life must be like down there, I found
     myself humming “Dueling Banjos” from the movie
Deliverance.
    Q UESTION : What do you call the hillbillies who appeared in
Deliverance?
    A NSWER :    Fellow Republicans.
    All right. I’m being unfair. But the reader may as well know that in looking at the South, I’ll be starting out as a skeptic
.
    I n the last several decades a curious event took place in American politics. It might be termed the Big Switch. The Republican
     Party, which used to be based in the North, has swapped bases with the Democratic Party, which used to be based in the South
     and the Rocky Mountains. The Big Switch was so pronounced that, as the map indicates, voting patterns in the presidential
     elections of 1896, before the Switch began, and of 1996, after the Switch was complete, amount to mirror images of each other.
     The change in the South has been especially dramatic: Dixie, which used to be the most reliably Democratic region in the nation,
     has become rock-solid for the GOP.
    After learning that the region in which I grew up, the North, used to be the stronghold of the GOP, it made sense to look
     next at the region that is the stronghold of the GOP today. You might think that Republicans would be delighted to have conquered
     the Old Confederacy. Yet it turns out that there are some very shrewd Republicans who almost wish the Democrats had kept the
     South to themselves.
THE BIG SWITCH
    The transformation of the South into Republican territory is actually the last part of the Big Switch. The North went Democratic
     first. The trend in the North began more than a century ago, during the great wave of immigration to the United States from
     Europe that lasted roughly from the 1880s until the enactment of strict quotas in 1924. Irish, Italians, Jews, Poles, Slavs,
     Scandinavians, and other immigrants settled in the cities of the Northeast and, to a lesser extent, the Midwest. By 1910,
     three-quarters of the inhabitants of New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Boston were first- or second-generation immigrants.
     As far back as the eighteenth century the Democratic Party had attracted the support of workers in northern cities. Now the
     numbers of workers in northern cities expanded dramatically. It often took one or two generations for the new immigrants to
     become regular voters. But when they did vote, they voted Democratic. The North went Democratic simply because so many Democrats
     moved in.
    The Rocky Mountain states participated in the Big Switch by going Republican during the last several decades, at roughly the
     same time as the South. The region’s original inhabitants were of two kinds. The first was farmers and ranchers. The second
     was silver miners. Both voted Democratic because the Democrats—notably under the three-time Democratic presidential candidate,
     William Jennings Bryan—sought a currency based on silver rather than gold. A silver regime would have required the federal
     government to make massive new purchases of silver, thereby profiting the miners, while in effect