Killer does not represent the South

Rich Lowry:

It’s telling that the South Carolina governor who called for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the state Capitol is a woman, an Indian­American — and a Republican.

The rush to efface the Confederate symbol from the South in the wake of the Charleston shootings, with Gov. Nikki Haley among the leaders, is a lagging indicator.

The region has been transformed over the past 50 years, from an institutionally racist backwater to a part of the American mainstream more alluring to African­-Americans than less dynamic parts of the country.

Dylann Roof is many things: a racist and a terrorist, pathetic and hellishly cruel. But he is not a representative Son of the South.

The left has nonetheless been channeling a less tasteful version of former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s old dictum:

Never let a hideous massacre go to waste. It has pointed fingers at the GOP’s Southern strategy and at the South more generally, distorting the partisan history of the region and ignoring changes there since the 1950s.
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The father of the Republican Southern strategy was that racist old coot Dwight Eisenhower, who — is it possible to wrap your head around the enormity? — wanted to begin to win some Southern electoral votes.

Ike won four Southern states in 1952 and five in 1956, when he won the popular vote in the region. And he did it while supporting civil rights.

How was this possible? The GOP had begun picking off the less uniformly Democratic areas of the New South.

As Alexander writes, the GOP’s Southern electorate “was disproportionately suburban, middle­ class, educated, younger, non-native­ Southern, and concentrated in the growth points that were, so to speak, the least ‘Southern’ parts of the South.”
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To Democrats the  unforgivable sin of the south is rejecting liberalism.  For years the Democrats dominated the South because Democrats were on the side of the racist.  When the racist were finally defeated there wan no longer a constituency willing to accept the rest of the baggage that goes along with liberalism such as soft on national security and big on deficit spending.  The so called Southern Strategy was really based on opposition to the Democrats betrayal of those who fought and died to save Vietnam from communism.  The South still provides a disproportionate share of those willing to serve in the military.