Not Whistling Dixie

More than one country has a region within it that has a distinct culture. That distinctiveness can raise difficult political issues and lead to violence. Such has been the case in Canada with Quebec, and in the United Kingdom with Northern Ireland (and, further back in history, with all of Ireland).

For the U.S. that region has been the South. In this and other posts, I've written about the manner in which slavery and its aftermath have affected the politics of the South, and of the country as a whole.

For much of the 20th century, the most influential southerners on Capitol Hill tended to be Democrats who were committee chairmen, after having built up a lot of seniority over long careers during which they faced little or no Republican opposition.

By the 1990s, southerners had extended their reach to several leadership positions in the political branches of the federal government. At the apex of their power, from June 12, 1996 to January 3, 1999, southerners (defined as those from states that had been part of the Confederacy) held all of the following offices: president, vice president, Senate majority leader, speaker of the House, and House majority leader.

As of January 20, 2009, none of those five offices will be held by anyone from an ex-Confederate state. Those who come closest to being able to be called a southerner are Vice President-elect Joe Biden of Delaware, and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland. Delaware and Maryland were classified as border states during the Civil War, i.e., slave states that did not secede.

This New York Times article, which mainly addresses racial issues in this year's presidential election as it played out in the South, discusses how that region is becoming marginalized in national politics.