Today's Paul Krugman column exploring the apparent end of Republican racial backlash politics has been getting some excellent commentary across the blogosphere, including friend of Calitics thereisnospoon's excellent take at Daily Kos:

For the longest time, the progressive economic agenda was held hostage to vaguely economically progressive but socially retrograde racist Dixiecrats in the South. When truly progressive economics required that all our nation's people have equal opportunity to share in the nation's wealth, those erstwhile allies became strained or broken. But today Democrats are no longer dependent on the likes of Zell Miller and his Dixiecratic friends to enact a progressive economic agenda. The Republicans have painted themselves into a corner as the Party of the South, and Democrats have largely cleaned our own house of the racists.

All that leaves for us is the question of whether enough of our Democratic officials will recover from their Battered Wife Syndrome and the reject the temptations of corporate corruption to truly herald the advent of a 2nd New Deal.

Krugman and spoon's points are especially applicable to California, where the Republican politics of backlash was born and perfected. From Reagan's 1966 campaign that took many white working class voters from Pat Brown and the Dems, to Howard Jarvis' 1978 Prop 13 campaign to cut taxes he argued were being misspent on people of color, to Pete Wilson's 1994 campaign won by scapegoating immigrants (also true of Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2003 recall campaign, to a lesser extent) California Republican ideologies and political success have been built on exploiting white voters' resentments. As both Krugman and spoon point out, the base wanted the Great Society undone, and the /real/ power in the Republican Party wanted to undo the New Deal.

As the state of California enters the most serious fiscal crisis in its 150-year history, it's worth looking at how the collapse of Republican backlash politics may provide the necessary opening to fix this state and move beyond 40 years of destructive and failed conservative ideology.

The short version of what I'm going to explain below is this: the collapse of the backlash is due to a more diverse electorate and to an economic crisis that is now consuming the white middle-class, eliminating previous economic privileges they turned to conservatives to defend.

The underlying economic and demographic rationale for Republican anti-tax backlash politics in California is now gone, making multiracial coalitional politics based on expanding government in order to provide badly needed services and jobs a very real possibility, and likely the seed of a new political framework in California. More services and more spending, not less taxes, are now the overriding concern of California voters. Our politicians will have to catch up to be viable.   Read More »