Jonah asks:
I just have one question for liberals so bigoted against the South as unalloyed bastions of racial hatred and economic backwardness. Why are blacks moving there in droves?
I can only imagine that Tomasky believes that he knows better than they do what the South is like and what is in their best interests.
Now, in the best of circumstances, this would be questionable. “Experts” almost never know better than individuals what is good for them. But coming from Tomasky, whose judgment in this area seems to be off, it is doubly so. He writes:
The Democrats will retain their hold on the majority-black districts, and they’ll occasionally be competitive in a small number of other districts in cities and college towns. But they’re not going win Southern seats (I include here with some sadness my native West Virginia, which was not a Southern state when I was growing up but culturally is one now). And they shouldn’t try.
Which is to say that, in his view, West Virginia could not until recently be included in the list of states he disdains. All told, that’s rather odd, is it not? Tomasky seems to hate the South in large part because he believes that the region is “one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment,” and because it has always been on the “wrong side of history.” Indeed, reading his various screeds you get the impression that this is what “Southern” means to him. Well, if West Virginia could not be said to be a part of this wasteland until lately, one has to wonder why the state spent half a century returning Robert Byrd to the Senate?
A self-serving exception to a condescending and inchoate rule.