Move forward or get left behind

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne is not the first person to point out that the 2006 elections left Republicans secure only in the deep South.

But he goes further to argue that the GOP is being undermined by its Southern base, because the South doesn't actually represent "real America."

It wasn't all that long ago that Democrats and liberals were said to be out of touch with "the real America," which was defined as encompassing the states that voted for President Bush in 2004, including the entire South. Democrats seemed to accept this definition of reality, and they struggled -- often looking ridiculous in the process -- to become fluent in NASCAR talk and to discuss religion with the inflections of a white Southern evangelicalism foreign to so many of them.

Now the conventional wisdom sees Republicans in danger of becoming merely a Southern regional party. Isn't it amazing how quickly the supposedly "real America" was transformed into a besieged conservative enclave out of touch with the rest of the country? Now religious moderates and liberals are speaking in their own tongues, and the free-thinking, down-to-earth citizens in the Rocky Mountain states are, in large numbers, fed up with right-wing ideology.

[...]

How durable are these changes? In both politics and culture, the side that thinks it's losing usually accommodates itself to the ascendant order. My hunch is that we will be seeing many new claims to moderation and social concern on the right and many fewer fake NASCAR fans on the left.

Dionne is probably correct about the national trends, but his argument implies the South will remain static as the rest of the country evolves.

In reality, the end result should be a more progressive South. Otherwise it will be left in the dust, once again.