Mary Landrieu just lost her Senate seat. Big time. She was the last of the white Democrats in the Deep South. And white Democrats are complaining that this is a racial issue. But that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Let’s just look at some demographics:

Of all the people who reported as Black in Census 2000, 54 percent lived in the South, 19 percent lived in the Midwest, 18 percent lived in the Northeast and 10 percent lived in the West.

So, more than half of the US’s black people, whom the Democrats take for granted in every possible way, live in the South. Yet that great number has not been enough to sway elections. Why? According to some Democrat strategists, it’s because Democrats have not appealed to enough white people in the South:

And so the Democratic Party is going to have to find a way to reach out to white voters both nationally, but particularly in the South because these Democratic candidates we’re losing, in part, because they were getting significantly less than 30 percent of the white vote. And that’s just not sustainable, even with the hope that you can get large African-American, large Latino and large Asian-American populations to turn out and vote Democratic.

So the most recent Democrat strategy of courting minority votes only works if you retain the votes from the white Democrats you once had. But Democrats have not been able to do that. Why? Because their policies seem directly aimed at hurting middle class white Americans for the purported benefit of minority communities. But what have we seen as a result of these policies? Continued damage to minority communities and continued robbery from people who have to work increasingly long hours to make ends meet.

This is only a racial issue because it has been called one so often. And it has been called one in order to leverage black people as political weapons. When you continue to emphasize the racial narrative that the Democrats are the party of the black people and minorities, what do you expect to happen to white Democrats?

I think the narrative is actually quite different than people are claiming. This is not an issue of appealing more to well-to-do white Americans in general, like the strategist claimed in the previous quote. Well-to-do white Americans are already the Democrat base everywhere but in the South. Why? I think because, like in the days of Abolition, the white people fighting hardest “for” African-American political interests outside of the South don’t actually have any real contact with African-Americans. And they honestly don’t care particularly about real black people. They just want black and minority votes so they can keep taking power and money from their well-to-do white opponents in the South.

Does that mean southerners don’t care about black people? Not from what I’ve seen. There is racism here for sure. But that’s because there are black and white people actually living together in the South. It’s really easy to espouse the virtues of tolerance when the only tolerance you ever have to exercise is an openness toward neck beards.

Southern views on race are and have been more rooted in the reality of actual black communities, not wishful thinking and self-righteous complacency. What we have seen, that Democrats in other states have not seen, is the firsthand impact Democratic policies have had on black communities and on our own. And it’s not pretty.

Many black communities, feeling long voiceless, vote Democrat because they believe the majority white Democrats are on their side. But they’re not. And I think more and more black voters are realizing that. But they aren’t voting Republican instead. They’re just not voting. Which is why white Democrats are losing the South.

I have a solution, and it doesn’t involve any more demographic pandering. The civil government could do its job of actually protecting the citizens (not choking them to death), and get out of the business of taking one demographic’s money and giving it to another. If the civil government would do that, communities could be free to begin the self-healing process. Maybe people are finally waking up to that fact.