A Twitter conversation between two academics, one in Arkansas, was published Tuesday by the online Raw Story. It explained that there are national implications in the South's long being controlled by the overwhelming political power of one party, regardless of which.
That way, serious political debate threatening change to the established Southern order--racial, economic and cultural--can be avoided.
The theory is that it matters not which party dominates as long as that party is so thoroughly dominant that it doesn't want or need to change anything.
The national context is that blue has become bluer and red redder, thus more Southern, forcing in Congress a mutual fear of the other's desired change and the kind of politically forced pragmatism I happen lately to have been advocating, probably because I'm incurably Southern.
The piece is part commentary by Yale journalism fellow John Stoehr and part responses to his tweeted questions to Southern politics expert Angie Maxwell at the University of Arkansas, main author of "The Long Southern Strategy."
Maxwell explains that, in the one-party Southern Democratic days (ending around the turn of the 21st century in Arkansas), politics was about entertainment, mainly cults of personality and tent-revival showmanship.
In Arkansas, in my view and lifetime, that meant the rascally down-from-the-hills charms of Orval Faubus, the smile and shoeshine of Dale Bumpers, and the sheer world-class political talent of Bill Clinton.
It is true that Win Rockefeller, without much personality, won a change mandate to become governor in 1966. But he couldn't begin to succeed with a rural one-party Democratic Legislature.
It was left to Bumpers, David Pryor and Clinton to enact some of WR's vision, which they could do because they were Democrats and superior country entertainers. They came off as moderate in Arkansas though they would behave more liberally when freed by relocation to the Senate or, in one case, the White House.
The difference now is that the ubiquitous instant national new cycle has made the change-fearing, order-protecting South wary of the big-city Democrats they newly see in Washington. So, Arkansas and most Southern states have switched wholesale to one-party Republican. But it's with the same intended effect, which is to keep things the same.
Liberal-minded people in Arkansas were approximately as disdainful of those old Democratic Legislatures as they are of today's Republican-overrun one. It wasn't Trent Garner, Bob Ballinger and Jason Rapert four decades ago passing the creation-science law.
The established order remains. Black people were and are disproportionately and overwhelmingly disadvantaged in Arkansas and most of the South. Medicaid expansion was and remains an uphill struggle. Tenant rights didn't and don't much exist in Arkansas.
Maxwell says that Bernie Sanders' economic policies connect many places elsewhere in the country but not at all in the South because, even among liberally inclined Southern people, the very idea that such dramatic change as Medicare-for-all might ever happen seems wholly out of the question.
No doubt, the reason I decry the impracticality of today's progressive Democrats in Congress, and long for a more palatable centrism, is that I've lived 67 of 68 years in Arkansas. I've spent more than half of those years absorbed in the art of the change-resistant and ruling-order politics of Arkansas and the South. And that's what makes me tactically correct at the moment in the context of a South-influenced nation.
Meantime, in Arkansas, the annual piece I write for Talk Business and Politics on the state of politics, out this week, says the state's battleground for 2022 will be rural-Arkansas legislative primaries pitting standard conservative Republicans against more strident Republicans.
Talk about one-party dominance. The only fuss with anything at stake is inside that one party.
A retired Air Force colonel and current chamber of commerce executive in Harrison named Bob Largent has announced his Republican primary candidacy in the area now represented by the strident Ballinger.
Largent announced that he intended to practice a more "collaborative" conservatism. Ballinger argues his collaborators are the people.
Rapert is going around the state campaigning for the Republican lieutenant governor's nomination by lamenting that the current crop of Republican legislators isn't pro-life enough.
As you may recall, Rapert wanted to extend the recent special session to pass a Texas-style anti-abortion law. More pragmatic conservative Republican legislators thought they could save the state a little per-diem by waiting for the U.S. Supreme Court to take care of Roe v. Wade later this year in that more relevant Mississippi case.
All the while, Sarah Huckabee Sanders barrels toward the governorship by promising to fend off any and all evil change.
If full conservative versus even more conservative is indeed the operative battleground in Arkansas politics, Sanders may have trouble finding even any perceived threat to pretend to save us from.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.