Between the Lines +20, then and now

Now that it’s time to celebrate this space’s twentieth anniversary, where it’s come over the past five years (the last time this exercise was completed) and what’s happened in Louisiana politics over the past two decades.

Readers should go back to that Jan. 22, 2020 post to review how and why this, which I still understand is the longest-running blog about Louisiana politics, all started, but I will extend my remarks from then a bit. The paucity of blogs about Pelican State politics invited such an effort, but a knowledgeable one. True then (not so much in volume) and now (featuring increased volume) is while information dissemination about the state’s politics (by any media) comes either in the form of the proverbial mile-wide and inch-deep – typically journalists, most opinion columnists, and some of the sources cited by each – or an inch-wide and mile-deep – describing some sources used – this effort has been all about being mile-wide, mile-deep.

At the time this started, I had been teaching Louisiana government in the college classroom for almost a decade, and in the course of preparing and teaching classes I became aware that much of what was seen in the traditional media (because new media outlets at this time were practically nonexistent) offered surface analysis or information for the most part, except for the occasional true expert but whose expertise was confined narrowly, was outright oversimplified if not incorrect. I felt I could offer a much broader and more thoroughly analyzed perspective, especially through my use of hard data that separates this space from the impressionistic or wish-fulfilling but bereft of systematic knowledge narratives common to the vast majority of news gathering and commentary about Louisiana politics.

Since I began that task, Louisiana’s political landscape has changed substantially, although not dramatically. As for evidence of the former, consider that at the start of 2005 Democrats held all but one of the single executive elective offices, maintained majorities on the Public Service Commission and Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (including the appointees, only three from the GOP of 11 for this), barely missed a supermajority in the state House of Representatives and had a healthy majority in the state Senate, had one of the pair of Senate seats (having just lost one), and were in the minority only insofar as House seats went with just one (but with having had three of seven just prior to the year’s start). In fact, of the state’s nine largest cities, seven were helmed by Democrats.

Then there’s now. No Democrat holds a statewide single elective post, they are in the minority on the PSC and BESE (with only two on this), are super-minorities in the state House and Senate, and only have two instead of one of six House seats due to odd judicial and political reasons. And to make matters worse, they have the mayoralty in only two of the nine largest cities.

Regardless, I don’t consider this dramatic change because policy change has occurred not so much, thanks to the atavistic liberal populism that keeps state government bloated and overly active. Too many elected officials in the GOP don’t mind this, but their numbers are falling every year.

This winnowing highlights the significant ways in which the major parties have changed in the state. In 2005, of Democrats in the state House about three-quarters were white; today, about a sixth are. For the Senate, then two-thirds were white; now, an eleventh.  Black voter registration among Democrats long ago overtook that of whites, and as far as total registration Republicans are on the doorstep of doing the same to all Democrats, mainly as whites abandon Democrats.

Lost as well has been the old liberal populist formula for election: expressions of social conservatism uneasily tied to big government redistribution. Now, Democrats with any sort of power base beyond the local level win offices by practicing strident leftism of the limousine liberal kind, making today’s alternatives to conservatism unable to win majorities outside of areas heavily typified by a top-down coalition – elites outside of the business world and/or households invested in dependency, with both drawing ideologically justification from Manichean worldviews about identifiable categories of people – such as by race, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, religion, etc. – allegedly victimized by others (read: white, male, practicing heterosexuality, identifying by natal sex, Christian, etc.) that only overwhelming government intervention can cure.

This constipated and unconvincing worldview is why they can’t win power in Louisiana now, with this metamorphosis from liberal populism being the biggest development over the past 20 years in state politics. That form of populism made as it locus economic class but has fallen out of favor because elites deemed the working class as insufficiently committed to climate alarmism, replacement of identity by sex with gender and multiple options at that, refusal to admit to their role in perpetuating racial oppression, etc.

The change agent, and the biggest development over the past five years, that solidified this – both the morph and self-destruction of ability to wield power – was the Democrat former Gov. John Bel Edwards Administration. Edwards himself was a shrill fraud who presented himself as a liberal populist, alleged social conservatism bona fides included, to voters but who governed and had more in common with the identarian/elitist left. His terms facilitated the lunatic left in outing themselves and seizing Democrat political apparatuses (as well as colonizing newer media) and articulating that agenda that has led to accelerating political defeats.

The counterreaction has conformed well with the same state political culture that sustained liberal populism for more than a century – the same populist persuasion that identifies power centers that serve as opponents to the people’s rule. Except that in the case of conservative populism it (correctly) tabs government as the oppressive force that policy must counter. If nothing else, the conservative populism practiced by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry he comes by honestly and extendedly, as a matter of principle.

The danger, of course, with conservative populism is it all too easily can be too tempting to use government as would the left to punish presumed enemies instead as an instrument of neutrality and last-resort assistance. Fortunately, the very principled nature of conservatism should serve as a bulwark against devolution into this behavior for scrupulous politicians, as opposed to liberalism that relies on emotive assertion unsustainable by fact and history that makes it all too easy to slide into the incoherent leftist screeds increasingly articulated.

The other significant change in the Louisiana political landscape over the past five years has been the sudden failures of black Democrats in mayoral contests among its largest cities. Beginning in 2020, Monroe, Shreveport – both with more black voters than white that ordinarily would favor Democrats – and Baton Rouge replaced black Democrat mayors with white non-Democrats. In Alexandria, a retread white Democrat in 2022 beat the black incumbent. Analysis shows a small shift of blacks to supporting white candidates but mainly blacks disproportionately sitting out these contests, apparently displeased with black incumbents.

Over the next few years it will be interesting to see whether the new incumbents can continue in office because they incorporate some of these voters into their coalitions or whether these voters instead become mobilized by more identarian elitist leftist black candidates (for the most part those who lost were longstanding and older liberal populist politicians). In part, this is why the blog has started to cover more thoroughly politics in these areas, plus another interesting clash between established elites and a more popular-based movement in Bossier City, my home town throughout this period (and coming on a century for my wife’s family; she’s hanging in there, thanks for asking).

I have no plans on stopping this, so we’ll see what transpires with these transformations in the future. As always, thanks for reading.