Republican talk radio host Rush Limbaugh today discussed the political isolation of the South in the second half of the first hour of his program. Limbaugh’s show has the largest audience of any talk radio program in the United States. He began the segment on the South by discussing two articles in the US media attacking the South and discussing its increasing political isolation. One of those articles is a piece by George Packer for The New Yorker entitled ‘Southern Discomfort.’ He quoted a brief section from that article about the US demographic and political trends which are running in opposition to Southern identity and values. The piece that Limbaugh quoted is excerpted below:
Now the South is becoming isolated again. Every demographic and political trend that helped to reëlect Barack Obama runs counter to the region’s self-definition: the emergence of a younger, more diverse, more secular electorate, with a libertarian bias on social issues and immigration; the decline of the exurban life style, following the housing bust; the class politics, anathema to pro-business Southerners, that rose with the recession; the end of America’s protracted wars, with cuts in military spending bound to come. The Solid South speaks less and less for America and more and more for itself alone.