Conservative Time Warp

Last week, Cindy Hyde-Smith won a runoff election for a full term as U.S. Senator from Mississippi. She defeated Mike Espy, a black former Congressman and President Bill Clinton's Secretary of Agriculture. She won just under 54 percent of the vote, a solid win.

She won despite her 2007 vote in the State Legislature that praised a soldier in the Confederate Army for his efforts to "defend his homeland." The South, not America.

She won despite her 2014 photo of herself outside the plantation home of the Confederate President, former U.S. Senator from Mississippi and Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, wearing a Confederate Army cap and holding a rifle, having written the caption, "Mississippi history at its best!"

She won despite being caught on video, after the general election but before the runoff, saying it would be "a great idea" to make it more difficult for liberals to vote.

And she won despite a campaign appearance in Tupelo, Mississippi -- birthplace of Elvis Presley -- in which she stood next to Colin Hutchinson, a local cattle rancher, and said, "If he invited me to a public hanging, I'd be in the front row." This was seen as an endorsement of lynching: The practice of an unregulated mob, with no authority from any government at any level, finding a person and hanging him to death from a tree. In the South, lynchings were almost always done by white people to black people. It was sickeningly common until the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

She won despite all of that. Or... Did she win because of all of that?

I went on Twitter, and saw John Stanway, a native of Toronto, but clearly a good observer of American politics, say this:

I think it would also be fair to say that all conservatives' brains are, in general, frozen in 1979. They still think we're in a crisis of corrupt union power, high taxes, high crime, and excessive regulation long after these problems have faded away, if they were ever that bad.

A responder, whose real name I don't have:

I think you might be giving him too much credit. 1979 seems too recent. I'm thinking maybe 1897--before women had the right to vote, after Jim Crow and disfranchisement started to become part of the South's legal fabric.

This matches something I've said for a long time: Conservatives want to take us back to the depression. And I don't mean the one in 1932, before the New Deal and civil rights. I mean the one in 1894, before both Roosevelts, before the regulations of even the Food & Drug Administration.

At any rate, I am reminded of the 1965 song of folksinger Phil Ochs: "Here's to the State of Mississippi." Where the calendar is still lyin' when it reads the present time.