Well, I drove across the country from Michigan, and I am now in Barstow, California. (No view from the room today; my camera is in the car.) I don't especially recommend driving 850, mostly mountainous, miles on the third day of a long drive, as my head was spinning and things were still moving when I went to bed last night. Fortunately, today's drive will be the shortest. (A mere 400 miles to destination.)

As it happens, I passed through only one state which had belonged to the Confederacy -- Texas. (Well, there is the complicated situation of Missouri, which was claimed by both sides and had two state governments. But it's hardly what we think of as a Confederate state.)

I hadn't really thought about the historical status of the states I drove through until this morning, when I read this piece about the "GOP=Confederacy" meme:

Win or lose, some liberal pundits seem constitutionally incapable of civility toward conservatives. Four years ago, the people and states that reelected George W. Bush were branded en masse as "dumb" and as ignorant denizens of "Jesusland" -- the kind of stereotyping supposedly only Republicans engage in. Bush won 31 states in that election, encompassing most of the interior of the continental U.S., over intense -- some might say deranged -- liberal opposition, and so perhaps their being sore losers was somewhat understandable. But even in victory liberal commentators can't seem to show any class; now the slander of the mean-spirited left is that the GOP has been relegated to the party of the Confederacy.

This vilification preemptively appeared in an electoral prognostication by Scott Horton, in Harper's on Election Day. Horton haughtily predicted that "the Republican Party will have transformed itself from the Party of Lincoln into the Party of the Old Confederacy" and that McCain would win only the South plus "a sprinkling of thinly populated states of the Plains and Mountain West." Horton then went on to tar the South as "largely a backwater" wherein "the GOP is ... weakest among the best-educated and most prosperous populations."

As the author Timothy Furnish makes clear, the Confederacy theory does not withstand either historical nor geographical analysis:

Of the 22 states that went for Senator McCain -- I'm counting Missouri as one, since he's ahead 49.5% to 49.3% with 100% of the precincts counted -- only eight are old Confederate ones. Many Americans, even those who should know otherwise like Ivy League-educated journalists, seem to assume that Kentucky, Missouri, West Virginia, and Oklahoma followed Jefferson Davis -- but actually all were Union territory. Thus, two-thirds of the red states in this election were from the Mountain West/Southwest and Midwest -- so it would probably be a better argument to say that the GOP, at least in the 2008 election, has become the party of the Empty Quarter and Breadbasket. But of course neither of those labels fits the prejudice paradigm regnant in news rooms, which delights in portraying the GOP as coterminous with the Land of Cotton where, in journalists' opinions, the good old times of slavery are still not forgotten.

I think they should have thought twice before floating this meme. Because, if you look at the national election map by county, the "Confederacy" is bigger and stronger outside the old South than it is inside!

Scary.

Except for New England, the "Confederacy" shows strength all over the country. Why, it's broken away from the South.

I can't blame them for trying, but it may be too late to stuff it back in.

MORE: As I get ready to hit the road, I looked at the map and saw that I'll be driving through large portions of Confederate California.

Hope I make it to Berkeley!