Very little remains of an Arkansas Democratic Party that, in its long but dormant dominance, was a vague association of disconnected parts.
Now that the anti-Obama revolution has overturned Arkansas and made it deep red, the state Democratic Party is necessarily leaner and seemingly more natural as a supposed coalition.
Except that it remains disconnected. And now it's also small and out of power. Suddenly it needs to play offense when all it has ever done is play defense.
Arkansas Democrats are left with white liberals, blacks and a few cultural remnants of the old days, like Conner Eldridge. Generally speaking, those groups don't see things the same.
The city of Little Rock, which is basically Democratic, is learning about--or let's say it is unwittingly revealing--the new disconnection and even dysfunction besetting this uneasy Democratic affiliation.
White urban liberals of the kind with which Little Rock is blessed tend to embrace gay rights, downtown renaissance and public schools that lure the children of middle-class people who happen to be mostly white.
The blacks with whom Little Rock is blessed may or may not embrace gay rights. Their preachers are as apt as white preachers to proclaim homosexuality a sin.
They believe, generally, that white people spend entirely too much public money trying to fancy up downtown to appeal to the upscale and tourists, and not nearly enough trying to restore long-neglected neighborhoods left to wither after white people fled.
They think an all-black public school district would be quite all right if that's the way it has to be; that it's a racial insult to say otherwise, and that, if it's socially problematic, then the fault rests with white people for running away.
Perhaps you saw the anecdote at the bottom of my column Thursday about visiting Baseline Elementary School.
Superintendent Baker Kurrus, whose general politics are uncertain to me but who clearly qualifies as heroically progressive in public school advocacy, was giving me a tour. Suddenly he ran into Joy Springer, a school board member before the state takeover and a paralegal for civil-rights lawyer John Walker, who happens to be a Democratic state legislator. Springer was at the school for volunteer reading day.
These two persons who might be expected to align for public school advocacy--a Democratic Party theme --got into a bit of a spat right then and there.
He felt she was trying to undercut him by spreading as fact certain embryonic ideas he has for elementary school consolidation. She thinks he wants to close elementary schools and cause disruption inordinately on the black side of town where enrollment may be relatively small only because, as she sees it, white people don't want to live close to people like her.
Consider also the issue of reconstructing and widening Interstate 30 through downtown Little Rock.
Mostly white and Democratic-leaning midtown neighborhood associations have passed resolutions seeking alternatives to freeway widening. They fear long-term harm to downtown by the vast divide of a wider freeway.
But at a public hearing last week, state Rep. Linda Chesterfield, who is black, and a Democrat, spoke in support of the widening. She said her constituents are Little Rockians, too, even if they live away from downtown or midtown and rely on the freeway to get to their jobs.
What I seem to be describing is Little Rock's problem. But it coincides with the state Democratic Party's problem.
I'd say that Little Rock and the Arkansas Democratic Party are the same, but that would be unfair to Little Rock, which is doing better as a city than the Democrats are doing as an Arkansas political party.
Quite apart from all that, state Democrats have decided to compete for the U.S. Senate seat this year with the aforementioned Conner Eldridge running as a white rural throwback to Blanche Lincoln, Mark Pryor and Mike Ross--losers all in the end, by margins that were not pretty.
So it turns out there is, in fact, something that white liberals and blacks might agree on. It is that Conner Eldridge's passé Republican-in-disguise routine offers them no reason for partisan enthusiasm and scant reason even for a vote.
Eldridge represents a kind of nominally Democratic politics that, by seeming nearly as conservative as Republican politics, worked well until 2010 as a defensive tactic in helping Democratic incumbents fend off the GOP.
But it's not worth much in rising from the ashes.
To rise from the ashes, Arkansas Democrats need to present themselves as vigorously different from Republicans. They need to advance unified causes in something resembling a movement.
If Democrats are going to lose, as they are in Arkansas, then they need to do it with unity and passion and purpose. There might be a future in that kind of losing.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 11/24/2015