Some may recall this discussion of his earlier call for a “third reconstruction.” Well, it now seems even more the case that Lind’s letting his formidible intellect take a breather as he lets his hatred for the south get the better of him. This is a breathless and at the same time boring attack on the GOP as nothing more than a Confederate Party. Some excerpts:

On Wednesday, January 28, 2009, President Barack Obama’s $819 billion stimulus plan passed the House of Representatives, despite the solid opposition of the Confederates.
By the Confederates I mean the Republican Party and their allies among Southern conservative Democrats. The battle in Washington is not between liberals and conservatives; it is between the Union and the South.

And:

The vote about the stimulus package was not about economics. It was about nullification. It was the bipartisan Confederacy sending a message to the rest of America, stricken by the greatest crisis since the Depression. That message? DROP DEAD.
Those who think that the Democrats could have won over more Republicans by making more concessions do not understand the neo-Confederate/Dixiecrat mentality. There was no one to bargain with on the other side. The Republiconfederate “alternative”—a joke of a bill consisting almost entirely of tax cuts—would not be taken seriously by any mainstream conservative economist. It was pure provocation.
The rest of the country needs to understand. This is not the nation-minded Republican Party of Lincoln and McKinley, Eisenhower and Dole. Nor is it the party of Herbert Hoover who, if he were alive, would be denounced by the Southern Right as the flawed but public-spirited Progressive he was. No, this is the party that was hijacked after the civil-rights revolution by former Democrats on the Southern far right. Its spiritual ancestors are the old states’ rights Southern conservative Democrats, like John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis and Strom Thurmond and Orval Faubus. The slogan of the segregationist Democrats—“massive resistance”—characterizes today’s Southern conservative resistance to necessary federal economic action, just as it inspired yesterday’s Southern conservative resistance to equal rights for black Americans.

I’ll leave it to others to decide how much merit there is to Lind’s analysis. After all, it is significant that the GOP has become more southern. But that’s the rub. The truth at the core of his argument, is nothing less than old and stale conventional wisdom. People have been writing about the “southern captivity” of the GOP for nearly 20 years (and much of that has been over done, by my lights). Listing where various GOP leaders come from is called padding, not advancing an argument. What’s new in Lind’s rant are the lengths to which he will stretch an old and familiar point into some fevered nonsense about the GOP being nothing more than the Confederacy reborn.