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We have reached a turning point in American history. It is no longer possible for a rural, regional, racially monochromatic political party to win the presidency. We are now, manifestly, a different country. The South, though a more complex region than ever before, won’t rise again until it resolves the issues that have marked its difference from the rest of the country since the land was colonized. President Obama, freed by victory to return to the grand rhetoric that marked his rise to power, acknowledged this demographic earthquake in the very first sentence of his passionate acceptance speech: “The task of perfecting our union moves forward.”

The line echoed two essential events in the history of the country: the Constitution’s mandate to “form a more perfect union” and Abraham Lincoln’s crusade to preserve that union. It marked the end of a 50-year era in American history, a time when the Civil War was fought again through the civil rights movement and a succession of Sun Belt Republicans revived the radical individualism that has been present in the nation’s character from the start. But on election night 2012, the solid South was fatally pinched as Virginia — the heart of the Confederacy — stubbornly remained blue, and Ronald Reagan‘s West continued its transformation into a region dominated by a rising generation of Latinos as well as the freethinkers who legalized marijuana in Colorado and continued to vehemently support liberal social policies along the West Coast. All that was left of Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy was Scots-Irish Appalachia and the German-Nordic stripe of prairie states. It was American politics at its most primal.