It’s a little after 6:00, Central Time, and the earliest polls in this strange Super Tuesday are beginning to come in. Some places are already calling Georgia for Donald Trump. This is not surprising, but is a state which some said held out hope for young Marco Rubio, the marshmallow savior for voters who think George W Bush was too intellectually engaged.

Today is also known as the SEC Primary, taking place as it does largely in the south. SEC is a nice modern way to put it, how we paint the New South, still idiosyncratic, but tucked away into the warm belt of the corporate/media nexus. It would be impolite though to call this what it really is: the Confederacy Primary. More than any other year since at least 1972, however, the Confederacy is dominating our politics, in the bizarre avatar of a know-nothing billionaire demagogue from New York. It’s a Southern kind of day in a Southern kind of year, and it exposes, for once and for all, the myth of the conservative movement, revealing what it always has been: a vehicle for atavistic rage, well-armed ignorance, xenophobia, and most prominently, white nationalism. There’s a straight line between William Buckley and Donald Trump, and the media’s inability or unwillingness to recognize it has led us to this calamity.

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