- guardian.co.uk, Sunday December 22 2002 03.18 GMT
President Bush's expert - and unprecedented - orchestration of his downfall was well advanced. Barely six weeks since the mid-term elections the President was in no mood to have his victory soured by controversy - especially over race, the US's deepest and most enduring scar and his party's Achilles heel.
In Atlanta, Georgia, the beacon of a new cosmopolitan South, there had never been any misunderstanding of what Lott meant when he expressed sympathy about Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist presidential campaign - or the insincerity of his effusive apology.
'Not an African-American in the South believed a word of it,' says Bill Campbell, the city's former mayor. 'Atlanta is an oasis, but it is still the Deep South. Drive out 50 miles from here and you'll find Lott's attitudes and philosophy are still held with almost religious fervour.'
The Lott controversy has exposed the deep divisions between the Old South, with its grim history of segregation, and the New South, where old attitudes have been supplanted by the multi-ethnic reality of modern America.
But it also exposed a fissure within the Republican party that refuses to close nearly 40 years after the civil rights movement began. Since the late 1960's, when Nixon devised a 'Southern strategy' to steal support of Southern Democrats, Republicans have talked righteously about civil rights in the North while playing to racial divisions in the South.
According to Tony Horowitz, author of Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War, Lott's blunder was an accident waiting to happen. 'The Republicans have played a game of double-speak for a long time. It's an open secret they've been appealing to white Southerners uncomfortable with the changed racial landscape and this has woken people up to the game they've been playing.'
'It's exposed a racial fault-line in the country and will pop in everyone's head each time these issues arise.'
Though Lott will now fade from view, the Republican party and the White House is worried that the incident has dented the party's image of 'compassionate conservatism' and may have damaged Bush's designs to ensure a wider margin of victory in 2004 by broadening Republican appeal to minority voters.
But the controversy has given Bush the opportunity to send a clear warning to politicians misty-eyed for the past. 'He rebuked a politician who tried to associate the party with the politics of 1948 because he has no investment in the old segregationist South,' says Merle Black, a political historian at Emory University in Atlanta. 'His political strength is in the middle-class Southern suburbs who care about economic development and tax cuts.'
The crucial political calculation is whether Bush can reassure moderate voters - especially women - that his party no longer tolerates racism, and still reassure staunch conservatives of the party's ideological course.
Lott's successor, Bill Frist, is Bush's choice in part because he's from Tennessee and so speaks to the southern base of the party, and because he's seen as ideologically moderate.
'The interpretation the world has given us is that most white southerners are racists, and the Republicans appeal to this racism,' says Merle. 'But they don't accept that characterisation.'
In Lawrenceville, 30 miles north-east of Atlanta, the division between the old and new Souths is plain. A separate dining room exists for older white patrons, while the younger majority eat and discuss business opportunities.
'The old boy network is just about gone,' says 30-year-old James Tipton, a retirement plan specialist, waving toward the elders. 'The question of race is still alive among some whites but they're like dinosaurs.' But dinosaurs roam still, especially in the Deep South of Alabama and Mississippi, and the old symbols of the Confederacy, even in progressive Georgia, resonate. As William Faulkner famously warned, 'The past is never dead. It's not even past.'
One of the many ironies of the new South is that southern politicians and commentators were first to call on Lott to step down. 'Twenty years ago people could say things like this and get away with it. The South has come to look much like the rest of the nation,' says Horowitz. 'It's now a more heterogeneous place filled with people for whom the confederacy and the rebel flag doesn't mean anything.'
But it still plays. In November, democratic governor Roy Barnes was defeated because of his push to miniaturise the Confederate battle insignia on the state flag.
Arguments over the rebel flag should not be taken at face value, says Horowitz. 'Ever since the South lost the civil war it has been trying to win memory of the war. A central part of that has been trying to deny what the Confederacy was really all about. Slavery was at the centre of what the South was fighting for and ever since there's been an attempt to deny that and to say it was a noble cause.'
Although it took three weeks for Lott's comments to reach enough political mass to trigger his resignation, there was never any misunderstanding to the true meaning of his comments.
At an exhibition of lynching photographs at the Martin Luther King historic site in Atlanta, the pictures spoke louder than any apology Lott could muster. 'He erased 40 years of civil rights progress with one comment,' said Daraford Jones, a young black student visiting the show. 'We're not far removed from those times and, with the Republicans in power, we're only a few laws removed from returning to them.'
At the extreme end of a new white southern pride movement is the Council of Conservative Citizens, a group with ties to Trent Lott branded a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Centre. According to the centre's director Mark Potok, the council is the spearhead of a neo-confederate movement that's grown over the last decade.
'It's a fairly traumatic form of white nationalism and Trent Lott's attitude toward the civil war, the battle flag, blacks in general, are precisely reflective of its racist ideology,' says Potok. 'There's an attempt to rewrite the history of slavery and segregation in such a way that segregation becomes merely a policy to protect the integrity of both races.'
In Atlanta, on the surface, the city has done a good job of racial integration, but the result is a kind of voluntary segregation in which blacks and whites work together but at night return to their own neighbourhoods. The city may be the so-called 'Chocolate City' - a place with more opportunity for blacks than any other - but its rifts are far from healed. 'You can have a society that's grossly racist without legally-defined segregation,' says Campbell, the former mayor. 'Race is still at the root of American politics. You can never get away from it. It's always race.'
