We Southerners are happy to be isolated here, watching the main stream of American affairs go by, oblivious to snide comments by some Republicans and to national Democrats who ignore us as social lepers.

We are used to voluntary apartheid, don't have to think about it anymore; it has become instinctive. Consider the history:

From the end of the Civil War in 1865 to 1964, we were a one-party — in effect, a no-party — region, nominally Democrat. Its chief mission was the social segregation as well as economic and educational subjugation of the Negro race.

Then in the 1964 presidential election, Sen. Barry Goldwater, who opposed President Johnson's civil rights legislation, carried the white South by 71 percent, while the president swept the rest of the nation in a landslide.

Ever since, we've been a solid, no-party, nominally Republican region whose founding purpose was to stop racial integration, a cause that was muted as it became less and less respectable to be publicly racist.

Strong echoes of the 1964 election can be heard in the 2008 race. The first African-American president, Barack Obama, was resoundingly rejected by the Deep South while sweeping the rest of the country.

Is there a pattern here? Yes, and it does not speak very well of us. We could normalize our politics, two parties competing over real issues, and become more American with sensitive understanding from native and national leaders.

More on that in a moment, but first, where are we now?

We are the base of a Republican Party that is shrunken, confused, leaderless and searching its soul to discover what kind of party it wants to be: one that accepts only the ideologically pure or one that grows with tolerance from a set of bedrock principles.

Two voices illustrate the fight for the mind and soul of the GOP.

First is the fiery voice of party purification, Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, the state that brought us John C. Calhoun, the theory of nullification, civil war, Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrats and Gov. Mark Sanford, the Appalachian trail explorer.

Sen. DeMint parsed the complex issues of access and cost in health-care legislation with this pretty paragraph: "If we are able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him, and we will show that we can, along with the American people, begin to push those freedom solutions that work in every area of our society."

DeMint has become the rhetorical leader of the no-tax, no-spend wing of the party, which at its core says: If it's broke, don't fix it … if it costs money or helps the wrong kind of people. If you can't afford a doctor, get a life or go to the ER.

A leader of Republican moderates shows us the rhetorical back of his hand. Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio had this retort for DeMint: "It's the Southerners. They get on TV and go, 'Errr, errrr.' People hear them and say, 'These people, they're Southerners. The party's being taken over by Southerners. What the hell they got to do with Ohio?'"

There you have it, a fired-up leader of the Southern base feels the Great Recession rumbling toward him, crushing banks, triggering a tsunami of home foreclosures, and he shouts, "Hold your ground, freedom lovers … DO NOTHING."

And the more sensible wing of the party takes the South for granted with an attitude of scornful embarrassment at being linked with it. The other party, the national Democratic Party, avoids us like the plague.

Is this a good situation to be in? At some deep level of consciousness, we know it's not a good place to be, but it's where we've always been except for that historical blink in the '70s called the "New South." It's why we smolder with resentment in our belligerent passivity, "I'm mad as hell, and I ain't going to do nothing about it."

How the Republican Party finds a leader and an idea to make it nationally competitive again will have no bearing on the isolated no-party status of the South. Why should Republicans discard a base from South Carolina to Texas?

If the South becomes a part of the normal, significant debate and decision about real domestic and international issues, it will have to be national and state Democratic leaders who lead the way.

This will take some changes of attitude and action, especially from the national party. Democrats must demonstrate they like rednecks, who need health insurance and affordable mortgages; that it's OK for Sons of Confederate Veterans to honor their heritage.

Progressive Southern leaders should have the courage to take back cultural symbols — flags and songs and a courteous way of living — genuine values hijacked and corroded by the Klan.

To do so is to say at last to millions of working and middle-income people, the Democratic Party likes you, too, and believes you and your culture are worthy of respect. According respect to white symbols is not to denigrate others. There is black soul, and there is white soul, too.

An approach to the South aimed at detoxifying perverted symbols, making them respectable in decent hands, will allow national and regional Democrats to speak with natural friendliness to blacks and whites in the South.

We've lived with ease for 144 years in voluntary apartheid.

Change will be hard, but two Southern parties dividing along serious national norms is a gift we could give to the nation and, in return, earn us attention and respect.

Brandt Ayers is publisher of The Anniston Star.