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As Jeremy Peters of the New York Times wrote in the paper’s lead story a week before the elections:

“Democrats in the closest Senate races in the South are turning to racially charged messages—invoking Trayvon Martin, the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., and Jim-Crow era segregation. …

“The images and words they are using are striking for how overtly they play on fears of intimidation and repression.”

The ads worked. But while Dixie Democrats rolled up landslides among black voters, Michelle Nunn, daughter of Sen. Sam Nunn, carried only 27 percent of the white vote in Georgia, and was wiped out.

Ironically, as Republicans capture state legislatures across the South, they will wield their power as energetically to guarantee black Democrats get safe districts as the old Dixiecrat Democrats wielded their power to ensure that black folks could not vote.

This weekend, 2 million Catalans went to the polls in Spain and in a non-binding referendum voted 4-1 to secede. This follows the vote by 45 percent of the Scottish people to secede from Britain.

As ethnonationalism pulls at the seams of many countries of Europe, it would appear it is also present here in the United States. When political appeals on the basis of race and ethnicity are being made openly by liberal Democrats, as in 2014, we are on a road that ends in a racial-ethnic spoils system—and national disintegration.

“There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism,” roared Teddy Roosevelt, “a hyphenated American is not an American at all.” Typical hate crime by a man unappreciative of our diversity.