“Seriously, I saw the usually astute Eugene Robinson on MSNBC scoffing at the idea that Republicans might be looking for an angle to impeach Obama.  His argument seemed to be, “Nah, why would we think Republicans would be extremist enough to concoct a bullshit reason to impeach a Democratic President simply because they can’t stand the idea of him in office?”“

Who could possibly imagine that a group of political terrorists posing as a political party — who’ve threatened the federal government via the utterly bogus “debt crisis” and held millions of Americans hostage as a result — would ever try to impeach a centrist Democrat/moderate Republican like Obama who has given them everything they want and more?  That’s just crazy talk!

“Clint-un”?  Could you spell that for me?  I don’t think I’ve heard that name before.  Could you be thinking of somebody else?  “Lou-in-skee”?  Seriously, I have no idea what you’re referring to.  “1998”?  That’s an awful long time ago.  Was the US even a country back then?...

Now I feel I need to read up on Southern culture. I seriously don’t get it, but I’d like to understand. What’s its history? How’d the region come to be that way? I’d definitely appreciate any reading recommendations about the subject.

Since I’m stuck in the same country with these fuckers, I suppose I’d better know who I’m dealing with.

Someone reading this blog (or the excellent piece you linked to) will point to the non-Southern congressman who just yesterday called the president a “tar baby” as evidence that it’s not just the southerners who are racists. What disturbs me most about that incident is my lack of surprise at the throwback, old school, straight up racism of calling the president a name like that. I’d bet $500 that some elected tea bagger will call him the N-word by January 20, 2013.

Unfortunately pointing this out to the press won’t change anything. They like to pretend that the tea baggers are all shiny and new. If it weren’t for the number of poor and unemployed people who are getting the shaft I think I would enjoy watching establishment republicans squirm more. Because the terrorists they have in congress now are really the end game of the southern strategy. This is what happens when you lie down with dogs—you get up with fleas. But too many people are being hurt for me to find any fun in what’s happening to establishment republicans.

SallyStrange, check out “Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity” by James C. Cobb.  It’s very well-written; it almost reads like a novel.  It’s an excellent primer for “outside agitators”.

And Amanda: witness!  Your assessment is spot on.  I recognized these assholes immediately but given that the South (and Southern culture) is a cipher for many it’s no surprise that non-Southerners can’t (or won’t) see it.  My feeling is that they simply can’t believe that people like this actually exist because that way of thinking is so alien to them.

It is to me, and I’m a got-damn native.

  There needs to be away to break the Neo-Confederate stranglehold on American politics. There has to be political reform that reduces the political strength of the South and Neo-Confederate areas outside the South, massive social engineering to get them to change, or both. The damange that these people doing, including to themselves, is immense.

I would recommend The Mind of the South by W J Cash.  It’s a good introduction to the subject of the South, and fits in with my observations of that region when I’ve lived in Alabama and Texas(where my father’s side of the family came from) at various times in my life.

Link to Amazon reviews of The Mind of the South.

Also, Southern Ladies and Gentlemen by Florence King is a good introduction to what you might say are “Southern types”.

Link

There needs to be away to break the Neo-Confederate stranglehold on American politics.

Y’all damn well had your chance, didn’t you?

@#3 That Congresscreep, Doug Lamborn, is unfortunately my representative. He was born in Kansas. Which of course is how the whole Civil War fiasco got rolling…with the argument over whether it would be a free state or a slave state, so Amanda is still right on here.

  Aaron at 7: That was pretty funny.

They got to Eugene Robinson? Sigh. He was the one from whom I learned to ask, “So why is it that the anti-Civil Rights Act Barry Goldwater won six states in the 1964 election - his own and five Southern states that hadn’t voted for a Republican in 100 years?”

It’s a question I’ve used to shut up several “What Southern Strategy?” wingnuts.

#2 - Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a lot on the Civil War, and did some on-line book clubs of Civil War History.  I read McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom with them and was blown away by how many parallels there are to the present day, and how many attitudes haven’t changed.
A good friend in Missouri was just complaining yesterday that her formerly intelligent, sensible brother just moved back after 11 years in Mississippi, and will need some re-education before she can take him out in public - he’s got all these “white man” phrases that he doesn’t realize aren’t ok because they’re ok in MS.  And Missouri is a former slave state, although on the front lines of the border wars.
Thanks for all the Southern book recommendations.  It’s a foreign culture to this Michigander.

Trying to pass off <strike>Southern</strike> [insert preferred region or cultural identifier here] white culture as more tolerant and less superstitious than it is might work on people who haven’t spent a lot of time around the very people we’re talking about

This is what I have so much trouble explaining to my friends in Seattle about why WA state politics ends up being so much more conservative than the city itself.  I grew up in and have come back to the rural/semirural inland NW and the only thing that distinguished many of the people I knew from Southerners was their accent.  Some even fly confederate flags.  This area is as conservative as Seattle is liberal…the white supremicist movement found shelter here.  Thank Jeebus more people live elsewhere in the state.

I wonder what the effect is on transplants to the area? My old neighborhood was largely westerners who moved to the area for business and a lot of their kids latched onto faux-redneck personae. They got into NASCAR, went muddin’ on weekends, and wore Confederate flag stuff to show their southern pride. I know those people grew up to be Tea Baggers because it’s just another way to tap into that down-home rebel mystique.

I wonder what the effect is on transplants to the area?

Men who transplant themselves into these areas tend to marry local women, and their kids end up getting raised with the local prevailing values. Meanwhile, those men realize that to integrate and advance socially with the locals, they need to conform to the local social mores/beliefs.

“Y’all damn well had your chance, didn’t you?”

The problem is we won.  But we only won the first phase of the Great Cultural and Civil War.

We thought the assassination of Abraham Lincoln marked the end of a terrible tragedy that forever scarred our history.  We were wrong.

In actuality, Lincoln’s assassination marked the beginning of the next phase of the war, which became a guerrilla war for a while until Reconstruction was over in 1877.  Then the third phase started, with Southern Conservatives regaining control, and putting into power their good friend Mr. Jim Crow.  They then proceeded to rule their fiefdoms with more or less impunity, treating Blacks in the South as if the war had never taken place, until that traitor to all things Southern and Sacred, Lyndon Johnson, had the temerity to step in and attempt to finally shutdown Jim Crow, once and for all. 

Again, in the wake of Civil Rights and Voting Rights legislation, it seemed the forces of Southern Conservatism had lost.  But this merely ended the third phase of the Great Cultural and Civil War.  The Republicans, who had been on the side of the angels way back in 1860, had by that time become a political party without a purpose, with fear and hatred of Commies and Pinkos as the prevailing ethos, and conservative Republicans being out of step with attempts to heal America’s deep racial wounds.

With the passing of progressive legislation by Lyndon Johnson, an opportunity presented itself to the Republican Party and those irrepressible conservative Southern Gentlemen.  They had common interests in repressing progress and the Democratic Party.  All the Republicans needed to do was make it clear they would give themselves to Southern Conservatives like a $2 whore if they put aside their traditional hatred of all things Republican (which had remained white-hot since 1860).  With the formulation of the Southern Strategy, the Fourth Phase of the war started.

With Nixon’s election in ‘68, we’ve all been strapped into the same handbasket as it careens down to Hell, taking us all with it; Grover Norquist, Karl Rove, and Rush Limbaugh at the controls, giggling like mental asylum inmates.  They and their acolytes will not be happy until they can do to the whole country what was done to the South during Reconstruction, and then top it all off with some satanic combination of oligarchy and The Handmaid’s Tale‘s Gilead.

It ain’t over until the fat lady sings.  And she hasn’t even made it to the theater yet…

One is Maryland, a state with Confederate sympathies during the Civil War, which, because the Census Bureau defines it as “Northeastern,” is responsible for the only Northeastern member of the Tea Party caucus, Roscoe Bartlett.

He only went into politics because he couldn’t get them Duke boys.

Lee, I was entirely serious.

Exactly, MikeEss. And the point that I’m making is that, if it weren’t for your damned ancestors, you’d all be perfectly free to let the Confederacy—and myself, for that matter, as I’d be one of its citizens and not one of yours—go to hell in our own way, while you build your “shining city on the hill”.

As things are, and with the idea of secession a dead letter both in practice and (since 1868 or so) in law, there really isn’t going to be a solution short of one section utterly subjugating the other, and I don’t believe there is anyone left with the kind of cold, ruthless, imperial will that’d be necessary to do so. Your damnyankee ancestors couldn’t manage it a hundred and fifty years ago, and that was a fair while before everybody got so all-fired concerned over whether they might say something that would upset somebody; if they couldn’t manage it then, surely I can be excused for taking it as a sarcasm that anyone should believe they can manage it now—oh, there’s plenty of people like Lee who will suggest such a thing, but would they have the stomach to see it carried out? The stomach for mass disenfranchisement, followed by popular insurrection, followed by endless occupation on the Iraq model but with even more trouble telling who one’s enemies are? I can’t even get from one end of that thought to the other without cracking a smile.

So, sorry, but you’re pretty much stuck with us. If you don’t like it, thank those among your ancestors who were just so damn adamant that the Confederate States stay in the Union. (And don’t talk to me about abolitionists, who for all their revolutionary Christian fervor were little more than pawns for the people in power on either side.)

@#13 scrumby - what part of the country do you live in?

Go on, then, prufrock, keep making it clear that my people have no place in your little progressive Utopia. That’ll help. How the fuck do you think long-haired soft-hearted queerbait like me ends up on the side of this shit that I’m on, anyway?

I am from Orange County California and I never connected the Southern without the accent, manners and food culture of the area to the Okies.  Doesn’t mean there is no connection, I just didn’t know about it.

I always figured the Southern element of OC (and inland empire) culture dated back to the rancho era when the economic (and political and social structure) of much of SoCal was not that much different than that of the South.  And that that glibertarian tendencies of the region were re-enforced by the ethos of “I pulled myself up by the bootstraps so everyone else should too” that large federal handouts ironically seem to engender amongst those who feel entitled to everything (i.e. isn’t it amazing how some of the most “up by the bootstraps” types have benefitted so much from family wealth/privilege/status and/or government programs? at the very least one must consider how much of OC’s wealth historically has come from federal—defense—contracts and how the posh suburbs in which so many OC conservatives live only exist because of massive government programs like the interstate system).

(Progressives: If you really want to know what needs to happen next from your own perspective, you’d do a hell of a lot worse than to refer to a comment made by Bacopa in an earlier thread. She (?) has absolutely got the right of it, and states it about as clearly as I can imagine any progressive ever will: at this point, we’re wrestling over who’s got ahold of the shotgun, and regardless of your ethics or morals on the subject of violence or your idle fantasies of martyrdom, it’s always better to be the one wielding the shotgun than the one looking down the business end.)

@#2:  Another great book to check out is “Race and Reunion : The Civil War in American Memory” by David W. Blight.  It’s about how the North and the South reconciled after the war.  Essentially, the victors let the losers write the history.  From Publisher’s Weekly, via Amazon:  “Blight . . . detail[s] the mechanics of mythmaking: how the rebels were recast as not actually rebelling, how the South had been unjustly invaded, and how, most fabulously of all, the South had fought to end slavery which had been imposed upon it by the North. His argument that this ‘memory war’ was conducted on a conscious level is supported by the Reconstruction-era evidence of protest, by blacks and whites alike, that he unearths.”

It always pains me to hear progressive people saying the south should just fuck off and die.  I appreciate the efforts of those who try to make the south a better place, even if they don’t want it.  After all, some part of me wants to go back, and I wish it was a better place.

Not that the post says that - just something not uncommonly heard.

This.

Thanks, Amanda.

Thanks for the reading recommendations, millsapien and Dark Avenger. Looks like the Cobb book is in one of my local libraries. Yay!

As for Aaron, uh, dude, sorry my ancestors (some of them; I have relatives on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line) fucked up, but your ancestors fucked up worse. See, I guess not being from the South, I just don’t see why anybody would get worked up enough to write… whatever it is you wrote up there. Yes, it’s sarcasm to wistfully suggest that we might all be better off if the South had been allowed to secede. But nobody, apart from yourself, has made the leap from “Damn, I wish we had just let those motherfuckers go off on their own when they wanted to,” to, “Let’s get an army together, invade, occupy, and re-educate those fools.” Interesting flight of fancy there. No relation to reality, but fascinating nonetheless. Cold ruthless imperial will? Calm yourself. I was thinking something along the lines of a constitutional amendment. Abolish the Senate. Or make it more representative. Abolish the electoral college. There’s no need to change the South itself, really, the main problem is their disproportionate influence on national politics. That way, at least we could restrict them to doing damage on their own local economies, rather than the national and global economies.

Go on, then, prufrock, keep making it clear that my people have no place in your little progressive Utopia. That’ll help. How the fuck do you think long-haired soft-hearted queerbait like me ends up on the side of this shit that I’m on, anyway?

There’s that Southern charm! You know, a moment ago I was on the fence about the value of attempting to reach out to Southern progressives who want to change the culture there, but after reading this polite, well-reasoned, and persuasive paragraph, I’m totally convinced that I should get on board with whatever Aaron proposes! Bless your heart, Aaron, aren’t you just special!

You sure do like writing a lot, Aaron!

And, no, prejudice, ignorance, and white nationalism don’t have a place in progressive utopia. Why would they?

Umm, so the earlier bit about supporting a more progressive south…still.  Don’t let the jerks sway you.  After all, they’ll just emigrate and take their attitudes with them.

SallyStrange, if you turn green at the sight of a little profanity, then you ought to be thanking me that I’ve convinced you to stop wasting your fuckin’ time, because if that’s enough to upset you then believe me you don’t even want to know about dip. (And don’t even try to “bless your heart” at me, you just embarrass yourself.)

Sure, Tyro, because that’s all there is to Southern white people, poor or otherwise, except for the occasional token fag who’s willing to shit all over his family, everyone he’s known, and the very ground in which he took root, in exchange for an occasional crumb from the table—he won’t be taken seriously, ever, but people will pretend they take him seriously, more or less and just so long as he’s willing to yes’m, yessir, you’re so so right about them awful rednecks, I should know ‘cuz I grew up with them and I’m so grateful to you for giving me a home away from them. To hell with that, I say; I’d rather be an apostate than a goddamned lickspittle.

I gave up that role a long time ago, though I am ashamed to have to admit that it didn’t occur to me to start wondering about my place in the progressive scheme of things until I noticed that people still give you shit for a Mississippi accent, whether you’re wearing pride rings around your neck or not.

Aaron asks: “How the fuck do you think long-haired soft-hearted queerbait like me ends up on the side of this shit that I’m on, anyway?”

Just making a very British guess: because you’re white.

As a Brit, it is astonishing to me how much sense American politics makes once you realise that post-WWII, white Americans of all classes were absolutely bone-headedly determined not to make life better for poor people if some of the people helped out of inequality were *shudder* not white. And how much that still applies in so many ways.

Not that Brits aren’t racist. Not that our politicians and our politics are free of racism. But the presence of the Confederacy in US history sure casts a shadow, when Aaron can nakedly defend the idea that his ancestors ought to have been let go on owning black people as property, just because it would make current politics in the US easier.

Yep, the non-insane people from the South knew these people for what they were the second they started screaming. We’ve been dealing with them our whole lives.

They’re dumb, but they’re dangerous as hell because this is almost two centuries worth of resentment they’re dragging around. They’re absolutely convinced that if minorities, women, and gays hadn’t gotten uppity they’d be sitting on the porch of their mansion sipping a mint julep while slaves (Who were happy to be slaves, thank you very much.) picked the cotton.

Sure it’s crazy, but they won’t be swayed by reality. It’s 76 virgins with mosquitoes and possums.

Aaron - you’re new here, aren’t you?  People on this blog are not bothered by profanity.  People who are bothered by profanity suffer optical damage just from opening this blog in their browser.

Seraph-That’s the best thing I’ve heard in a long time!

Aaron’s rant looks awfully familiar.  Any other regulars from Manboobz here?  Does his rant look almost exactly like the rant of an MRA who used to be a feminist before he realized how awful women really are, or is it just me?

Let me relate a story.  I play in a community band with a bunch of people from all around southwest Virginia.  Which is pretty Southern/Appalachian, despite the presence of a big college nearby and a lot of Northern transplants like me.  And there’s a high school kid who’s a good kid who sits next to me.  And one day, he starts telling me this joke which I know is going to be racist, and I say to him, “You know, I like you. Don’t change my mind.”  And he stops and never says anything even a little off-color around me again.

I like to believe that I made him think a little that day.

People grow up in a culture.  They are taught ways of looking at the world which are reinforced constantly by what they see around them.  The best thing we can do is to keep pushing for progressive politics and try to open people’s minds - keep exposing them to another viewpoint.  I think the larger dynamic of American society, where at least casual racism is frowned upon, has been a very positive factor in the current generation of young white southerners.

We’ve made a lot of progress already.  Remember that while the majority of Tea Party folks are white and Southern, the majority of white Southerners aren’t Tea Party.  I think some people here are drawing the wrong conclusion from what Amanda is saying, which is essentially correct.  The core of the Tea Party are people who would have been KKK members or sympathizers half a century ago, and the media gives them way too much credit for being some kind of new, populist movement.  That’s not an indictment of the South or white Southerners - it’s just a reminder that we’ve seen this before, and that the old battles aren’t completely over.

I do think we’re winning.  Slowly.  And we can’t give up.  And we need the help of white Southerners like Amanda and Aaron.  Because if we write them off, then we encourage the perception that us Northerners really don’t respect them and really are out to destroy their culture and way of life.

...which in the end only encourages the terrorists.

Go on, then, prufrock, keep making it clear that my people have no place in your little progressive Utopia. That’ll help. How the fuck do you think long-haired soft-hearted queerbait like me ends up on the side of this shit that I’m on, anyway?

Lighten up Francis.

I’m not even a little bit sure of what Aaron is trying to communicate, which does not speak well of his writing skills.

It’s not just the southern diaspora, though. There are other parts of Whitopia that absorbed the attitudes at a distance, especially the ones (think north and west) where there just wasn’t a lot of experience with legally-equal people with a different skin color…

@Dave @36 - To be fair, we do want to change their culture and way of life pretty radically. 

Your story is encouraging, and you’re right that we do need white Southern progressives.  I just wouldn’t necessarily count Aaron as one of them.  As I said above, “I was one of you until I learned better” is a story I’ve heard before, and I don’t trust it.

That’s the thing, Aaron, the South was going to get their way by either forcing the rest of the Union to accept slavery whether we wanted it or not, or they were going to leave the Union in order to hang on to slavery.  So what choice did people who were not sympathetic to the goal of keeping slavery going to do?

For the North, the Civil War ended in 1865.  For the South, the War Between the States is still going on, and shows no signs of going away any time soon.

I grew up in red/redneck areas of California (and still live there too), and short of Amanda’s background of being born and raised in Texas, I think I have a pretty good idea of what the real South is like through the Southern proxies that I’ve been around my whole life, even though I’ve never been to the South.  I can’t imagine those red areas in Cali are any more progressive (or maybe just barely more) than the hardest Hazzard County/Boss Hogg hell-hole in the South.

I don’t care about your damn accent.  We’ve all got an accent to someone, so it’s not a big deal. 

What is a problem is the too common attitude (among Palinites and Teabaggers and Confederate flag wavers and many “conservatves”) that a person is acceptable only if they hate education enough, love Republican/conservative politics enough, go to the right church often enough (or talk a good enough game), and hate the wrong people enough.

I don’t dislike Southern bigots because they’re from the South, I dislike them because they’re bigots.

I don’t dislike Southern religious nutcases because they’re from the South, I dislike them because they’re religious nutcases.

I don’t dislike crooked Southern (conservative) politicians like Haley Barbour, Grover Norquist, Newt Gringrich, Tom DeLay, etc., because they’re from the South, I dislike them because they’re crooked (conservative) politicians.

It’s pretty simple…

Thank you, Dave Fried.
As a lifelong Georgia resident until grad school, I’m still surprised by the tea party people.  The southerners around me might have been conservative, racist, or whatever, but it was all so much more casual in my experience pre-2008.  That style, even if only a veneer, always made me think that reason and rationality could be listened to.  Casual acceptance might make it difficult to combat wrongheaded ideas, but at least you could talk about it.

My experience is that redneck culture is not bound by any geographic location, but it gravitates to the south as it’s sort of “motherland” (which is why you see pickup trucks with the confederate flag in them even up here in the extreme northeast). It is found wherever people find themselves hopelessly embroiled in ignorance and poverty (which leads to a sort of “why fight it” mentality).

Seraph, I’ve been around here, lurker and commenter both, since 2006 or ‘07, and my experience here has been that people are only unbothered by profanity if it’s used in the cause of expressing a sentiment with which they agree. Cuss about anything other than that and it’s tone arguments galore, as SallyStrange ably demonstrates.

Jesurgislac, if you think the ancestors of every white Southerner owned slaves, maybe that vaunted outsider’s insight is letting you down just a bit; inasmuch as I can figure it out at all, I’m mostly descended from Irish transportees, with a more recent infusion of Italian immigrant blood for leavening. My problem is not that people who aren’t white have been helped out of inequality; there’s more than enough to go around for everyone, is my way of thinking about it. My problem is that I am no longer willing to offer my allegiance to a Left that’s had its face turned away from my people for a century and a half—that doesn’t even bother to make a distinction between rich white people who’ve got something to gain by their hatred, and poor white people who go where they’re led and resent anyone with any kind of prospects!—and now professes itself astonished that they refuse, of course out of simple orneriness and perversion both genetic and spiritual, to recognize the blazingly refulgent rightness of the progressive vision. The Inquisition made much the same argument—oh, but the difference is that progressivism is right, and therefore if progressivism prescribes poor white people a lifelong diet of shit sandwiches, why, that must be just what poor white people deserve.

And just for the record, anent slavery in the Confederacy, I don’t think it’d have lasted more than fifty years after the war in any case. Why not? Two words: “Combine harvester.” But I acknowledge that such a suggestion doesn’t leave much room for the modern progressive fantasy of the Civil War as some kind of Quakers’ crusade against the institution of slavery.

Mighty Ponygirl, I remember learning in catechism that the whole point, the animating passion, of progressivism, was to raise people out of that kind of resentment- and stupidity-inducing misery, without fear or favor, on the axiomatic understanding that whoever’s left to fall behind acts as a drag upon us all.

Finding out that ain’t actually how shit works is what, more than anything, has produced in me the transformation which has led to my present voluble apostasy.

Honestly, if I had one blogospheric wish to be granted, it would be that southern progressives stop indulging in butthurtedness when it is quite rightly pointed out that something about the social and cultural heritage of the region is deeply problematic at best.  Yes, there are many fine progressives down south, and that’s very nice to hear, but the odds of progressive political dominance, or even substantial progressive representation, are very slim indeed.  Culturally, it’s never going to be very much in sync with Enlightenment ideals—there are plenty of theories about why this may be the case, but I feel pretty certain that the old Confederacy and its rural cousins will always be lagging at best wrt social issues, and at worst, actively destructive.

And I’m from Mississippi originally, now live in Tennessee, and would be rather pleased to never leave the more-or-less urban county in which I live except by air.  Yes, the food at funerals & family reunions is very tasty, and people tend to be good at fixin’ things IME, but neither makes up for the dismal quality-of-life measures and the toxic combination of belligerence and finger-pointing (i.e., poor blacks just drag the averages down) that perpetuates them.

Aaron, you sound like an idiot. Are you an idiot, per chance?

MikeEss, I’m not even going to touch the whole “well, I grew up in California and have never even visited the South, but I know all about it anyway” thing. But, what, everyone is just like you? I should assume from your sterling example that I’ll never catch shit from anyone about my heritage, and that that little sting I feel when I hear somebody make a nasty joke about rednecks is something I should just ignore because, after all, my willingness to show allegiance to progressivism proves I’m better than them?

Because I can sure as shit tell you that ain’t how it works. Have I mentioned I used to try to hide my accent? It’s not actually all that hard if you listen more than you talk, which I do, but I gave up on that when I noticed that even mentioning which state I was from was enough for some people to cut me completely dead. I think it’s not going too far to say that, among at least a large subset of progressives, being of redneck extraction is like bearing the taint of original sin.

But hey, y’know, I’m just, as Seraph rather broadly intimates, the political and racial equivalent of an MRA, whatever you like. Whatever makes it easy to write me off as a broken mutant excuse for a human being, right?

@ Aaron @44 - Have you ever read Ta-Nehisi Coates?  The Civil War was about slavery for the South.  It’s written into the Confederate Declaration of Independence.

There needs to be away to break the Neo-Confederate stranglehold on American politics.

Well, since they insist on starting a cultural war, why not give it to them in spades?

Spread the meme via bumper sticker and telephone pole - “If you fly this flag [Confederate flag with a bar across it] you are a TRAITOR to the United States”.  Then watch their butthurtedscreechiness reach new, ultrasonic levels.

If you’re worried about vandalism, sneakily stick it on the cars of those flying that flag.  Bonus points if you manage to get really strong glue.

Also, Aaron, consider this: rednecks are, by their nature, people worthy of ridicule. Even if it walks like a redneck and talks like a redneck, if it don’t think and act like a redneck, it ain’t a redneck. You throwing your lot in with such people says not-good things about you.

@BrianX - please elaborate on your definition of “Redneck”, and why you think they’re inherently worthy of ridicule.  “Redneck” has to mean more than “rural” in your mind, if that’s what you think.

Seraph:

Well, I’ll tell you right off that “redneck” certainly doesn’t strictly mean rural, or there’s a lot of Irish Catholic morons in South Boston who need some redefining. (“Urban redneck” works for me though.)

As a general rule, “redneck” at least to me describes exactly the sort of stupidity we’re talking about here—anti-intellectual, racist, usually misogynistic, and generally xenophobic, and usually fundamentalist in religious outlook. The type’s not limited to the South or the Americas either—the Taliban, for the most part, are rednecks (although Al Qaeda as a general rule seems not to be). I think Amanda’s made the distinction about herself actually—IIRC she grew up in what might be considered redneck culture, but she had a distinctly different attitude that clashes with it.

I look at it this way. Jeff Foxworthy, as far as I can tell, is too smart to actually be a redneck. However, his family (at least the cartoon version in his standup)... yeah, definite rednecks.

As things are, and with the idea of secession a dead letter both in practice and (since 1868 or so) in law, there really isn’t going to be a solution short of one section utterly subjugating the other, and I don’t believe there is anyone left with the kind of cold, ruthless, imperial will that’d be necessary to do so. Your damnyankee ancestors couldn’t manage it a hundred and fifty years ago, and that was a fair while before everybody got so all-fired concerned over whether they might say something that would upset somebody; if they couldn’t manage it then, surely I can be excused for taking it as a sarcasm that anyone should believe they can manage it now—oh, there’s plenty of people like Lee who will suggest such a thing, but would they have the stomach to see it carried out? The stomach for mass disenfranchisement, followed by popular insurrection, followed by endless occupation on the Iraq model but with even more trouble telling who one’s enemies are? I can’t even get from one end of that thought to the other without cracking a smile.

Say what you mean. Northern politicians in the 1870s lost their stomach for enforcing democracy on the South at the point of a bayonet. They recovered in the 1950s and 1960s. And you’re mad because some northerners rememeber these things and think badly of you because of them. What I don’t get is the why. I feel for you that you feel insulted when people piss on the south and you get lumped in with the majority that’s voting for Republican politicians and right to work laws. That’s not fair, but it is understandable, no?

My problem is that I am no longer willing to offer my allegiance to a Left that’s had its face turned away from my people for a century and a half—that doesn’t even bother to make a distinction between rich white people who’ve got something to gain by their hatred, and poor white people who go where they’re led and resent anyone with any kind of prospects!—and now professes itself astonished that they refuse, of course out of simple orneriness and perversion both genetic and spiritual, to recognize the blazingly refulgent rightness of the progressive vision. The Inquisition made much the same argument—oh, but the difference is that progressivism is right, and therefore if progressivism prescribes poor white people a lifelong diet of shit sandwiches, why, that must be just what poor white people deserve.

The left has turned its face away from your people? Poor white southerners didn’t get to partake in Social Security? Medicare? Legal abortions? Birth control? All the raft of Great Society and New Deal programs? I’m pretty they, in fact, did.

Say what you mean, what is it you want the left, especially those of us here, to do?

I agree with you that Southerner-bashing for the sake of it is lame. John Waters reminded us that “white trash” was the last acceptable ethnic slur. I dunno where others are from, but I’ve lived in Michigan all my life. The country-ass white people I grew up amongst don’t seem likely to be more progressive than the ones in Alabama, but I’ve never been there. The suburbanites from Oakland County I met in college seem unlikely to be less racist than the ones from the burbs around Memphis.

I’m going to ignore the guy re-fighting the slavery issue and address @24: thanks.  I don’t think the South is unsalvageable per se.  Many pockets of awesome (Austin, cough) exist.  We have to look at works and do more of that.

Actually, BrianX, what says not-good things about me is that for a very long time I’d have had no difference, intellectual or moral, with what you just said. There’s also the fact that, by granting the possibility that someone who comes off like a redneck isn’t one, you’re ethically well in advance of your progressive fellows, but we’ll just leave that on the side of our plate for now, shall we?

Seraph, I’ve read Coates and have a good deal of respect for him, though I very much doubt he’d feel the same about me were he aware of my existence and the arguments I am making. You’re right that slavery featured heavily in the Confederate declarations of secession, but you’re wrong about why that is; the mistake I think you’re making is to imagine that anyone in power a hundred and fifty years ago, on either side, thought of slavery in the same moral terms in which we think of it today. If the Confederate economic base had been built on, say, shipping, no one on either side would’ve had a word to say about freeing the slaves, whose plight wasn’t at the time so much regarded as insignificant or deserved by anyone on either side, as it simply wasn’t regarded at all.

People seem to think I’m advocating Confederate revanchism and a return to slavery days, when what I’m actually saying is that slavery offered a ready veil of morality over the causes of what was, at its base, a fundamentally economic war.

(Hell, racism aside, I’m not sure you even have to be white to be a redneck—submit one Michael Vick as evidence.)

“inasmuch as I can figure it out at all, I’m mostly descended from Irish transportees, with a more recent infusion of Italian immigrant blood for leavening. “

I beg your pardon, Aaron. You don’t wish your ancestors had been allowed to continue owning slaves: you wish your ancestors had continued in grinding poverty caused by the slave system, but able to at least feel superior to all chattel property by virtue of the colour of your skin. Still kind of naked.

“My problem is that I am no longer willing to offer my allegiance to a Left that’s had its face turned away from my people for a century and a half”

The US has never had a Left in politics at national party level, Aaron, everyone knows that. All you’ve got is the loony right - the equivalent of the BNP/SDL - and the less-loony right. The Democratic Party in the US is the political equivalent of the Conservative Party in the UK. I never did understand why, given that poverty and inequality ought to be a means of bringing everyone together against your class enemy, it wasn’t in the US, until I understood: it’s because poor whites just couldn’t deal with the idea that they could join a political movement which would benefit black people.

“and now professes itself astonished that they refuse, of course out of simple orneriness and perversion both genetic and spiritual, to recognize the blazingly refulgent rightness of the progressive vision.”

Is hard to understand why you’d rather live in Third World conditions in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, than work for a better world - the problem is of course that you’d have to share that better world with black people, and it appears that you refuse - out of what you call “simple orneriness and perversion” and I call racism - to work for a better world if that means benefiting black people too.

“and therefore if progressivism prescribes poor white people a lifelong diet of shit sandwiches, why, that must be just what poor white people deserve.”

Honey, if you want to eat shit sandwiches confident that this is preferable to letting everyone, regardless of the colour of their skin, have a sandwich made from good bread and butter and fresh salad and organic meat or cheese or maybe a sliced avocado - well, I’d like to say that the quality of your diet is no one’s business but your own, but the fact is, your self-prescription of eating shit sandwiches and blaming “progressivism” for them is actually really crappy for the rest of us, too. It takes quite a racist to want to eat shit and forcefeed his black neighbours shit because he’d rather everyone eat shit just so long as black people eat worse shit.

“And just for the record, anent slavery in the Confederacy, I don’t think it’d have lasted more than fifty years after the war in any case. “

With people like you around, I’m damn sure it would have lasted longer.

As a general rule, “redneck” at least to me describes exactly the sort of stupidity we’re talking about here—anti-intellectual, racist, usually misogynistic, and generally xenophobic, and usually fundamentalist in religious outlook. The type’s not limited to the South or the Americas either—the Taliban, for the most part, are rednecks (although Al Qaeda as a general rule seems not to be). I think Amanda’s made the distinction about herself actually—IIRC she grew up in what might be considered redneck culture, but she had a distinctly different attitude that clashes with it.

I think when most people say redneck the mean rural white person with thicker accent than person in the nearest city. It’s not usually about anti-intellectual attitudes, racism or miysogny, because I’ve heard people who hold all those attitudes make fun of rednecks. They just were from the suburbs instead of the country. I think if you use it like you use it, you’re giving cover to those who use it as an ethnic slur. I’m a little agnostic on whether we really need to do away with ethnic slurs, but of course slavery and racism by whites against blacks have poisoned the well quite effectively.

If you squint down in the this Google books page you can find one of my favorite southerners, Chester “Moon” Mullins, a transplanted southerner and Detroit union activist who was described by someone in GM management as a “Hillbilly Anarchist.”

Well, since they insist on starting a cultural war, why not give it to them in spades?

Please.  Oh PLEASE.  It’d be so sweet to have those boots on the right feet for a change.

“MikeEss, I’m not even going to touch the whole “well, I grew up in California and have never even visited the South, but I know all about it anyway” thing.”

I grew up in red California, which isn’t LA, or San Francisco, or any other liberal part of the Golden State.  I’m talking about places like the San Joaquin Valley, among lower-class, blue-collar, white trash Americans.  People who live in trailers.  People who do farm work, and fix cars (often their own), who weld metal, and hammer nails, and work in beauty parlors, and literally live by the sweat of their brow.

Many of my relatives came out here during the Dust Bowl (and before) and during the Great Depression.  These were people who had been poor their whole lives, came from people who had been poor their whole lives, and had kids who mostly stayed poor their whole lives.

I think I have a pretty good feel for the kind of people who fly Confederate flags out of the beds of their pickup trucks, people who think a High School diploma is an end-goal and not a way-point, people who hate Blacks, and hate “Mexicans”, and hate Asians.  I have literally been around them my entire life.

I think I can understand what Amanda is saying very well, despite the fact that the last of my Southern forebears left the Carolinas in the late 1700’s.  I have an aunt and an uncle and many cousins who are living in several states in the South at this moment. 

I was honest enough to admit I’ve not been to the South.  Can you admit you’ve never been to Red California?...

Thanks, Amanda.  For me, that place is Athens, GA.  Someday…
Also, I hear that the 40 Watt sets up at SXSW these days.  Also someday…

If the Confederate economic base had been built on, say, shipping, no one on either side would’ve had a word to say about freeing the slaves, whose plight wasn’t at the time so much regarded as insignificant or deserved by anyone on either side, as it simply wasn’t regarded at all.

WTF?

Are you saying the entire abolitionist movement was an economic plot against the South?  Would that be including the Quakers of 1688, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine?

I’m a proud Yankee with some serious Confederate roots (I actually qualify as a DoC if I were so interested to apply). Even my mother, a born-and-raised Okie, understands that “Redneck” is not just a slur against people who are poor and rural. BrianX’s definition is accurate.

Aaron:

The Civil War was about slavery, plain and simple. That’s what the CSA Constitution said. That’s what the secession documents all said. The combine harvester probably wouldn’t have made much difference at all—even if the plantation owners had them, they’d probably have just had slaves for mechanics.

The South was built on dirt-cheap labor. Slavery and land were pretty much their only forms of capital, so when someone says the war was started for “economic” reasons, that was the reason—if they had to pay a living wage to their workers, it would have destroyed them. From a human decency standpoint, this was unacceptable (quite rightly), which was why the North had been slowly turning against slavery despite the fact that at one point it, too, was just as dependent on it as the South.

In a way it’s not so different from the **AAs abusing copyright laws to protect obsolete business models. The South was stagnating badly and couldn’t be bothered to develop alternate ways of gaining revenue, so they fought to keep slavery until the rest of the country simply said “no more”. (I would tend to doubt the slave states that stayed loyal to the Union really expected to come out of the war with their slaveholdings still intact, though they were probably in denial about it.) In any case, any doubt that white supremacy was a big cause of the dependency on slaves was dispelled by the rise of the KKK and Jim Crow.

On a somewhat related note, Obama is the first Northern Democrat to hold the Presidency since Kennedy. I imagine that just makes the blatant racism against him that much worse.

@56 - I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here, but I think you’re missing mine: I’m well aware that the North didn’t go to war to free the slaves.  They went to war to keep the South from seceding because the South felt they were starting to lose the Abolition debate, and were afraid their slaves would be taken away from them. 

Amanda is completely right that there’s nothing new about the Tea Party, it’s all White Southern Culture backlash emboldened by being given voice and influence through the Southern Strategy after having taken a severe beating during the civil rights era.

Lee in #5 proposed that somehow the political power needs to be limited somehow. I can tell you exactly how to do it. And I agree with others here that you wont win by wishing y’all had your own little Northern Utopia. To understand what needs to be done we must look back to when WSC had their great disaster, the Civil Rights era. We must never forget that many white Southerners helped make this progress happen. You may remember this one guy, LBJ. Where was he from again?

Some white leaders openly endorsed desegregation. Some did so because they always believed it was right, others because they though it was good for business. I highly recommend “The Strange Demise of Jim Crow” for a look at the Civil Rights movement you won’t get from the history books. And then there were those whites who resisted desegregation at first, but came around pretty quick. Nashville mayor Ben West is a good example. Even George Wallace came around.

So, how do we take down the Tea Party? Make the role of Southern whites in the civil rights movement part of white southern pride. Get the message out. Let’s all watch “Eyes on the Prize”, I learned more about the positive role of southern whites there than I ever did in any history class.

Too many white Southerners have a narrative that things were just wonderful in the pre-civil rights South and that everything went wrong when uppity negroes and the Federal government started oppressing them. This is incorrect. A few white folks knew something was wrong all along and worked with the civil rights from the beginning. Some whites were in it for the money, and others came around because they were decent human beings.

I am a white Southerner. I am proud of Ben West. I shopped with pride at Foley’s. I still like channel eleven news because they helped lead the media blackout during our local strange demise of Jim Crow.

That, my friends, is how you roll back the Southern Strategy.

@ Mighty Ponygirl @64 - I’m afraid I have to go with witless chum @59.  Brianx’s definition of redneck is out of step with how it’s generally understood.

witless chum, basically what I’m looking for is a little less of seeing my people burdened with blame for all society’s ills, and a little more recognition that we’re really not all that hard to buy off, either individually or en masse. Hell, all it really takes is a politician like Clinton who would at least pretend to respect us while screwing us over—just think how much of a difference it’d make if more of us could earn an honest living. Medicare and social security are fine as far as they go (and as long as they last), and even Tea Partiers like ‘em, but even leaving aside the question of pride, which is a real and meaningful question, they never do amount to quite enough, do they?

Like I’ve said before, what I want for my people is that they should be able to find work, to feed themselves and their families, to be able to buy homes, basically to be able to feel like they’re earning their own way in the world instead of surviving on sufferance. That’s all I’m really after. You can call it undeserved if you like, seeing as—and I freely grant this—a lot of the people I’m talking about wouldn’t extend the same kindness to others for a whole panoply of reasons. But also like I said before, isn’t it kind of the whole idea that anyone we leave behind ends up dragging us all backward?

How do I suggest we make that happen? Well, economic protectionism on the one hand, and an end to illegal immigration on the other—I’ve got no problem with immigrants, but I do think they should become citizens at some point in the process, primarily because that way there’s no ready-made exploitable underclass for capital to use to drag everyone else down to the same level, and that seems to me to be better for everybody. That’s seemed to be a controversial suggestion itself when I’ve tried advancing it in the past, but considering that at this point most of the people here probably have a picture of me as half Stormfront and half Ku Klux Klan, I suspect advocating a little economic protectionism and immigration reform is probably going to be pretty moderate by comparison.

Seraph, I’ve read Coates and have a good deal of respect for him, though I very much doubt he’d feel the same about me were he aware of my existence and the arguments I am making. You’re right that slavery featured heavily in the Confederate declarations of secession, but you’re wrong about why that is; the mistake I think you’re making is to imagine that anyone in power a hundred and fifty years ago, on either side, thought of slavery in the same moral terms in which we think of it today. If the Confederate economic base had been built on, say, shipping, no one on either side would’ve had a word to say about freeing the slaves, whose plight wasn’t at the time so much regarded as insignificant or deserved by anyone on either side, as it simply wasn’t regarded at all.

People seem to think I’m advocating Confederate revanchism and a return to slavery days, when what I’m actually saying is that slavery offered a ready veil of morality over the causes of what was, at its base, a fundamentally economic war.

I really, really don’t see how this is the case. What’s so remarkable about the Civil War is that it wasn’t economically demanded by anyone. The north was tied into the southern economy in a number of ways. Southern cotton was being shipped up to Mass. for the mills to turn into cloth. The southern leaders had to know their economy was going to be severely hurt by secession, even if the north had just let them go. The midwest sure missed the Mississippi River system to get their produce to eastern markets until Grant and Farragut opened it.

The country tied itself in knots over ideology. Not as you say, probably, in modern terms. There were no opinion polls then, but public opinion in the north seems to have turned to harder anti-slavery positions as the war went on. The north, I think, was harboring resentment, not that they all loved black people (though Lincoln did say things like “If slavery isn’t wrong, than nothing is wrong” and got reelected) that the south was using the power of the federal government to enforce cooperation with southern slavery on it. And the south could count electoral votes and feared that the free states would elect a president and use the power of the federal government to begin to curtail slavery. They didn’t even wait for Lincoln to take office, the mere fact of his person in the White House was enough.

If you want to minimize slavery as a cause, I think the stronger argument for that is that a lot of people had stronger emotional attachements to their states back then, though there were plenty of southerners who felt the opposite. Every Confederate state but Mississippi supplied at least one (white) regiment to the Union Army, I read once, and Appalachia spent much of the war in low-grade armed revolt against their state and Confederate governments, though I’d bet this had more to do with existing grudges than a great love for Our Federal Union.

But would the war have happened if the the U.S. had been all-slave or all-free from the beginning? I really doubt it.

My problem is that I am no longer willing to offer my allegiance to a Left that’s had its face turned away from my people for a century and a half

You’re really forgetting that a lot of the policies of FDR and LBJ and Bill Clinton were specifically aimed at relieving the poverty of and industrializing the rural south. The past 150 year have in fact been all about bending over backwards to address the needs of rural white southerners.

Another good book for familiarizing non-Southerners with modern southern culture is “Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War” by Tony Horwitz. Explains a lot of the bravado and righteous underdog mentality that makes up the area; although the attitude goes back to the civil war, the book brings it into the 2000’s and, although it was written before the Tea Party, lays the foundation to understand why this rootin’ tootin’ maverick upstart/minority party has the traction it does in the South.

http://www.amazon.com/Confederates-Attic-Dispatches-Unfinished-Civil/dp/067975833X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1312314989&sr=8-1 by tony Horwitz.

Hey Aaron, here’s an idea.  Instead of bitching about how (some) Northern progressives look down on Southern people (according to you), how about working to actually change the mindset?  Not all at once, mind you, but one at a time.  I do my best to point out benefits of progressivism when I believe the point might stick.  So fight the battles you can win.  I mostly focus on how people who work for the government aren’t the devil (ironically, many of these same people are government employees) and how many conservative economic theories don’t really work.  Also good to do: point out fallacies about race, but be VERY careful to avoid the implication that said person is racist (unless it’s something truly vile, like the suggestion that black people are subhuman).  I usually couch it in terms of saying that while they may have been told that, it isn’t true, without ever even uttering the word “racism” or any variation thereof.  Letting go of racism and resentment is pretty difficult for many Southerners (at least the most politically active ones) so it’s gonna take baby steps to wean them off of supply side economics that they’ve been tricked into believing via race-baiting politicians.

Hmm.  Mostly off-topic, but now I’m wondering how our Northern Utopia would have developed if the South had been allowed to secede.  Would it have been feasible for Northern factory owners to relocate to the South to take advantage of slave labor, thus leaving the North behind from the Industrial Revolution, or would the feeding and housing (or even rental from other owners) of slaves have cost more than what they paid the disposable immigrants they actually ended up using?

Like I’ve said before, what I want for my people is that they should be able to find work, to feed themselves and their families, to be able to buy homes, basically to be able to feel like they’re earning their own way in the world instead of surviving on sufferance. That’s all I’m really after. You can call it undeserved if you like, seeing as—and I freely grant this—a lot of the people I’m talking about wouldn’t extend the same kindness to others for a whole panoply of reasons. But also like I said before, isn’t it kind of the whole idea that anyone we leave behind ends up dragging us all backward?

Make that your platform, move to Michigan and I’ll vote for you for Congress. (Actually, just promise to make your corporation-fawning less abject and you’d be an improvement over my congressman) I might disagree with the your solutions, but not your goals. Nobody should have to pass a test of character to get their human rights.

Blah, blah, blah. “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” (A lot of poeple seem to read it differently, so I’ll some up Frank’s observation. If the Dems don’t offer much more on economic, why would cultural conservatives vote Democrat?) Economic populism is a good idea politically for the Democrats and it’s smart policy. But they’re either being bribed to not see this or fooled into thinking it isn’t true. To try to get back on Amanda’s point, the Tea Party’s bromides about small government wouldn’t be very attractive during a recession in the face of federal jobs programs, tangible health insurance reform, bigger stimulus packages, etc. And to go with it, you need political rhetoric that doesn’t apologize and says it’s the right thing to do. Maybe it wouldn’t play in wherever Aaron’s writing from, but I think it’d play in Michigan.

Where I’m going to disagree with you is where you don’t want to join the only side of the political spectrum that has a chance in hell of ever advocating anything along those lines. I realize that Vote Democrat! They won’t screw you quite as much isn’t very inspiring. But it’s what I got.

There are other parts of Whitopia that absorbed the attitudes at a distance, especially the ones (think north and west) where there just wasn’t a lot of experience with legally-equal people with a different skin color…

My cousin was 7 years old, and visiting from Napa, CA, back in the 60s a sleepy town surrounded by vineyards.

Dad had an African-American student working in the back yard.

Cousin X was amazed, as he had never seen an African-American in his life.

white Americans of all classes were absolutely bone-headedly determined not to make life better for poor people if some of the people helped out of inequality were *shudder* not white.

You can say that again.  Racial covenants restricting ownership to whites was only overturned in 1948, and there were anti-racial mixing laws that wouldn’t be outlawed nationally until the next decade.

My grandmother and her sister had to have a special bill passed through Congress so that they could live here and become citizens.  I don’t think Grandma Monk took a test in school that she ever passed so proudly as her citizenship quiz.

One of my great-aunts joined her husband here illegally in the early 30s because of the immigration laws regarding immigrants of Chinese descent were so restrictive back then.  She never used chopsticks because even though to the uninformed observer, she could ‘pass’ for white, she never said or did anything in public that revealed her Chinese roots.

She once gave me the stinkeye for handing her some chopsticks at a family meal.

For fuck’s sake, Aaron, you really, really need to get that chip off your shoulder. 

Yes, poor white southerners have been shit on, repeatedly, by mainstream American culture for a long time now.  I’m from southern WV and proud of it (now living in NW Ohio) and if I had a dollar for every time someone made fun of my accent or acted surprised that my teeth are reasonably straight and I wear shoes or asked me if it really is like Deliverance down there in the mountains (it isn’t) or asked me if I know any Hatfields or McCoys (I do, and I’m related to both), I’d be a rich woman.  It never made me ashamed of where I’m from or who I am, and I’ll proudly cop to being a hillbilly at my core, but it does get old after a while. 

But, as a group, those of us who are southern/Appalachian (or of southern/Appalachian extraction) progressives and liberals need to grow a thicker skin and realize that while our culture has a lot going for it, there is a lot that is also pretty rotten and we need to own it and do something about it.  Amanda is exactly right about who is at the root of the current incarnation of crazy threatening to take the nation down, and it is the exact same group it always is—southern white people, super religious and afraid, and resentful of anyone who isn’t exactly like them who feel like if they have to share, then they don’t want a nice country and nobody else should have one either.  Those people, MY people, MY ancestors, MY relatives and some of MY friends, are the reason we can’t have nice things.  Sure, life has been hard for them, but it has been hard for lots of people and poor whites aren’t the only people with genuine grievances and they (we) shouldn’t be the ones throwing a tantrum and taking our toys to go home when the other kids (rightly) point out that yes, we do in fact have to share.

And just for the record, anent slavery in the Confederacy, I don’t think it’d have lasted more than fifty years after the war in any case. Why not? Two words: “Combine harvester.”

Not invented til the 1940s, and arguably would not have been invented at all if there had still been slaves.  This thought experiment also completely ignores that slavery was also a system of social and political control. 

shorter Aaron: “I don’t know shit about economics, but because the US <s>left</scenter right is visibly socially classist, I’m going to throw my lot in with the US <s>right</s> Christofascists and neocons who, by virtue of their racism, sexism, heterosexism and xenophobia look less socially classist, while doing their best to wage a Class War against America’s poor”

Immigrants, even the “illegal” ones, create jobs and economic value; bankers, financiers, etc. destroy it. One of the reasons, maybe the main reason, America’s poor have no jobs and cannot sustain themselves is not because of brown people from across the border, it’s because you let your states become “right to work” states, and because you’ve (you, as in poor Americans) let yourself be divided by race and distance from immigrant-status. If unions hadn’t been fighting against immigrants and blacks, and vice versa, you wouldn’t be in this shit. If you hadn’t accepted the lia about unions being bad for workers, you wouldn’t be in this shit. If you’ve made the voice of workers stronger witthin companies rather than weaker, you wouldn’t be in this shit.

But America’s rich have always known well how to hide their Class War behind social issues.

wow, total tag fail. *sigh*

speaking of the combine harvester… last I checked, plenty of crops can’t be harvested that way: that’s why there’s such a thing as a migrant farm laborer.

#18 gretchen. I’m from the wealthy suburban wasteland of north Atlanta. Maybe the faux-necks were a reaction to that kind of culturally sterile environment you get in suburbs; teenagers looking for a sense of identity just fell into the southern white trash thing because it was local, distinctive, and easy.

Fighting over the response to poor white southerners is kind of like fighting over an addict. Outsiders focus on the terrible things they’ve done, the stuff they stole and the people they hurt while locals see a loved one destroying themselves for shitty reasons. And then you’re all like “why are you trying to defend this terrible person, they choose to be this way” and ” and we’re like “it’s not him, it’s the fucking drugs! they’re killing him, how can you be so unsympathetic?” Meanwhile the addict keeps causing mayhem and misery while some drug lord steeples his fingers and cackles.

When I say redneck, I mean the racist, xenophobic and homophobic people who live a valley over where the water is bad and they let their flags get ratty from dragging them around all the time.  The guys who put more value on a ‘no trespassing’ sign than on neighborliness, and complain about mexicans taking their jobs - even though many of those ‘mexicans’ have families who’ve been farming here since before California was a state.

Walks like a duck, talks like a duck, acts like a duck.

This tell you something about Red California, where I’ve grown up and live at the moment:

http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments//texas_will_secede_and_youll_finally_get_that_pony#111226

I second the notion about Confederates in the Attic.  When I applied to the Harvard of the Midwest, they had scholarships available to descendants of Union and Confederate soldiers, so the word went to Texas to an aunt to do some digging up.

I had an ancestor who served in the TX Rifles, until 2 weeks after going without pay, he deserted.

Also, can anyone tell me the sense of military Civil War recreations in California?

The real history is more mundane for the Golden State:  The gold from the diggings helped finance the war,  there were unsuccessful attempts to raise a Confederate fighting force, and there were attempts to get Union gold by banditry by some Confederate sympathizers.  The most western of those efforts took place near my natal town, San Jose.

History records that one true son of the South wrote a note to his victims’ boss, explaining that he had caught the poor fish by surprise and that he shouldn’t fire him for the loss suffered because of his superior skills as a robber.

Re: Comment #74: Seraph

Jefferson pretty much found out that no, you couldn’t do it with slave labor.  With slave labor you were stuck with many mouths whether they could perform the duties you needed at your factory, and you would constantly be doing training.  Slaves wouldn’t be encouraged or allowed to do business outside the plantation, and the extra overhead of the owner deciding who could or couldn’t interact outside the plantation made for huge inefficiencies.

At the same time, free workers and business people would refuse to deal with businesses that had such ‘advantages’ which made it all the more inefficient.

Lastly, I’m glad these things are true in the modern world.  But on the other hand, it means that businesses need to be regulated lest they treat their customers and employees worse, since the ability is there.  We have the history of the company store and sharecroppers to be mindful of.

LMAO at the typical fucked up spelling on the signs. Idiots.

ETA: I hate the Confederate flag.

I like the story of the abolitionist shot and killed in an honor duel by the southern slavery-supporter.  By showing his honor for slavery, the guy basically gave a case to the state to vote against slavery.

Aaron;

You remind me of back when I was a right-winger. (You even have the same first name as me.) Except you’re right out in the open with it; for me it was only ever a doubt around the edges of thought, quickly pushed back. I mean, resentment against the progressives for always being right, as if I’d become right-wing merely by drawing the wrong straw or something. In your case there’s a pseudo-ethnic side to it (“my people”); you just hate it that historically and still today the Americans least like Southerners have always been the best Americans, in all senses of that phrase.

I don’t have anything to say to help you. You’ve obviously made your choice for the dark side with eyes wide open.

Interestingly, slavery isn’t necessarily the economic winner people assume it to be. For example, plows sold in the south had to be manufactured to be three times stronger than those sold in in the north, because enslaved black folks had a habit of breaking their owners’ tools. Hiring sharecroppers would have likely been a much more efficient way to run the plantation system, but that would have meant abandoning the social superiority whites enjoyed. Slavery and racism were already distorting whites’ rational judgment, even before the civil war started. This is why I’m skeptical that economic pressures alone would have forced the South to quickly move away from slavery, had they been allowed to secede.

And just for the record, anent slavery in the Confederacy, I don’t think it’d have lasted more than fifty years after the war in any case. Why not? Two words: “Combine harvester.” But I acknowledge that such a suggestion doesn’t leave much room for the modern progressive fantasy of the Civil War as some kind of Quakers’ crusade against the institution of slavery.

This is such an incredibly boring argument, I don’t know where to begin.

For starters, telling slaves that they should just be patient and wait another 50 years and they’ll totally start getting treated like human beings then is not okay. Cutting slavery short by 50 years is worth a little aggressive political action. Worth all the bloodshed? Impossible to say, but the bloodshed was the result of the South’s refusal to treat blacks like human beings, so…

Second, the whole notion that Southern racists were racist for 100% economically rational reasons, and that the moment it became economically rational to not hold slaves, they’d free them all, is incredibly ridiculous. It took 100 years after the end of slavery for the North to finally goad the South into treating blacks like human beings by law, so the idea that agricultural technology would have totally made Southern whites suddenly start treating blacks like their brothers and sisters is laughable to the extreme.

serious bette @3: Doug Lamborn may be a repressentative for CO, which is intermountain west, but he was born (Leavenworth, KS), grew up and was educated (U KS) in Kansas.  Kansas is about as retrograde South as you can get outside of the deep south.

Caelan Aegana @ 12: that would be the Okie/Southern Desporia phenom in effect as well.  It’s obvious in the accent prevelent certain areas of WA, OR, ID and MT as well as parts of inland CA.  It was shocking how close some of that is to my grandmother’s rural CO and my uncle’s TX accents.

MikeEss @41:  your not being able to imagine would be way wrong.  Some of the conservative areas of inland CA begin to approach, at a distance, a very far distance.

Aaron @ 44 - the combine harvester would have ben considered a wasteful excess so long as slaves were available.  The row crop cultivator is a more recent example - these replaced hoe-gangs when there was a migrant labor shortage in the 70s throughout the inland west.  Until cheap labor was no longer available, it just was too extravegant to get a machine for that, even though they had been available for more than 50 years.

It took 100 years after the end of slavery for the North to finally goad the South into treating blacks like human beings by law, so the idea that agricultural technology would have totally made Southern whites suddenly start treating blacks like their brothers and sisters is laughable to the extreme.

It’s obvious that the vast majority of them would have gotten shipped “back to Africa”, except for a few kept around as house servants.  And by “shipped back to Africa”, I mean clapped in big heavy chains, put on a ship and sailed just over the horizon…

the combine harvester would have ben considered a wasteful excess so long as slaves were available.

Not just that, but insofar as mechanization was more efficient than using human labor, the available of free slave labor would have meant that the south would have concentrated on its “comparative advantage” in this space and switched to crops that required lots of menial human labor. It’s not that the combine harvester would have replaced slave labor, it’s that slave states would have given up grain in favor of crops where the availability of slave labor gave them a leg up on farms that needed paid laborers.

Aaron’s really grinding the “lost cause” ax. It’s all bullshit—it was a bunch of myths that the US consciously created to help all the whites, north and south, “get along” so no one would feel bad for being traitors after the country was reunified. Don’t confuse such mythmaking with reality: and in the end, that mythmaking was damaging because it allowed America’s dark side to fester.

I don’t have much to say here (not going to mention the CCC or TVA or the farmworker exclusion for social security) except that I still don’t really understand the worldview of the “I was a progressive/democrat/environmentalist until they hurt my feelings and I became the sensible conservative I am now” trolls. It’s just so fsckin’ crazy. If you believe that certain things are right, the scruffy/pedantic/patronizing behavior of other people who believe those things may embarrass you, but if you end up abandoning your former convictions as a result, ummm. (Oops, I just realized we missed a brand of antifeminist last week, the “I was all for equal pay and reproductive choice until I saw those women not shaving their legs or their armpits who were also for those things”.)

Maybe it really is the tribal view of political identity, where you choose your peers and then your beliefs, rather than the other way round. Because as an ex-physicist I sorta see this as “Well, I was all over special relativity, but everyone in my class made fun of me for writing dots over coordinates instead of a d in front of them, so now I’m convinced Einstein was wrong.”

Oh, hey, Aaron, something just occurred to me (talk about l’esprit de l’escalier): waaayyy back in comment #30, you defined a Southern progressive’s choices as “apostate” and “goddamned lickspittle”.

Which is Amanda?

Another question about the “Northern Utopia” alternate timeline: what would have become of the Southern agricultural economy if George Washington Carver had remained an anonymous slave?

Seraph: It would have chugged along making plenty of money for the people it was already making money for, at least up to a point.

witless chum, basically what I’m looking for is a little less of seeing my people burdened with blame for all society’s ills, and a little more recognition that we’re really not all that hard to buy off, either individually or en masse.

You know, I’ve never heard a Midwesterner - even one who’s proud to be from the Midwest, who has a sense of Midwestern identity (which, like a seemingly good chunk of Southern idenfity, is based on grievance and resentment) - say “my people.” That kind of quasi-racial thinking seems to be a Southern thing, because I’ve never heard a New Englander, or a Californian or Montanan say it, even when their regional affiliation was a thing for them.

Which is, of course, not to say that white supremacism isn’t a big deal, especially here in the Midwest, where we invented and perfected sundown towns, but I feel like there’s a stronger ethnic identification - you have things like “America’s Little Switzerland” or Verdi Clubs or towns where the big thing is that every lamppost has the Swedish flag flying from it in June for Midsommer. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I feel like that’s more prevalent, even in the rural Midwest - if a white person has an additional identity, it’s ethnic, not blood-and-soil regionalist.

What point?  And what would happen after that point?

Another question about the “Northern Utopia” alternate timeline: what would have become of the Southern agricultural economy if George Washington Carver had remained an anonymous slave?

How much of an anonymous slave would he have been? His former owners supported his educational pursuits; if he had remained their slave how far would a private education get him? The man did amazing things in the south under Jim Crow, could he have reached the same levels of access an respect as a freedman in the Confederacy? Without Carver the rural south would just be that much more dirt poor than it already is. He helped a lot of people keep the wolf from the door but peanuts and soybeans were never the cash crop cotton was.
Colonial plantation slavery wouldn’t have survived the bowl weevil and the invention of the tractor; as plenty of people have pointed out, it was an extremely inefficient system. Had the confederacy survived the war I imagine it would have morphed into something more akin to Apartheid South Africa with a permanent underclass providing all the benefits of forced labor with non of the hassle of direct property ownership.

Seraph, I think scrumby gets at your question better than I could, with less flippancy.

I’ve always found it interesting that the original “tea party,” which is, of course, where they got their name, also had racist/racial overtones.  The participants in the original Boston Tea Party famously dressed as Native Americans in order to deflect suspicion onto a group that was already viewed with suspicion as savages.  Today they’d probably dress as the New Black Panthers.

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I think the alternate-timeliners are optimistic. Think of the lives that sharecroppers led, and the economic and political power that enforced that kind of divide between owners and workers. If mechanical and other productivity improvements had been allowed to come to the region, a more likely result is that as the value of a slave declined the (already dubious) convention that slaveowners were responsible for their property’s welfare would have gone by the board.

I’ve always found it interesting that the original “tea party,” which is, of course, where they got their name, also had racist/racial overtones.  The participants in the original Boston Tea Party famously dressed as Native Americans in order to deflect suspicion onto a group that was already viewed with suspicion as savages.  Today they’d probably dress as the New Black Panthers.

I don’t think they expected anyone to believe that a bunch of Onondagas had come over from upstate New York and started dumping tea. It was just a disguise so you couldn’t recognize individuals. Plausible deniability. I’ve also heard the interpretation that the Indian was used a general symbol of liberty at the time, because the colonials at least recognized that Indian society was much freer than Europeon. Which is something many denigrated about them, but others had the self-awareness to notice things like how common it was for Europeons to join the Indians and uncommon for the opposite to happen. Or how even people captured by force and taken off to be forced to join Indian tribes would often, years later, refuse to go back to Europeon society.

How do I suggest we make that happen? Well, economic protectionism on the one hand, and an end to illegal immigration on the other

Economic populism is a good idea politically for the Democrats and it’s smart policy.

Protectionism is one way for Dems to reclaim the South and some other states. It’s a position that overlaps conveniently with racism while simultaneously being left-of-center. Historically, this is one reason why segregationists found a home in the left-wing party and why northern liberals granted them inordinate power: VP slots, the Filibuster, chairmanships of key committee where civil rights would die, and even high level spots like Senate Majority Leader or Speaker of the House post-64.

With few exceptions, Dixiecrats were New Dealers in good standing. I can’t imagine these sentiments are no longer there. Indeed, the Tea-Party arguably ran to the left of Obama on Medicare, demagoging end-of-life like classic 3rd-Rail New Dealers. Byrd maintained these sentiments till the end and, if you don’t mind me making Pat Buchanan an honorary Dixiecrat (I’m sure you won’t), free-market fundamentalism is the main reason he left the Republican party.

We saw both Clinton and Obama disingenuously go anti-nafta in OH and this was a major issue in Clinton’s ”firewall states”, where she counted on ““Hard-Working Americans, White Americans” to stand up to Obama in one of the more remarkable “southern” strategies in recent memory. This is actually where Birhterism started.

The Bankers party didn’t stand a chance pre-64, because they did not get in bed with the Dixiecrats like the Liberals did, but also because of this. But if you all are right about the Tea-party willing to let America default, then that mean s they are not beholden to Wall St. I would imagine their base might hate Goldman Sachs too. International bankers. Jews. You get the picture. So dangerous unhinged populism like this:

Immigrants, even the “illegal” ones, create jobs and economic value; bankers, financiers, etc. destroy it

…could play well to this crowd if you get rid of the first part.

Typist, #38: “I’m not even a little bit sure of what Aaron is trying to communicate, which does not speak well of his writing skills.”

He’s basically just screaming about how horribly oppressed Southerners are. White Southerners in particular. And being really emo about it. I guess it’s preferable to the violence-endorsing crabs-in-the-bucket mentality he displayed in the “Ideas and Identity” thread: You think you’re better than they are? You EARNED an ass-whuppin’!

Uh, yeah, you know, I think I AM better than people whose “culture of honor” impels them to resort to violence in order to respond to insults. I’ve never done that.

I was raised working class and I have plenty to say about classist liberals, none of it good, and I think Aaron is a whiny ass who, judging from #44, ought to read up on white privilege (hint: yes, you DO have it, even if you’re poor) in particular, and take Latts’ advice at #46 and ks’ at #77 in general.

People seem to think I’m advocating Confederate revanchism and a return to slavery days, when what I’m actually saying is that slavery offered a ready veil of morality over the causes of what was, at its base, a fundamentally economic war.

Bullshit! The American Civil War was all about slavery, and attempts to deny that this was the case is of ignorance about your own history, delusion about reality, or straightforward historical revisionism. Slavery was the only economic reason the south felt the need to secede and then go to war over.

The state governments who seceded said it was all about slavery. The secession happened in response to the election of a president who was seen as a threat to the expansion of slavery. The people fighting the war said it was, in the end, all about slavery. The Confederacy specifically wrote provisions within their constitution about slavery. The “oh, there were other reasons” argument didn’t come up until after the war, and guess who brought those up? Southern apologists.

The only reason this is a “debate” at all was because, in the interest of national unity, the South was allowed to paper over the reasons for the Slaver’s Revolt, and the apparently inherent inability of Americans in general to accept that sometimes their ancestors were assholes or willingly fought for assholes.

I don’t think they expected anyone to believe that a bunch of Onondagas had come over from upstate New York and started dumping tea. It was just a disguise so you couldn’t recognize individuals. Plausible deniability. I’ve also heard the interpretation that the Indian was used a general symbol of liberty at the time, because the colonials at least recognized that Indian society was much freer than Europeon. Which is something many denigrated about them, but others had the self-awareness to notice things like how common it was for Europeons to join the Indians and uncommon for the opposite to happen. Or how even people captured by force and taken off to be forced to join Indian tribes would often, years later, refuse to go back to Europeon society.

Indeed. The original framers of the Constitution were quite aware of the system of democratic self-government employed by the Eastern Native Americans. Although this part of our history was papered over somewhat, in recent years historians have been coming to recognize the strong Native American influence on the formation of our government’s foundational documents. They immortalized this influence by including tobacco leaf designs on the walls and ceilings of the first capitol building of the U.S., the one that was burned down in 1812 (this I learned from Zinn’s History of the U.S., IIRC). I think your idea is more plausible than thinking that the Colonists actually expected people to blame the Indians for it. I mean, if you’re engaging in a political protest, you want people to know who did it, generally, if not in specific.

Sure, Tyro, because that’s all there is to Southern white people, poor or otherwise,

No, it’s not all there is. You may keep your accents and BBQ. You’re going to have to give up the confederate white nationalism stuff, classism, and hostility to unionization.

I meant to include the phrase “Iroquois League” in that previous post, since that is the specific group of Eastern Native Americans I was referring to, but somehow edited it out just before posting. Just FYI.

Protectionism is one way for Dems to reclaim the South and some other states. It’s a position that overlaps conveniently with racism while simultaneously being left-of-center. Historically, this is one reason why segregationists found a home in the left-wing party and why northern liberals granted them inordinate power - Manju

I am not sure you have your history right.  I know at least at first (pre-civil war) it was the north and GOP that were protectionist and the south was full of free traders: because the north manufactured stuff while the south imported stuff from either the north or the south and exported raw materials, so free trade benefited wealthy southerners in ways that it did not benefit anyone in the north.

I am not sure how these dynamics played out post-civil war and especially during/after the New Deal as the South was industrialized to at least some degree.

As to the Southern embrace of the New Deal, many politically connected Southern Whites embraced it as a way to keep a real populist uprising at bay and somewhat out of a philosophy of “if you can’t beat it, join it”.  The New Deal also benefitted the South greatly because it finally finished the literal job of “Reconstruction”.  I suspect at some level racist Southerners who supported the New Deal supported it in order to steer that iteration of “Reconstruction” the way they wanted and figured if they didn’t join up with the New Deal, what they’d get was radical reconstruction.

In fact, as Michael Lind documents in “Made in Texas”, many reactionary Southern politicians worked hard behind the scenes to undermine the New Deal (and even to remove FDR) while ostensibly supporting FDR and the New Deal.

DAS:

Manju’s historical knowledge is well known not to be very accurate.

@SallyStrange,
First of all, Southern culture is all about slavery. That institution shaped all others. When Baptists first entered the South they championed the separation of church and state and condemned slavery! But then they made a bargain with the Southern planter power-brokers, first tempering their criticism of the South’s ‘peculiar institution’ and later defending it. In order to do so they had to adopt a peculiar, obscurantist way of interpreting scripture. So, even though slavery is gone, its legacy exerts a fierce grip.
There are several quite informative recent books that trace the origins of the political parties and their intersection with their culture. But one thing Lind would have you know and keep in mind: the Republican and Democratic parties have switched identities—the movement began with FDR and the New Deal and accelerated with the Civil Rights era… the only remnants of 19th century Jacksonian democracy in today’s Democratic party are some elements of his economic policy and a reluctance to police personal behavior (the Peggy Eaton affair)!
One could argue, as Daniel Howe has in What Hath God Wrought, that Martin Van Buren created the Democratic party as an amalgam of Southern slaveowners, Northern small farmers and immigrants, held together by the toxic brew of white supremacy. The Whigs grew out of a coalition based in the 19th century concept of ‘improvement,’—the economic improvements of Henry Clay’s American system and the moral improvements championed by the United Evangelical Front (today’s mainline Protestant churches). Among other things, this latter group opposed the Indian Removal policy of the Jackson administration, was in favor of temperance (as a feminist goal), moral reforms and eventually provided the ground troops of abolitionism. The United Evangelical Front opened opportunities for women to participate in the political sphere—often organizing petition drives. The Republican party of Lincoln’s day was a fusion of the old Whigs and Northern Democrat/Free Soilers.
I’d also recommend Kevin Phillips’ books, The Cousins Wars and American Theocracy, the former tracing the origins of our culture wars back to 16th century England and the latter looking at the toxic combination of oil politics, radical fundamentalism (no coincidence that NASCAR arose in the South) and the financialization of our economy. Phillips, BTW, had authored Nixon’s notorious Southern Strategy, but horrified by his creation has become a fierce critic of Republican politics.

About those rural areas outside of the South where southern attitudes about race seem oddly common even though the population is lily white:  The whiteness of rural and small-town midwest, northwest, and west is no accident.  Blacks and Asians were deliberately driven out.  See James Loewen’s book “Sundown Towns” for details.

So dangerous unhinged populism like this:

adorable; economics research = “unhinged populism”

you’re not very bright, manju, are you.

What it is about the Civil War, that causes folks to imagine alternate histories? It just seems like every single time someone blogs about the Civil War, discussion begins about what could have been or would have been, if only X hadn’t happened.

Why is that? Is it just because the Civil War was such a painful time that we want to blot it out with fantasy? Is it because we feel like we are still fighting the Civil War today, and therefore feel like we are trapped in a “history” that cannot advance into the “present”?

I dunno, atheist, perhaps it’s because the version of Civil War history that most folks learn in school the first time around was an alternate history to begin with.

That kind of quasi-racial thinking seems to be a Southern thing, because I’ve never heard a New Englander, or a Californian or Montanan say it, even when their regional affiliation was a thing for them.

An ex-girlfriend of mine contends that Californians act and think as though they came from paradise, and there is some truth in that, and the high-prestige American accent these days is one that is Californian as it’s perceived as neutral and not really ‘regional’.

SallyStrange, it’s also because it’s the first modern American war, complete with railroads, balloon observers, telegraph, guerrilla strategy, a cast of characters twists and turns toward the inevitable surrender at Appomattox Courthouse.

Item:  Faulkner on a Civil War battle:

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose than all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago.

In case you were wondering, yes, the first sentence is 173 words long.

And it depends where and who you learn it from:

The Lost Cause is the name commonly given to an American literary and intellectual movement that sought to reconcile the traditional white society of the U.S. South to the defeat of the Confederate States of America in the American Civil War of 1861–1865.[1] Those who contributed to the movement tended to portray the Confederacy’s cause as noble and most of the Confederacy’s leaders as exemplars of old-fashioned chivalry, defeated by the Union armies through overwhelming force rather than martial skill. Proponents of the Lost Cause movement also condemned the Reconstruction that followed the Civil War, claiming that it had been a deliberate attempt by Northern politicians and speculators to destroy the traditional Southern way of life.

In the South, it became a wound that never healed, one that made them cling more fiercely to their ‘traditional’ values of insularity, pride, and stuborness.

The white populace nursed a wounded grievance that would only be appeased by a remembrance and re-enactment of their Lost Cause, a continuance of the romanticism that was already popular ante-bellum from the novels of Scott and the sense of honor more samurai than knight errant.

A phrase from my class about Japanese fiction and ‘the nobility of failure’ comes to mind.

The South Will Rise Again

DAF,

I should clarify that I’m speaking of protectionism (and populism) within the context of the modern left-right dichotomy. So these political positions align with their respective parties arguably around the Wilson presidency and certainly by the time we get to FDR. And they held sway in the south up to ‘64 on the presidential level and ‘94 on the state, local, and congressional levels.

I agree that “many reactionary Southern politicians worked hard behind the scenes to undermine the New Deal (and even to remove FDR)” but I’m describing the zeitgeist. To be fair, anti-new deal sentiment was significant enough that prominent segregationists like Sen. Josiah Bailey (D-NC) Gov. Eugene Talmadge (D-GA) signed the ‘37 anti-New Deal “Conservative Manifesto”. 

But they don’t override Gore, Fulbright, LBJ, Byrd, Pepper, Wallace, Faubus, Maddox, etc…to use the last generation of Dixiecrats. All were affiliated more with democratic populism than the subsequent conservative free-market ideology. Segregationists ran on the presidential ticket of every D up to and including Kennedy, with the exception of Truman. Almost all of them stayed with the party post-64, demonstrating that the bond between southern Dems and their northern counterparts went beyond segregation and the willingness to enable it.  At the end of the day, the Dixiecrats were part of the New Deal Coalition.

revrick: The Baptists kicked out the Southern Baptists for believing that God permitted slavery. This led, a century and a half later, to black liberationist theology: could black men and women really worship a God that approved of their sufferings? People like Obama’s pastor Wright decided that God did not approve of American racism, and preached some fiery sermons to that effect.

There is no Midwestern identity because no one can agree on the limits of the Midwest. Ohioans do not feel kin to the Dakotans.

The history of America is the search for cheap labor. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is your best guide to the events of today. When the native born were living too comfortably and demanding too much from employers, immigrants were lured here to be exploited and cast aside. The people who would work for less money than even the meanest Hunky or Dago were Southern Blacks.

“It always pains me to hear progressive people saying the south should just fuck off and die.”

It’s like they forget that the vast majority of the US’s black population - one of the most dedicated democratic voting blocs around - resides in that region. We might not be the most progressive folks around in the aggregate, but we show up to the polls and make a national progressive agenda possible.