Is the South Dragging the Rest of the Nation Down?

From AlterNet:

In 1978, out of college without a job and having failed to establish Birmingham’s version of The Village Voice, I took a job as advance man for the Alabama Republican Senate candidate.

One incident that stuck with me was a visit to campaign headquarters by a young Republican adviser—I didn’t recognize his name, but I remember that he strummed a guitar while talking to us. He told us, “Don’t ever use the words ‘black’ and ‘white’ in an argument. Always say ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative.’ You’ll turn every argument about race into a political one. You do that, and race will start to disappear as an issue.”
 
And

I don’t think racism is the cardinal sin of the South, and it certainly isn’t exclusive to the South. The South’s cardinal sin is in pretending that racism didn’t cause the Civil War, and that racism doesn’t survive as a major issue.

On this point Thompson is unrelenting. “We can no longer afford to wait on the South to get its racial shit together,” he writes. “It’s time to move on, let southerners sort out their own mess free from the harassment of northern moralizers.” This is pretty much what William Faulkner wrote in more eloquent terms some 60 years ago. And, as we approach the 150th anniversary of the battles of Vicksburg and Gettysburg, Thompson finds plenty of Southerners who think, as one of them tells him, “We’re on the verge of a civil war.” Thompson asks, “Between North and South?” The answer: “Between conservative and liberal.”

More here.

This is why I hate on Paula Deen.  Not because she used the n-word, but because her entire view of what it means to be an American is utterly tainted by teary-eyed sentimentality for an old South that never existed.  This attitude, when multiplied by the millions of deluded white Southerners who embrace it, is why the United States is the profoundly dysfunctional nation it is today.

Southern whites don't side with big business against their own economic interests continually because they've studied neoliberalism in depth and have made rational choices about what's best for the general population and overall prosperity--indeed, as the linked essay observes, nine of the ten poorest states in the US are in the South; clearly, neoliberal policies are SCREWING Southern whites, not helping them.  Rather, white Southerners side with big business because they perceive big business as the champion of whiteness.

This cannot be understated.  The Republican Party, when it realized in the late 60s that the Democrats' embrace of civil rights gave the GOP a massive political opportunity in the South, has been doing everything it can for forty years to transmute "black versus white" into "liberal versus conservative."  Social welfare programs, for instance, enjoyed a great deal of support among white Southerners for decades until the Republicans successfully turned the symbolic face of welfare from white to black.  And "big government," which is hated by big business, because it prevents rampant exploitation of citizens and wanton destruction of the environment, became forever intermingled in the white Southern mind with what is now the antithesis of "big government," and, not so coincidentally, a traditional rallying concept for the old South, "state's rights."  Of course, the "state's rights" over which the Civil War was ostensibly fought are essentially not much more than white privilege and "freedom" to oppress and exploit workers and non-whites, instead of a Randian pro-business notion, but let's not quibble too much over the details.  After all, Southern Republicans certainly don't.  The point here is that white Southerners vote conservative because they think that means they're voting white, whether they have any conscious awareness of this or not.

And that's why Paula Deen's brand of bigotry is so extraordinarily key to understanding most everything that's wrong with America today.  She's not some weirdo backward-ass celebrity with bizarre niche attitudes about "liberal" Catholicism and Zionist conspiracies to rule the world, as with Mel Gibson.  That's relatively small scale tinfoil hat stuff in comparison.  Deen's racism, in stark contrast, her elevating of the barbaric and traitorous regime known as the Confederacy to something both honorable and desirable, is part of a massive cultural strain that relentlessly drives American politics in an ever more dangerous direction.

We'll never get off this death-ride until we start telling the truth: Southern pride is suicidal bullshit.  America tolerates it only at great risk to itself.

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