There are Democratic and Republican areas of the country that have nothing to do with North, South, East, or West. But it’s still true that the Democratic Party and Barack Obama are, by far, least popular in the South. More than that, though, the politicians that represent the South are the ones least likely to oppose the torture of detainees or the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens. I don’t want to pick on the South. I am well aware that it was a Republican from San Diego who justified the atrocities at Guantanamo Bay by saying that they were served two kinds of fruit, orange-glazed chicken, and rice pilaf. I am well aware that the Michele Bachman is from Minnesota, Tom Tancredo is from Colorado, and Steve King is from Iowa.
But it is the South that delivers almost all of its electoral votes to the Republicans and that elects the lion’s share of Republicans to Congress. New England has rejected Republicanism so thoroughly that there are currently no New England Republicans serving in Congress. Of the three New England Republicans still serving in the Senate, two voted with the Democrats on the economic recovery act and the other briefly joined Obama’s cabinet.
One thing I’ve noticed about the politics of the progressive blogosphere is that it seems to reject the totalitarian tendencies of the old left. Almost all the prominent progressive bloggers are soft on federal gun control and are committed civil libertarians. Few of these voices would have been committed Cold Warriors, but almost none of them would fail to defend freedom of religion and the right of the public to be free from invasions of privacy.
In other words, even the so-called fringe of the Left in this country…the people that have been committed opponents of the Bush administration…are more committed libertarians than the Right as expressed by their Southern base.
It appears to me that the South, left to its own devices, would quickly abandon core elements of American tradition like the commitment to the Geneva Conventions, the fourth amendment, the separation of powers, and meaningful restraints on executive power. That is the reason I ask whether our cultures are compatible and reconcilable.
The south definitely has its own culture and its own history. In a weird way, it is frozen in time — a sort of colonial style of architecture with an idealized past of southern gentry and plantation owners.
Have you ever been to Charleston, SC or Savannah, GA? Both towns are absolutely beautiful (and very liberal, of course). They have a feel to them that goes back to a pre-industrial (i.e., slave labor driven agrarian) era…
Then, of course, you have isolated ignorant bigots and religious fanatics. There are a whole lot of them.
I don’t really know if the cultures can be ‘reconciled’, but I do know that the core ‘know nothing’ base of the GOP is so out of touch with reality that they can’t responsibly wield real power. (Did you know that men and dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time? The bible says so!)
Anyhow, this ignorance means that these people can be easily manipulated. Ultimately, we may be able to convince them to ignore politics and go back to doing what they do best: predicting Armageddon and spitting on women who use birth control. That’s how it was before Reagan (and before Roe).
Either way — the society itself is just not going to be any good and solving problems of self-government. People are too ‘polite’ and their politics are just god damn crazy…
That’s my general take. However, if you haven’t seen some of these colonial cities that I just mentioned, they are worth a visit. It is a part of American history that has been frozen in time.
The South has a distinct history – slavery, secession, Civil War, losing the Civil War, occupation by Federal Troops, Reconstruction, Jim Crow. Watch Birth of a Nation (if you can stand it) not Gone with the Wind, for a Southern self-concept that resonated with many for decades.
and changing as pointed out in other thread
(I assume you’re talking about white southerners)
I haven’t thought this through to any depth yet, but I think it’s a mistake to work the “GOP is a regional party of the [generic] South” angle. Such a strategy, while reflecting certain demonstrably obvious realities as to voting blocks, etc., is, to my mind, something that does a disservice to many who live in the South. Additionally, I think emphasizing the geography and lumping all who live there under the same rubric misses the more elemental points that are more accurate identifiers of who the knee-jerk GOP votingbase really is.
I think the low-information segment of the GOP base is one where the people have been duped by simpleminded rhetoric, (or conversely, overly complex rhetoric impossible to understand), to vote against their own best interests consistently and take pride in doing so. And, despite having been in rural Arkansas for the final 6-7 weeks of 2008, here in northern California I encounter very much the same sort of lack of awareness and knowledge and curiosity. These characteristics may not dominate here to the extent they do elsewhere, but they do flourish nonetheless, and I think if the Democratic party is truly going to evolve and be successful about repairing the damage done by the GOP and moving the country forward in a good way, they should be focusing on the dynamics of the social climate these unfortunate characteristics flourish in, not a simplistic geography.
The GOP-as-Southern-Party nonsense does a lot more than a disservice to the people of the South; it lays the groundwork for another civil war. There was a time the Democrats were in that role — and they were the scary-ass right wing party back then — and things did not turn out well for anyone. (Oh, don’t start on the liberation of the slaves; once that pretext was no longer necessary, the Federal government was quite content to let the freedmen rot in the sharecropping system and look the other way while their newly-acquired citizenship rights were stripped away for an entire century.)
When Booman asks “whether our cultures are compatible and reconcilable,” that’s a question that indicates at least a theoretical willingness to let the slim nutjob majority here pull the secession lever again and deliver the nearly half of us into the hands of the theocratic tyrants who would surely take power at this point in history. And that’s why I go ballistic every time there’s a hint of a screw-the-South rant in the air. It may consciously be a rejection of the Southern nutjobocracy, but in practical terms, what’s really being advocated is allowing the freedoms of tens of millions of people to be stripped away so that the long Southern struggle for egalitarian liberal democracy doesn’t inconvenience New England Democrats.
There’s a reason the South delivers all of its electoral votes to the Republicans: it’s a winner-take-all system. If we actually had a proportional system, Southern liberals would have a voice in the Federal government, and it would be just under half of the Southern population. It would, however, be more than enough to break the influence of Southern Republicans and to dispell the myth — and it was always a myth — of the Solid South.
(Turning the Federal Senate into a democratic institution would be a giant step in the right direction, too, but for some reason, no one wants to even discuss that giant blight on our democracy.)
For what it’s worth, the eject-the-South crowd should consider two things:
After all that, I don’t think any Southerner would be remiss in invoking, a la Colin Powell, the Pottery Barn rule. Do y’all believe in egalitarian liberal democracy or not? Only when it’s quick and easy?
Now it would be entirely in keeping with the standard operating procedure for Americans to make a total mess of a country and then abandon the bulk of the population to the local extremists. But I am hopeful that the same Northern liberals who were happy to abandon the Cambodians to the Khmer Rouge, and who can’t wait to have a big I-told-you-so party to celebrate the mass butchery that will follow our washing our hands of Iraq, will magically develop human hearts full of compassion and decline to abandon millions of Southern liberals in their hour of need.
I know I am not alone when I say that this Southerner would gladly take up arms and lay down his life if that’s what it took to demolish the extremist right-wing oligarchy that rules here. It is not unreasonable then, I think, for us to expect that liberals in other sections of the country will resist the urge to retreat from Howard Dean’s 50-state-strategy and to keep up the pressure that has helped us push back the conservatives as far as we have, and in time, will help us finish them off.
It seems pretty clear to me that the GOP, as currently constituted and with its current propaganda machinery running full throttle, is already at war with the the Constitution. It’s not democracy when you only honor the bits and pieces that give you what you want and sabotage the rest because you see it as an obstacle to your own well-being.
The GOP these days is dominated by authoritarians who view our core constitutionally based democratic principles as things to be overcome, not embraced. And the sad part is, the people most vulnerable to suggestion emanating from this authoritarian mindset are low information voters and citizens who feel vaguely threatened by things they don’t understand, and who are loath to admit the value ofnew understanding forfear it will knock over the occasional sacred cow in their own world view.
Scaring people, keeping them ignorant, and then promising deliverance from those inculcated fears, this is the age-old formula at the heart of most successful mass-psychology propaganda manipulations since the beginning of time. The GOP has worked this formula relentlessly for decades now, and whereever there are pockets of people susceptible to their rhetoric, the nonsense flourishes and incredible damage is done.
The history of overturned democracies is replete with the likes of gasbag authoritarians like Boehner, Cantor, Graham, Kyl, etc. But these creeps would get nowhere, (they’d be laughed off the stage), were it not for the fact that their scaremongering messages resonate with a certain segment of the population, and the news media, (now primarily an entertainment enterprise), flogs their nonsense in an effort to prolong the rhetorical combat which they think increases their ratings.
Many in the Democratic party are not enough different from the GOP to be meaningful. In the clubhouse known as Congress, party pressure is, I think far more determinative [than we’d like to believe] of voting choices than personal principle is, and this is true for Dems as well as Repubs. The fact that movement conservatism is a fractured and bankrupt and failed dogma is certainly true, but I have no doubt that there are many Dems who, if they were in the Repub party would ‘go along to get along’ with similar frequency.
The ambition required to become and sustain membership in congress certainly leaves little room for real principle. And this is no less true for those from other parts of the country than it is for those from the south.
When I look at the larger trends, and the broad view of history, it seems like the gap will only lessen. We have gone from slavery and the Civil War to Reconstruction and Jim Crow to the Civil Rights movement. So we are clearly not as divided as we were for most of our nation’s history. And now, with increased physical and financial mobility and the internet the larger trends point to homogenization.
But I’m not sure we’re talking about the South as much as we’re talking about contemporary conservatism.
As we know, the Republican Party’s Southern Strategy exploited white fear about desegregation, the Great Society, affirmative action, et al, which turned them into (or solidified themselves as) conservative Republicans. And that’s why you have solid to overwhelming majorities of whites in state after state in the South voting loyally Republican and identifying as conservative. When polls show the South standing out among the other regions, it’s because they have more conservatives than other parts of the country.
And it is my belief based upon my experiences, that today’s conservatives, generally, do not have a consistent system of thought. About ninety percent can not logically and consistently defend their positions of the time. Andrew Sullivan, for example, is one of the other 10%. The vast majority have simply adopted a conservative identity. It’s not about thought or ideas–it’s about identity. Modern conservatives don’t really care what the underlying law or principle is even if they say that’s the reason. Rather, they care who’s doing the punishing and who’s getting the punishment. If the bad guy looks like us, the law should not apply, but if the bad guy looks like them, the law suddenly should. If Saddam Hussein violates the Geneva Conventions, that proves he’s evil, but if we violate them, “we have a right to protect ourselves!”
As you pointed out, batshit conservatives exist all over the country. I have been in parts of upstate NY which are not much different than parts of the rural South. The reason why the South stands out, then, is because contemporary conservatism happens to be most prevalent there.
For every dollar we pay in federal income tax in CT, we get far less back. In the South, every state gets far more back than the dollar they have paid. Therefore we in the Northeast are supporting them and aren’t getting anything for it. They know it and laugh at us stupid northerners for paying them while they take the lead in pledging the flag and using the Constitution as toilet paper.
Funny you mention that, but one of the major causes of the Civil War besides slavery was that the South was paying most of the taxes and most of the spending was going on in the North.
Get over it. Wealth redistribution is the function of taxes. Money comes from where there is a surplus and goes to where there’s a deficit. That will always be the case; it is, in fact, why we have taxes.
Now, if you want to complain about the hypocrisy of Southern Republicans lecturing poor people about self-reliance, then you have a point. And it’s a point that Southern liberals agree fully with you on. But complaining about taxes moving money around is like complaining that light bulbs emit light.
I was always under the impression that American subcultures need not be reconcilable, freedom of association and what have you. Do you, I’ll do me, they’ll do them. Some people like Coke while others drink nothing but Pepsi, and those tastes are irreconcilable. Some people like the Gints while others like the Iggles, and those tastes are irreconcilable. Some people are OK with a heavy-handed government while others prefer maximum liberty, and those tastes are irreconcilable, and there’s nothing more American than that – the ability to dissent from the majority and still live without fear for your well-being.
Be careful which road you head down – you could end up in Salem…
hmmm, if people from the North would take a head count….they would really find the truth….
there are more northern people here, than native southern people….THAT’S A FACT
maybe it’s the Northern attitude, trans-planted that’s the problem ; )
Clapton: “before you acuse me, take a look at yourself”
c’mon down y’all, and we’ll have a mint-julep, and set on the veranda, and chat bout it ; )
peace
That situation changes with a flip of Texas to Democratic and almost disappears with a flip of Georgia. Both of those are likely in 2010 or 2012.
It also changes if there is more diverse media in the region. A return to locally-owned radio and TV stations could shut down the 24-hour-a-day wall-to-wall hatemongers. Just drive through the rural South (and some larger Southern cities) to see how uniform the media is.
Don’t think that Southern Republicans are libertarians just because they are anti-government. The Republican Party in the South arose because the “Hell No” segregationists like Strom Thurmond changed parties. But they were pro-government national security freaks, seeking ideological uniformity. They consolidated their control during the general national trend to more and to more extreme conservatism over 30 years. And they gained strength as a result of the collapse of several state Democratic parties and the growth of the very expensive investment conservatives made in politicized media. And their ossification was not complete until 1994. After all Jimmy Carter was elected in Georgia, Al Gore in Tennessee, Richard Riley in South Carolina, and Bill Clinton in Arkansas in the midst of conservative trends in their states.
“Left to their own devices…” The problem is that Southerners are not left to their own devices. Powerful cultural institutions funded by primarily wealthy people–Bob Jones University, Regent University, Liberty University–have intentionally designed propaganda campaigns in the South that operate under the cover of “Christianity”. The Gingrich-Reagan-Bush Republicans engineered a denominational coup in 1979 that effectively made the Southern Baptist Convention a propaganda arm of the Republican Party and reached into every Southern Baptist Church with propaganda from the pulpit. To the point that the denomination split, the major denominationally supported universities – Wake Forest, Furman, for example, dropped their affiliation with the Southern Baptist Convention rather than sacrifice academic freedom. Southerners have not been left to their own devices any more than gun-owners and veterans have been. Consider the way that the National Rifle Association and the American Legion have become arms of the Republican Party and its movement conservative wing. Both of those organizations are strong in the South because a lot of the land area is still rural and because of the number of veterans from small towns and in retirement near military towns.
Left to their own devices, Southerners would become more like Larry Kissell and Kay Hagan and the early Lamar Alexander (who was more moderate twenty years ago) and Fritz Hollings and Olin D. Johnston (minus the segregation) and Robert Byrd and Albert Gore, Sr. and Lloyd Bentsen.
The fact is that, outside of Arkansas and Louisiana, Republicans are losing the South. The spell is broken here. It is only a matter of time. Don’t get too fixated on the 2008 electoral vote. Look at the margins and look at the county popular vote. For example, Huntsville, AL, which is more Appalachian than Deep South voted for Obama.
The most effective way that non-Southerners can help transform the South is to get a veto-proof majority in Congress in 2010 and ensure that voting rights are protected. To the first end, folks in Pennsylvania can help us most by turning central Pennsylvania blue. Folks in Ohio can help us and Kentucky most by turning southern Ohio blue. Folks in California can help us most by turning the Inland Empire blue. Folks in Massachusetts can help us most by helping out in New Hampshire and Maine. Folks in Michigan can help by turning western Michigan blue – is not Hoekstra as embarassing as Cantor or DeMint? And then that Congress will make the changes in media and banking and education funding and….that will bring the South along. And the sound defeat of the modern conservative movement will either prompt realignment to the center by the Republican Party or its demise. Should the Republican Party disappear, the Democratic Party could split along progressive-Blue Dog lines.
Come visit us before you write us off completely.
Given that rural areas are more likely to vote Republican than urban and suburban areas, one could just as easily say,
As someone with Southern roots so deep as to include veterans of the Revolutionary War and of the Civil War (Army of Northern Virginia) and the Virginia governor who signed John Brown’s death warrant, I find the premise of this question repugnant.
Yes, the South is different because of slavery and the Civl War, but racism and bigotry is as American as the Boston tea party.
The two most segregated cities I have visited (and I have spent a lot of time in both) are Boston and Chicago. Back during de-segration struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, Southerners used to say, with some truth, that Southerners may hate blacks as a group, but liked them as individuals, whereas Yankees love blacks as a group, but refused to associate with them as individuals.
The South lost a war and created a myth to ease its pain.
Its way of life was destroyed (justifiably so) and so too were its wealth and property and economy.
Then the victors walked away (trading “Reconstruction” for electoral votes in the 1876 election–shades of the Southern strategy!), leaving it in shambles and turning away as they created Jim Crow and a rather ingenious system of quasi-slave labor. One can argue that, had “Reconstruction” actually reconstructed anything, in particular a system of public education, the results would have been very different.
To attempt to localize the heart of American shame in the South and thereby discount that it is an American phenomenon, not a regional one, measured not at the ballot box but in day-to-day behavior in cities and counties from sea to shining sea is, at the very least, a smug conceit.
The premise of the question is repugnant.
Again, I agree with your point about conservatism being a countrywide phenomenon and that you could easily substitute ‘rural’ for ‘South’. That’s why I made a point that I am not trying to pick on the South. But the South distinguishes itself by electing conservatives and those conservatives are increasingly authoritarian and hold views antithetical to liberty. That’s why I ask the question.
Much of the solidly blue Pacific Northwest is as segregated as Alabama in 1950, too. Will federal troops be going to Portland and Seattle to integrate the schools any time soon? Not bloody likely.
Amen. I wonder why so many people forget that, before, during, and after the Civil War, the United States was built on doing successfully to the American Indian what Hitler tried and failed to do to the Jews. And Germany, after the war, made some efforts at paying reparations to the survivors. Here? We let the survivors build casinos on their concentra— er, reservations.
Focusing on Southern racism is more than unfair and repugnant. It allows racism to flourish unnoticed everywhere else.
Doesn’t the South have a poor history of have good public education. I always remember Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana as being in the bottom rung of states with good schools. Maybe some improvement there would make the South from feeling left behind or apart from the rest of the USA.
Again, even leaving aside Florida, this is demonstrably false. Two of the three largest states in the South voted Democratic, Boo.
And the region that gives, literally, all of its electoral votes to the Republicans?
Not the South. It’s the Plains. Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming. All red.
The South has a very ugly past. And much of it has a very ugly present. But, contrary to the never-ending ignorance spewed by many Northerners, it ain’t your daddy’s South, Boo.
Umm…Florida is only a southern state in a literal sense. McCain won every other southern state except Virginia and North Carolina. And if you look at the House or the Senate you’ll realize that the south and border states make up by far the biggest percentage of their withering minority.
The Plains states do support the GOP but they contribute very little to the electoral college of the House of Representatives. And, as you can see in the Dakotas and Montana, and Nebraska, they still have statewide Democrats winning elections, which is not happening in Alabama or Mississippi or Texas.
Which is why I left out Florida, as I did in my comment last night, although I submit that Florida is very much a southern state once you get out of Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade. People think of Florida as Mickey Mouse, beaches and fruity drinks. They don’t think about the Other Florida.
Outside the SE, Florida is just Mississippi with one-third of the black population.
This is like saying, “McCain won all the inland western states except Colorado and New Mexico,” except that it’s even more ridiculous because North Carolina is as large as Alabama and Mississippi combined, and Virginia’s not far behind that. On balance, McCain won the South, but it wasn’t some overwhelming victory making it dramatically different from elsewhere. A few votes swing, and suddenly Obama’s got Georgia and we’re knocking on the door of a majority in the region.
And you’re still suffering from this stereotypically Northern insistence on seeing the South as some kind of monolith rather than a group of different states.
The Plains elects Dem Senators and congressman. Okay. I must have missed Webb, Warner, Hagan, Pryor, Landrieu, and Lincoln getting thrown out of office, along with all the Democratic congresscritters from the South.
Silly me.
I think an argument can be made that the Republicans’ hold on the South is growing tenuous. Virginia and North Carolina seem to have shifted demographically to a point where they are no longer Southern in political culture. Yet, in most of the South and the border states, Whites voted for McCain at 85% levels or higher. And it wasn’t racism because they voted for Bush over Kerry at similar rates. Even Democrats in the South were inclined to vote against the stimulus bill, and they will follow suit on countless more telling legislation.
The subject I am bringing up is really related to issues surrounding torture, civil liberties, and executive power. On those issues, it seems to matter less whether a politician is a Democrat or a Republican, but whether or not they represent a southern or border state.
You can nitpick how we define the South, but that sidesteps the larger point. At the most basic you can see something showing up in Obama’s approval ratings by region.
There is definitely something cultural going on there.
Don’t take Southerners and Border-Staters voting against Kerry by the same margin as against Obama as disqualifying race as a factor, because race hurt Dems in general in the region, whether they were black or white.
Nothing really meant by that as it relates to our points, but I’m just submitting it for the record. It doesn’t work as a Black Dem vs White Dem thing on race. It’s Dem vs Rep.
Your point about the stimulus is also factually inaccurate, looking at the roll call. Seems the Alabama freshmen, Taylor and Shuler were the only Southern Dems voting Nay. So, no, Southern Dems were not inclined to vote against the stimulus. Not even close, Boo. Even ones representing pretty conservative districts generally voted our way.
I’ll say to you that, while more enlightened than other Southern states, North Carolina is most certainly culturally Southern. You’re basically committing the Mark Penn fallacy here of not recognizing certain areas as “real”. Sure, if you only take married, middle-aged white men from rural areas in Alabama as being “culturally Southern,” then I guess NC is not culturally Southern. But that’s dumb.
Could anyone seriously argue that Georgia, the state that elected Sonny “Pray for Rain” Perdue, is not culturally Southern? That’s Georgia, which Obama only lost by about 5 points (making it very winnable in 2012 if the economy turns around). Six of Georgia’s 13 congressmen are Democrats, by the way.
Is the South more conservative than other regions? Of course. But your idea of it as some kind of alien planet — again, not counting Florida, which is that — is quite silly. It serves more to allow Northerners to reassure themselves that it’s just us rednecks in the South who are screwed up, socially, than it does to serve producing a better nation.
I said ‘political culture’ as distinct from ‘culture’. North Carolina is seeing demographic shifts that make it distinct from Alabama or Mississippi or Tennessee. If you look at the data, including how whites voted, you’ll see that NC did not vote the same way that Georgia or South Carolina did. It voted more like Virginia or Indiana.
Georgia, since you brought it up, voted just like a Deep South state. The reason it was close was the huge monolithic turnout of blacks, and not because whites crossed over to the Democrats as they did in Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina.
It’s only one measure, but a state that does not reflect extreme racial polarization in Dem/GOP preferences isn’t behaving like a state with a southern political culture.
And I took it to mean political culture. We’re not debating jazz and blue grass.
Georgia’s vote was much more in line with Virginia’s and North Carolina’s than it was with Mississippi’s or Alabama’s. Not as good — somewhere a little north of the midpoint. Obama carried, if I remember correctly, between 25% and 30% of the white vote in GA, while carrying only about 10% in Mississippi and Alabama.
But, again, you’re sitting there saying that a state doesn’t count unless it delivers the ridiculous levels of racial polarization you find in Alabama — that a state is not Southern, politically, if isn’t bigoted.
Which is both offensive and, unfortunately, backs up some of a lot of nasty stereotypes Southerners have about Northerners.
Georgia: white voters 76-23 for McCain.
North Carolina: 64-35.
Virginia: 60-39.
Florida: 56-42.
Arkansas: 68-30.
Mississippi: 88-11.
Alabama: 88-10.
Tennessee: 63-34.
Right.
Another way of looking at this is to look at the overall vote by region.
If the South were not included in the election, it looks like Obama would have easily topped 55% of the popular vote. If you don’t include North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida in the Southern numbers, it’s probable that McCain would have topped 60% of the popular vote in the South.
There is clearly something very culturally different about the South from the rest of the country even when we factor in that a certain commonality of conservatism exists between the culture of Idaho, Utah, Kansas etc., and the South. If you could look at the Bush administration as a region and overwhelmingly vote for more of the same, then you just aren’t on the same playing field with the rest of the country.
And there is a difference between the white voters of the South and the Mountain West and Plains states, and it showed up most dramatically in the primaries, where Obama carried all the western states because he carried the white vote but carried the southern states despite losing the white vote.
But that’s what I keep telling you: If my aunt had a penis, she’d be my uncle. You’re arguing that these states that don’t follow the narrative don’t count, and that’s ridiculous, because they’re different states in the same region. It makes no sense to say, “The South believes in x,” because there’s no such thing as The South<sup>TM</sup>.
And with your use of NC and VA, it would be like saying, “Well, if you toss out Cal, they Obama got trounced out West.” Well, no shit. Cal is a really big state, and you’d be essentially saying it doesn’t count.
You keep trying to fit these things neatly into their little cubbyholes, but it doesn’t work that way, sociologically.
Your arguing against the wind.
I think it’s transparent what I am talking about. I gave the numbers for the WHOLE South and then noted that the numbers must be even more stark if you don’t included the states that, you know, voted for Obama. It’s not rocket science we’re discussing here. Parts of the South are changing demographically and that is also bringing some cultural change along with it. The numbers tell the story. The more diversity from immigration and northern transplants, the more Democratic-friendly the state’s white voters become.
Which is exactly what I said last night.
which is why it’s odd that you are nitpicking about tangential matters unrelated to the point of this post.
My point is that the preponderance of the South is politically opposed to things like rigid interpretations of the Fourth Amendment and the Geneva conventions.
This would, by the way, back up my point, not yours, with regard to NC and VA.
What?
How does it back up your point?
The one thing I was wrong about is that Tennessee is showing the same profile as North Carolina, which surprised me because Obama got trounced there.
Whites in North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee are showing a lot of willingness to vote for a Democrat (even a black one) while Georgia falls midway between Alabama and North Carolina. Fewer than one in four white Georgians voted for Obama in an election that Obama won with 53% of the vote.
Tennessee has far fewer black folks than other Southern states. Fewer Latinos, too, I suspect (don’t know off the top of my head, honestly). Hence Obama getting trounced there while doing alright in Georgia and South Carolina.
It backs up my point because you insist on seeing Virginia and North Carolina as being somehow different on grounds of racial polarization. In fact, while a little high, they’re not at all out of the ordinary by the looks of that exit poll data when you’re talking solely on data from whites.
You’re looking at the South through Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana. My point, on Georgia, was that it was “a little north of the midpoint” on racial polarization between the two groups, and that adding the states’ various shares of black folks put it much closer to NC and VA than AL and MS.
All of this backs up my point that your understanding of Southern politics is incorrect. Treating VA and NC as being somehow distinguishable from The South<sup>TM</sup> is silly. My point the entire time has been that it makes no sense to generalize about the region, because it’s a collection of different states with different attitudes, while you’ve basically said, “the South is x and states that don’t follow along with that don’t count.”
Throwing out the states that don’t follow along with your narrative renders your discussion completely devoid of usefulness.
There’s a logical fallacy here. Of course the majority of white voters supported McCain: this is a majority conservative region near the climax of a period of conservative dominance. Do you think the numbers would really have been very different if the Democratic candidate had been white? Were they very different when Kerry ran?
For this example to mean very much, you’d have to contrast it with a race between a black conservative and a white liberal.
Granted, cases like that are rare for a reason, but it is worth noting that J.C. Watts was pretty successful in Oklahoma, which is a pretty racist state.
no, they weren’t much different when Kerry ran, especially if you factor in the Kerry did worse across the board. I’m not arguing that the South voted against Obama because he is black but that they voted against him because he is a Democrat.
Those two things are not unrelated, but they are not the same, either.
If you look at the body of this post, I’m specifically talking about support for things like torturing the crap out of detainees and granting the government the right to monitor our communications without warrants. These are sentiments that are odds with settled American tradition and law. Yet, I do not think the South would keep these traditions if they were to actually secede and create their own union. That’s the root of my point. It had nothing to do with racism.
You’re probably right at this point in history, Booman. I just get alarmed whenever people from other parts of the country start talking about cutting us loose and leaving us at the mercy of people who think torture is acceptable. I also think that such talk serves to further alienate a lot of Southerners from the Democratic Party and thereby strengthens the hand of the nutjob faction.
Well, not racism, but you’d better believe there was a strong element of sectional antipathy there, which is arguably a form of ethnic bigotry. Yankees do not play well in Southern elections, the occasional exception like Governor Phil Bredesen of Tennessee notwithstanding.
John Kerry was just the latest in a long line of Yankee candidates the Democrats picked to break on the rocks of Southern voters. Dukakis? Mondale? Doomed from the outset, irrespective of their political views. I mean, I voted for Kerry, but believe me, I’m much further to the left than even most Northern liberals, and I had to hold my nose to do it.
I’m a Southerner with a lineage going back to the early colonial era. My ancestors served in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, and every conflict since. And one side of my family is from Florida. (The other is from North Carolina.)
Florida is a hybrid state at this point, to be sure, but the northern half of the state is very culturally Southern. The southern half is, quite frankly, unlike any other region of the United States, though it might well be like the future of the United States if we ever learn to get along with each other. South Florida’s got it all: Yankees, Southerners, Cubans, Germans, Mexicans, liberals, conservatives, and random retirees from all over. And most of the time, the worst that comes of it is the occasional middle finger in traffic. As it should be.
As someone stated in an earlier comment, slavery explains why the South is different from the rest of the country. I think that we can directly link slavery to the fascist conservatism that comes out of much of the South. Once you’ve decided that enslaving people because of their race is OK, you can justify anything. In fact, without the South, the US would be almost exactly like Canada.
The good news is that this is changing, and changing quickly. In VA, the influx of people from all over the country has led to a much more open-minded electorate, and has greatly changed both Northern Virginia and the Hampton Roads area (SE Virginia). In NC, the large number of educated people (and immigrants) in Charlotte and the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area is breaking the back of fascist conservatism there. And large number of immigrants will eventually end fascist conservatism in GA and TX.
To answer your question, the past culture of the South is irreconcilable with core elements of the American tradition and it always was. But, increased diversity, mobility, and education are destroying the Old South, and the Republican Party will die with it. The Republicans simply can’t win a national election without Virginia AND Florida, and really can’t win national elections without VA, FL, and NC.
Even worse, the capture of the GOP by the old South guarantees its death in the rest of the country because of its incompatibility with the rest of the American tradition.
Boo,
It’s more complicated than just the South. The real situation is summed up by a guy like the aptly-named Dick Cheney, who is neither a religious nut nor a Southerner.
A guy like Cheney is the real pimple on the ass of progress. He embodies the deep politics of the military-industrial complex, the CIA, and Wall Street, which are mostly centered in the preppy northeast, Texas, and California. But a guy like Cheney needs to work in secrecy and stay behind the scenes, as he has done. He needs a front. That front is culturally conservative and religious in a particular way. By pandering to their specific interests (which really don’t make a bit of difference to him one way or the other), and stoking up their inherent fanaticism and strong military tradition as a bedrock of support, Cheney safeguards a kleptocracy that will do anything he and his cronies (many of them denizens of foreign lands) want.
The South is very complex and I think we all know that what you are seeing as “The South” is not the whole story. But it is enough of the story to represent the core of a set of cultural attitudes ideal for supporting the hidden agenda of Dick Cheney & Co.
Ironically, many southerners are much more interested in sniffing out “hidden government agendas” than liberals have traditionally been. So they eagerly lap up all sorts of conspiracy theories thrown at them by the forces of disinformation, all the more eagerly because they are unlikely to suspect that the party that poses as their one and only friend, is the real conspiracy.