I read about this last week, before the Faculty Senate voted unanimously against the appointment of their new neo-confederate president.
Members of the College of Charleston community are not happy with the choice of a Republican politician with ties to neo-Confederates to be the next president of the college. Donors are complaining. Students are protesting. And on Tuesday, the Faculty Senate held a unanimous vote expressing no-confidence in the school’s Board of Trustees.
The college’s board announced late last month that it had voted to offer the president job to Glenn McConnell, the current Republican lieutenant governor of South Carolina. But McConnell’s lack of experience in academia, and his well-publicized enthusiasm for the Confederacy, quickly inspired protests.
Can we have a discussion about the fact this man is the sitting Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina? That seems more worthy of protest than the fact that he will serve as president of the College of Charleston.
Now, granted, the people of South Carolina did not elect him as their Lieutenant Governor. But he became Lieutenant Governor because state law says that the Senate President Pro Tempore shall serve as LG in the event of a vacancy in the office. In other words, Mr. McConnell was the longest-serving member of the state Senate, where he served from 1981 to 2012.
He’s been elected many times.
And he’s most famous for his fight to preserve the practice of making public displays of the Confederate Flag.
By percentage of population that is black, South Carolina ranks 5th in the nation at 28%. Only Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and Maryland rank higher. By contrast, only six percent of the student body at the College of Charleston is black.
Neither group appreciates being led by a neo-confederate.
Way down south in the land of cotton…. Old times there are not forgotten……
“Neither group appreciates being led by a
neo-confederate.treason apologist“FIFY
Methinks “treason enthusiast” is more accurate still.
A hundred and fifty years later and some think the south should rise again. Will it ever end?
Graffiti in South Carolina (where I grew up), circa 1972:
“The South will rise again. Shit floats.”
States like South Carolina have actually changed quite a bit in 40 years – the white folks in Charleston wouldn’t have been protesting back then, for example. But the state’s political leadership has not changed. Strom Thurmond – the Strom Thurmond of the 1948 Dixiecrats – is alive and well.
no
Off topic, but I couldn’t resist.
Apparently there is at least one sane Republican
left in Oklahoma. Who knew?
Send him to Illinois. Oklahoma has one more than us.
Dude,
it’s South Carolina.
for my Black behind, nothing else needed to be said.
Too small for a republic, too large for an insane asylum.
James L. Petigru (1789-1863)
from the article:
After South Carolina seceded in 1860, Petigru famously remarked, “South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.” This quote is still used to describe contemporary South Carolinian politics.
Fixed for accuracy.
use
hah! it doesn’t show substitute < for , and > for . below:
use ,s.,/s.
There was a time in South Carolina in which Barnwell County politicians controlled the state Democratic machine through having one as Speaker of the House (Sol Blatt) and the other as President Pro Tem of the Senate (Edgar Brown). The Lieutenant Governor’s main power was that he could become governor if the Governor resigned, was incapacitated, or died. The Lieutenant Governor was the logical stepping stone into the governor’s chair. Then, lieutenant governors tended to be young up-and-comers.
This guy has reached his highest political office and is seeking to call in his chips with the university system to get a final sinecure of accomplishment and to double-dip his retirement. It is a testimony to how disliked he is that he got shunted into a ceremonial position and then is getting pushback at the efforts to ensure his quiet retirement. That is what ferment looks like in Charleston.
The importance is that this guy could not even keep the Confederate flag flying atop the State House because a Democratic governor negotiated a compromise. Moreover, he could not get the flag back on top of the State House even when Republicans controlled both houses of government and the governor. Change moves slow in South Carolina; they have, after all, finally adjusted to the idea that slavery cannot be extended to California and Oregon, the key complaint in the Secession Convention document.
While you can point and snicker at 67-year-old Glenn McConnell, for South Carolina it’s still “Thank God for Misssissippi”, which just passed a discrimination bill more draconian than the one Jan Brewer rejected in Arizona. The population that no one really counts in red states are the gay Republicans and independents who are Republican because of economic ideology. When do they become a swing vote in states like South Carolina.
Finally, despite the weakness of the Democratic Party in South Carolina, the office that Democrats are most likely to come up with in 2014 is Governor.
Can they articulate that “economic ideology?” Not likely to be anything other than “white privilege,” and they’ll take that satin lined closet over the alternative of less income and wealth inequality with non-whites. Long tradition of self-loathing whites in the US south.
That is very hard to tell because of the closeted status of a whole lot of gay Republicans. Also hard to tell is what their response will be to increasing legal discrimination. Because that closet is not as secure and more subject to blackmail with legal sanctions than just with the social opprobrium of the local religious.
I would love for some bold interviewer to question Lindsey Graham on this very issue.
I’m not exactly sure what is meant by “self-loathing whites” here. Folks like McConnell would likely use that phrase to describe Southerners not neo-Confederates.
Not even bankers can articulate that economic ideology other than to want a “strong business climate” and “low taxes” and “ease the burden of regulation”.
I used to argue with these sorts of right wingers but they proved impervious to facts and logic.
Exasperated I turned to questioning their intelligence and ridiculing them for their ignorance and/or mendacity.
This only dragged me down to their level and did nothing to change their closed minds.
Now I pity them as I watch them gleefully vote against their own interests cycle after cycle.
Perhaps when Kansas implodes or North Carolina falls into the sea it will be a wake up call. Until then I don’t really see much hope of getting through to these people.
And I used to be such an optimist.
I’m not at all averse to seeing them get what’s coming to them, but I’m not exactly thrilled that the rest of us get to suffer right along with them.
Who says the people who elected this guy to office for 30 years weren’t voting their interests? Isn’t it more logical to assume that he represented their interests better than his opponents would have?
Self-interests aren’t just economic. (And racism is, among other things, a means of gaining economic power for the dominant group. There’s a reason there were more African-American skilled tradesmen in, say, Philadelphia in 1810 than in 1910.)
What’s the matter with South Carolina is its history and (most of) its citizens (current and past) attitudes to that history.
South Carolina wasn’t just another member of the Southern Confederacy. Its was the intellectual leader of both the nullification movement under its most famous senator, John C Calhoun, and the secession movement. Without the politicians and thinkers of South Carolina in the decades before the war, secession probably never happens.
You may have noticed that Fort Sumter is in Charleston Harbor, SC. The civil war started when SC volunteers shelled the fort after Lincoln attempted to re-provision it. The North was expected by secessionists simply to hand over all federal military installations to the seceding states. Lincoln refused, and the South Carolinians opened fire. Thus the civil war began (in South Carolina).
Then you have the process of the South’s explaining what the Confederacy was fighting for. Their leaders were fairly clear on the matter at the time of secession—they were fighting to preserve slavery, which they feared the new Repub party was out to destroy or severely isolate and fatally lame. This motivation morphs somewhat after the South’s catastrophic defeat, into a (somewhat) more noble right of a state to leave the union, sort of a state’s “liberty” to be sovereign and “free”. Of course, the sole motive for exercising this “right” was the preservation of slavery or the state’s right to continue to have sole say over slavery and slaves.
The point is that it seems to me that the Cause the South fought for remained to be seen as “noble” long, long after the war was concluded. It HAD to be noble in order to justify the almost inconceivable number of deaths and maimings of hundreds of thousands of Southerners and the incalculable destruction secession wrought upon the South.
Most survivors weren’t embarrassed or dismayed that they as a people dragged the nation into disunion and devastating civil war over slavery–more specifically the South’s desire to ensure its perpetuation. Where and when was there a broad cultural acknowledgment and reappraisal that perhaps they and their ancestors had been morally wrong and blindly wrongheaded? That in reality they had fought a “bad” war?
Indeed, the Cause of Southern Independence is still seen as “noble” to this very day, as far as I can see—the proof of which is the very successful political career of this fervent (SC) lover of the Confederate Stars and Bars, (“which should still be proudly flown on southern statehouses[!] to this very day!”), a movement which currently claims the affections of hundreds of thousands of southerners (and certainly some northerners) as a part of “our” history–a part of which they are clearly proud.
The North fought for reasons its leaders and citizens saw as noble as well: to restore the union and (ultimately) to eliminate slavery and amend the constitution accordingly. Did both sides of our horrendous civil war really have a Cause that can reasonably be described as equally “noble”? Ask your average (white) South Carolinan…
The political career of Mr. McConnell ended as lieutenant governor of a relatively smaller state, a position of little prestige, power, or historical note.
The very interesting thing about Mr. McConnell is the extent to which he doesn’t represent the opinions of white Southerners. He rode to office on a national Republican Tea Party wave, Republican dominance of SC politics, and Nikki Haley as a running mate. He apparently is being shed from a second term by moving him into the Presidency of the College of Charleston. That sounds like finding an attic for the crazy uncle to me. He’s not good for attracting non-Southern business, his go-fering on Nikki Haley’s Boeing deal notwithstanding.
What’s the matter with South Carolina?
I’m going to go with South Carolinians.
WHITE South Carolinians.
You rang?
You’re right, should have said “except for the minority of sane ones”. Keep fighting the good fight!