Wednesday, February 06, 2013

This country is not separated Right to Left, it is separated from North to South.

Courtesy of Salon:  

Mainstream American history, from the point of view of the white majority in the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast, is a story of military successes. The British are defeated, ensuring national independence. The Confederates are defeated, ensuring national unity. And in the 20th century the Axis and Soviet empires are defeated, ensuring (it is hoped) a free world. 

The white Southern narrative — at least in the dominant Southern conservative version — is one of defeat after defeat. First the attempt of white Southerners to create a new nation in which they can be the majority was defeated by the U.S. Army during the Civil War. Doomed to be a perpetual minority in a continental American nation-state, white Southerners managed for a century to create their own state-within-a-state, in which they could collectively lord it over the other major group in the region, African-Americans. But Southern apartheid was shattered by the second defeat, the Civil Rights revolution, which like the Civil War and Reconstruction was symbolized by the dispatching of federal troops to the South. The American patriotism of the white Southerner is therefore deeply problematic. Some opt for jingoistic hyper-Americanism (the lady protesteth too much, methinks) while a shrinking but significant minority prefer the Stars and Bars to the Stars and Stripes. 

The other great national narrative holds that the U.S. is a nation of immigration, a “new nation,” a melting pot made up of immigrants from many lands. While the melting pot story involves a good deal of idealization, it is based on demographic fact in the large areas of the North where old-stock Anglo-Americans are commingled with German-Americans, Polish-Americans and Irish-Americans, along with more recent immigrant diasporas from Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. 

But even before the recent wave of immigration from sources other than Europe, the melting pot never included most of the white South. From the early 19th century until the late 20th, the South attracted relatively few immigrants. Who wanted to move to a backward, rural, apartheid society dominated by an oligarchy of a few rich families? Apart from several encapsulated minorities — Cajuns in Louisiana, Germans in central Texas — most white Southerners remained descendants of colonial-era immigrants from the British Isles, chiefly English and Scots-Irish. And while Irish and German Catholics and Jews diversified the religious landscape of the North, the South was dominated by British-derived Protestant sects like the Episcopalians, Baptists and Methodists from Virginia to Oklahoma and Texas.

You know I think that this chasm between the North and South was NEVER more apparent than after the election of Barack Obama. In the North it was celebrated as this incredible step forward as a country, and the very embodiment of the progress we were making as a nation. But in the South is was seen as an aberration, and sign that something had gone terribly wrong, and the country was no longer the America that they loved so much.

I encourage you to read the entire article, it is very illuminating and portends of dangerous times ahead. Times that it would behoove us to prepare for, or find ourselves once again in the grip of a war we did not see coming.

20 comments:

  1. Anonymous3:01 AM

    Read Micheners The Covenant to understand the challenge. It describes the Calvinist world view of Boer South Africa shared by the south, one that is so set that it is a waste to consider compromise. Resign to the need to out-maneuver these supremacists or be forever frustrated.

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  2. Anonymous3:54 AM

    I've been thinking lately that having lost the Civil War and failed to stem the tide of civil rights in America, the South has now simply carried its historical resistance on into the halls of Congress. Here they have managed to acquire enough power, not to lead and to govern, but to thwart the efforts of those of us who would move this country forward. This, almost 150 years after the North-South conflict was supposedly settled once and for all.

    I wish I knew what the solution to this problem was. Perhaps enough progressive baby boomers deciding to retire to the south combined with an increasing Latino population, will slowly turn the tide away from the South's ongoing legacy of racism and ignorance. The fact that Virginia has slowly become blue and that North Carolina has flirted with the same idea in the last few years gives me some hope, but I doubt if the real diehards in the deep south will ever give up without further bloodshed.

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  3. Anonymous3:54 AM

    My life has been spent evenly divided between the north and the south. This includes all phases of my education and work experience. I find the basic premise of the article to be as flawed as the birthers, the tea party, and the area 51 conspirators'. Anytime you take the lazy man's path of looking at people as labels, and not individuals, you play into the same fake hysteria and hype that Flush and his ilk use to sell advertizing. The exception that makes the rule is of course the label 'idiots'. Just as bad code can be written in any programming language, idiots are found in any demographic.

    Danny

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    1. Anonymous6:18 AM

      Totally agree.

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    2. Anonymous6:49 AM

      I also totally agree. If one goes to the article and reads the comments, a whole different attitude comes forward. Try it.

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    3. Anonymous8:29 AM

      My English teachers, including the many with strong southern accents are upset with me...advertising, not advertizing. - 5 pts

      Danny

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  4. I suppose it's no accident I accidentally wound up here in the South, and here I though I could now “retire," and ease up. No such luck, the Work has only just begun huh? Now I have to demonstrate to Mike Huckabee who is “America's History Professor" in fact. Oh dwell (deep subject).

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  5. Anonymous6:02 AM

    "The Glorious South" that is what the South is called isn't it? I, never understood that. What is gloriuos about holding another in bondage?
    when I hear people talking of retiring in the South, and they ask me? I say never! Again asked why not? I say, because I couldn't stand the mind set of the South.
    Had an experience in Denver Co. once.
    While walking around a park. There was a reenactment of a battle from the Civil War. stood by the fence for a while and a member of the group came jogging over. Seemed to think I didn't know or understand what was taking place. Started to tell me, and I informed him I did surly know, as my great Grandfather was with Sherman, on his march through the South. Showed him the ring I wore from that period. But, as I said Sherman, he turned around and trotted back. Didn't seem to like the fact that I knew what was going on.
    I should have yelled after him, Hoorah, the North wins again.

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    1. Anonymous6:53 AM

      And this attitude is partly what keeps the two apart. Try reading some history and looking at what is going on currently without depending on the politicians to tell you what to think.
      Do you now or have you ever actually known any Southerners? They are as diverse as any other group.

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  6. Anonymous6:49 AM

    I'd say it's more of a rural/big city divide. You can go to any rural area of the North and find the same attitudes towards Obama and all things Liberal as you can find in the South.

    In Eastern Washington they despise the I-5 corridor of Western Washington and it's Liberal ways. While Eastern Washington is a larger area, They don't have the population base to compete in State wide election. The Eastsiders feel like they get railroaded in the State capitol, and the truth is, they do. City folk don't understand the rural lifestyle and values. And to a big extent, the rural folk don't understand the city folk.

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    1. Anonymous8:00 AM

      I've had the misfortune of visiting Eastern Washington while on a college tour (Pullman). Eastern Washington consists of a bunch of people on welfare who demand the gummit get their hands of their welfare benefits. The population is as ill-educated and belligerent as any area in the deepest of the Deep South.

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  7. lostinmn7:12 AM

    What is most interesting about the south is that so many southern men were killed in the Civil War that conventional wisdom would suggest the entire southern way of thinking should have been absorbed by the victors. But a funny think happened, the northern troops were often cut loose where they stood meaning many of them were left in the south where they hooked up with a large population of widowed southern women. Since many of the soldiers were immigrants who'd offloaded from the ports of the Northeast direct from Europe they had to rely on the women they stayed with to teach them about life in the US. If you take it from there then it was the women of the south who maintained and taught their new husbands the racist thinking they'd never known before. It's why the Daughters of the Confederacy remains one of the most quietly powerful organizations around.

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    1. Anonymous10:27 AM

      Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

      Delete
  8. Anonymous7:56 AM

    This is crap...I live in Florida, was born here and have spent most of my life here. We are a very diverse state, in fact I know very few people who are not of mixed race. We went blue for Barack Obama (though for some reason we seem to keep electing Repub governors, though I think that will change soon as well) and I don't see a lot of people crying about it. He has a lot of love and support down here. This article is full of shit, sorry.

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    1. Anonymous9:35 AM

      Well, I don't live in Florida but spent a month there recently visiting family. Miami may be blue but large portions of the rest of the state are as redneck as you can get. That's where the Republican support comes from. I was appalled by the ignorance and racism I encountered on a daily basis. But as you say, your state is diverse and has such an influx of retirees from the Eastern seaboard and Hispanics from the islands that I don't consider it the "Old South" in the same way I do Alabama. And that diverse demographic is what makes Florida a battleground state when the rest of the South isn't even in contention.

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    2. Anonymous10:05 AM

      There are racist assholes everywhere, my problem is when people act like it's exclusive to the southern states, that's all I'm saying.

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    3. It's not exclusively there.

      It's concentrated there.

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  9. I thank the god I don't believe in that I escaped the South.

    I even went to school in what my aunt, with horror, called "The North." She never forgave me.

    Southern in this context is not geography and does not apply to all individuals. But it is a mindset of supremacy, insularity, racism and sexism and the gulf between THAT "South" and the rest of the nation is as wide as it was in the terrible days of George Wallace, a period I lived through with horror and shame.

    I've donated to LOTS of "Southern" political races. I rejoice that there are intelligent, compassionate, progressive people every where in my country. But I don't fool myself as to the amount of cheek turning I would have to do, and the amount of disdain I would have to repress, should I ever move back to "the South."

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  10. You know, I've long wondered what would have happened if the US had split at the beginning - in the 1780's - and we had two countries all along>

    Any ideas? By the way, here's a funny Onion spoof on the South Rising Again.

    http://www.theonion.com/articles/south-postpones-rising-again-for-yet-another-year,377/

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  11. Anonymous1:30 PM

    Yes I have met a few Southerners, not exactly my favorite people, Met them at My Grandfathers resort from the time I was very little. also I have a niece that worked in a very posh store in the south. she never told anyone where she was from, because if they found out where she was born, she would not have had any customers. Had an experience right in my home town.Was in the drug store wearing a t shirt with a political statement. A Women in the store said to me."if I wore that in my home town, I'd get tared. Looked at her and said, glad I live in a state with some intelligence and walked out.,

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