Lots of talk about the role of the South in the GOP is bubbling up. Joe Conason:
Anyone who has wondered where the Republicans would take America if they regain control of Congress and the White House could learn much from what has been happening lately in Virginia and West Virginia. The answer is backward, toward a time when mine owners let their workers perish as a normal cost of doing business–and government firmly endorsed the white supremacy of the Old South.
To which, as a Southerner through and through, I say: Again? How many times do we have to refute the notion that Southerners are pretty much ignorant racists with no teeth and fewer brain cells? It’s something that takes place repeatedly, just part of the landscape when you know what redeye gravy and noodling are, yet hold to political principles that don’t pass muster in Tuscaloosa.
Of course there are strains of thought in the South that are outrageous. Virginia is particularly bad in that department when you get well south of Arlington. There are still lots of places in Arkansas and Mississippi where the other side of the tracks is called “N____town” by the white folks. But to reduce the South to that is silly. The dominant (but not monolithic) strain of thought there, I’d argue, is a weird mixture of religious and business fundamentalism. Yet obviously, I feel protective of the better angels of the South, of which there are plenty.
Here’s another story that, dressed in its seersucker best (“epistemic closure,” anyone?), delivers the point in better fashion, though its premise will offend a lot of people for other reasons:
The South is a distinct region in America, significantly different in history and political culture from the rest of the country. Moreover, regional identity in the South is manifested substantially in opposition to the rest of the nation. A political movement dominated by the South will necessarily manifest a political culture that is more similar to that of the South than to that of the rest of the nation, and that political movement is also going to absorb this oppositional element of Southern identity, and will necessarily become overly invested in intellectual shibboleths. What looks like epistemic closure is really just identity politics.
I don’t think this explanation can be dismissed out of hand – in particular, dismissing it out of hand as “insulting” to the South would be in instance of precisely the dynamic I’m outlining. The South does have a distinct history and culture; that culture is substantially oppositional; and the American right is dominated by the South in a way that it has not been before.
Y’all enjoy.
