"We got too many Jim DeMints and Tom Coburns," he told an interviewer with the Columbus Dispatch, referring to GOP senators from South Carolina and Oklahoma. "It's the Southerners. They get on TV and go 'errrr, errrrr.' People hear them and say, 'These people, they're Southerners. The party's being taken over by Southerners. What the hell they got to do with Ohio?' "
Kathleen Parker, thinking about Voinovich's comment wrote:
Whatever Voinovich's sound effects were intended to convey, his meaning was clear enough: Those ignorant, right-wing, Bible-thumping rednecks are ruining the party.
Alas, Voinovich was not entirely wrong.
Not all Southern Republicans are wing nuts. Nor does the GOP have a monopoly on ignorance or racism. And, the South, for all its sins, is also lush with beauty, grace and mystery. Nevertheless, it is true that the GOP is fast becoming regionalized below the Mason-Dixon line and increasingly associated with some of the South's worst ideas.
Kevin Drum, at Mother Jones, added:
Well, look, I like magnolia groves and bluegrass music too, but let's call a spade a spade. Parker never actually uses the word "white" in her column, but later on she makes it clear that's what she's talking about. Not "the South." Not "Southern Republicans." Southern whites.[snip]
Parker says Republicans need to "drive a stake through the heart of old Dixie," and she's right. The rest of us need to help.
Michael Lind has taken profound offense on behalf of the entire South, arguing that liberals are being mean to the South.
In her Washington Post essay, Kathleen Parker writes: "Hefty majorities in the Northeast, the Midwest and the West believe Obama was born in the United States. But in the land of cotton, where old times are not by God forgotten" -- evidently this is intended to be a strained joke -- "only 47 percent believe Obama was born in America and 30 percent aren't sure. Southern Republicans, it seems, have seceded from sanity." Kevin Drum thinks that Parker is too kind and that white Southerners as a group should be thought of as having "seceded from sanity."
Oh, those dumb white Southerners! No other group in American society could possibly believe in preposterous conspiracy theories.
Open Left's Paul Rosenberg noticed Lind's commentary and has rightly recognized it as an extension of a problematic tradition and has written a series of posts. The most cogent, for my purposes, is his latest in which he observes:
In trying to paint Drum as a bigot, Lind was engaged in the age-old Southern strategem of misrepresenting northern disgust with Southern bigotry as itself constituting a kind of bigotry. Necessarily overlooked in this "clever" inversion is the fact that Southern bigotry is based on skin color and alleged group attributes that no individual can change. Northern criticism is based on Southern political culture, and individual behavior, which millions of White Southerns in fact have changed.
Today's conservatives have engaged in the same rhetorical backflips in an attempt to defend the status quo. On a regular basis, religious conservatives claim they are victims of bigotry - critiques of their political views are transformed into bigotry against their faith. The notion that religious conservatives are an oppressed minority is utterly laughable but religious conservatives in the US tub thump on about it at the drop of a hat.
What's happening here is the playing out of a complex, political dynamic as old as the American Republic. Even in the earliest colonial days, the southern colonies were unique from those in the north. By the 1820s, those differences had become even more pronounced. While the North and Midwest industrialized, the South remained a largely plantation and agricultural economy. (Shelby Foote once remarked that had it looked as if the South were going to win the Civil War, the North would have brought the other hand out from behind its back.) Southern exceptionalism was used to explain the continuation of slavery. In the destruction of the Confederacy the myth of the Lost Cause was born. The myth of the Noble South - the aristocratic Southerner in his/her Greek columned plantation house presiding over a genteel agricultural realm sustained by (to borrow a phrase) happy darkies singing in the fields - was born from the ruin wrought by the Civil War - and let's be honest, the post-war Confederate states were ruined, major cities lay in rubble, agricultural regions ravaged, the economy was shattered, and hundreds of thousands of people were dead, dislocated, and impoverished. The myth of a once genteel society swept away by war in defense of a lost cause took root easily and naturally. To this day, many Southerners argue passionately that the defense of slavery was not one of the root causes of the Civil War. Southern white political culture has largely failed to come to grips with its own past.
Southern Exceptionalism was born from the ruin of the South. It says that the South is home to a unique and uniquely noble culture. White Southern political culture was born and bred on the myth of Southern Exceptionalism. It has become the dominant political culture of the GOP. White Southern political culture is strongly hierarchical, colorful, entertaining, macho and bare knuckles and strongly wedded to defense of the status quo. FDR succeeded in convincing conservative Southern Democrats to support the New Deal by implicitly agreeing to not confront Jim Crow. Paradoxically, the logic of the New Deal led to the Civil Rights act and Great Society programs both of which undid Jim Crow and directly confronted white southern attitudes about race.
There is something else at work here. Historically, New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the Midwest and the West Coast have been home to America's liberal and progressive movements. The so called Mormon Corridor - the Intermountain West - and the South have traditionally been the most conservative regions of the country. But, and this is important, populism has been widespread in American political culture - populism of both conservative and progressive populism - and has taken root throughout the country. Southern Exceptionalism tends to express itself as a firebreathing conservative populism - angry about everything, resentful of the "coastal elites" and "social liberals" who look down on the common folk, and proud of their unsophisticated ways - think Huey Long or Sarah Palin here. It's worth pointing out the Alaskan politics are remarkably reminiscent of the politics in the South, as are the politics in the Intermountain West (though without the larger than life, colorful figures of the South).
Right now, mainstream politics in the US are nonexistent. The center has not failed to hold, it is has been wiped away, removed. Right now, populists are battling it to determine if progressive or conservative populism will become dominant. Great Society liberalism failed to revivify itself, New Deal Liberalism works but hasn't found an effective national advocate and conservatism has proven utterly incapable of providing effective governance. Southern dominance of US politics which lasted for a relatively brief period from 1994 to 2006 wrought complete political chaos in its wake. All the normal rules are in abeyance. The political style of the Bush administration and Republican Congress were typically Southern in almost every way.
The political realignment that began in the 1960s, that completed with the Republican Revolution of 1994, is in its final stages. Facing the prospect of becoming consigned to status as a regional party, conservatives and Republicans have little reason to contain their anger right now. The anger we're seeing in the Town Hall meetings and the teabaggers and the Birthers makes emotional sense. It's why the Republican party seems incapable of accepting the failures of the Bush administration and conservative ideology. If you are exceptional than the regular ways of doing things don't apply to you. Conservatives, infused with Southern Exceptionalism, are already working to mythologize the Bush administration as a noble lost cause, swamped by malicious political enemies. |
STATE BLOGS
