Do you agree with this?
It is not a stretch to say that the ascent of the South has been the single most important development in US politics in the past 50 years. Beginning in the mid-1960s, with fitting irony, almost 100 years after the collapse of the Old Confederacy in the Civil War, the South has steadily grown to a remarkable dominance over America’s politics.
And are they right that Dixie’s days are over?
They are just getting back to where they were between 1790 and 1860, when with a few notable exceptions, they ran the Federal Government almost continuously, right up to the end. It helped that they could count slaves at 0.6 to the white man for purposes of representation. Now they do the same thing by disenfranchising ex-slaves at pretty much the old rate.
Didn’t the South always hold the threat of secession over the Union during much of that period as well. That threat is what forced the various compromises allowing the westward expansion of slavery into the new territories, not to mention the war with Mexico. The South’s Congressional Representatives and Senators formed a solid phalanx of legislatures to force the Union to allow more slavery, even though a majority of the population wanted it to end. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it.
Actually, I think the country-club wing of the Republican Party is actually the agent killing the South’s ascendancy. Until recently, the South had benefited from the corporations’ shift of jobs out of the North (just look at the abandoned mills in New England). Now, those same corporations are shifting the jobs oversees and the good ole’ boys in the South are finding out what the workers in the North have known for some time. Unfortunately, the Southern crowd have always opted first for venting their frustration and rage on the minorities readily at hand, aided and abetted by their clerics, so this realization has been a little slow in coming. The country-clubbers in the Republican Party have worked hard at pounding it into their constituency in the South, so hard that even the South’s voters are starting to awaken to reality. It’s not gonna be pretty, either, because all of these folks have guns.
No, not in my opinion.
Nixon’s southern strategy as implemented by Reagan still holds firm in the south. Afterall, if a smart conservative DLC Democrat like Harold Ford could only gather a third of the vote for the Senate against a small town, good-old-boy mayor, we still have a long, long way to go. For the most part, across the south Black majorities make up the Democratic party, and white majorities make up the Republican party. And when these majorities constitute a within state majority, Blacks can win elections. Where not, forget it. Racism still reigns.
And this is not cynicism. Senator Hollins of South Carolina, on retiring, recited these very same words just a few years ago.
2006 General Election for U.S. Senate (TN)
* Bob Corker (R), 51%
* Harold Ford, Jr. (D), 48%
Correction:
He lost.
Yet a Black man got 48% of the state-wide vote in Tennessee. Would that have happened 20 years ago? Ten years ago?
Your point is taken but what I said undoubtedly still applies to the deep south states, and that is where Reagan made his greatest antiBlack strides. Yet,
Washington Post
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
“COALMONT, Tenn. — John Layne is a 57-year-old white Republican with a long gray beard, no job and advancing emphysema. He arrived an hour early to hear Harold Ford Jr. speak in this struggling mountain town.
“Oh, sure, there’s some prejudice,” Layne said as he contemplated casting a ballot for a black man. “I wouldn’t want my daughter marrying one.” But he’s more concerned about rising medical costs: When it comes to voting, “you gotta look at the person, not the color.”
The hardest blows have come from the national GOP. The National Republican Senatorial Committee ridicules Ford’s expensive tastes on a “Fancy Ford” Web site, and the Republican National Committee is airing a controversial new ad that features a scantily clad blonde who says she met Ford at a Playboy party. “Harold, call me!” the woman chirps.
If Ford pulls it off, he will become the first black senator to represent the South since Reconstruction.“
Race is still THE issue in the south.
No argument there – I am a Black man living in the South – but the point is that 20 or even 10 years ago a Black man (and we can argue Blackness, although for those to whom Blackness – or more accurately, non-WASPness – is an irredeemable defect, there is no debate) would have received single-digits in the polls and possibly an extended neckline…
Things are by no means perfect or even close to where I believe they should be but it’s not quite the 50s any more where they could go Emmett Till on a brotha.
And yes, I know that the GOP pulled their own version of Emmett Till on Ford, and I’m 100% with Bob Hebert on that score…
…I wake up most days, look around and get forced to conclude that over the long run we did not win the Civil War.
We just lost the occupation.
Sound familiar?
Population trends continue to favor the South. I had the opportunity to marvel (in horror) at the absolutely gigantic real estate developments going on north of Dallas. Places like this is where the white lower middle class is moving to from places like New York City, where they are being displaced by a mix of hipsters and immigrants. This trend in turn may intensify the de-dixification of the South, but in terms of relative importance the Southern boom is unbroken.
…the mass appeal of spending your entire life in a giant puddle of sweat or an air-conditioned tomb. I guess I must be some kind of freak.
The answer to the mystery is winter. (Especially as you get older, you become what Mrs. K.P. calls a “Winter Wuss” – When we lived in Kansas City I used to go out in 20 degrees in a t-shirt if there was no wind [as if there is ever “no wind” in Kansas City]; here, when it hits 20 I put on a coat to throw out the trash.) When you’re having blizzards we’re out doing yard work in sweaters. Of course, with global warming the South will lose this advantage but still keep the summers. Knoxville is fortunate that the mountains keep it a bit cooler here in the summer (Definitely cooler in summer than Kansas City was!).
Everyone is from somewhere. However much I curse the summers, it’s where I grew up, and it’s still where most of my family is.
I lived up north in North Carolina for a few years. It’s a great place, and I would have been happy to stay there. All the same, I missed the window rattling thunder storms. My gills had trouble with the dry air. Whenever we had a little bit of weather, I had to run outside because it was the one time I could really breathe.
it is interesting that not too long ago common wisdom held that in order for a presidential ticket to be successful it had to include a southerner. that seemed to be THE LAW for all the years i have been following politics.
until now. all of a sudden, we don’t hear that rule anymore. and of all the major presidential candidates, there really aren’t that many southerners. among the ones that are taken seriously, it’s only edwards and thompson, and neither are likely to win.
i don’t know if that means the south has lost all it’s influence, but the perception seems to be that it has lost something.
…that the nation has become so Dixie-fied that a genuine Southerner is no longer necessary. A successful ticket merely needs to pander to the issues that are of interest to the antebellum crowd.
I’d say “Don’t take Thompson seriously,” but then I said the same thing about Reagan, and look what happened… 🙁
Go west young man, where growth in places like Phoenix and Las Vegas far outstrips all other cities. I’m not counting Arizona amongst the states of the traditional south. Phoenix is already a hugely sprawling blot on former desert terrain. (Of course, if the worst predictions of global warming come to pass, things may make a U-turn.)
So how long do you think they’ll last as the water runs out?
the rapid level of growth in the Phoenix metro area is appalling. Not to mention the lawns and swimming pools that abound.
They’ll just steal all of Colorado’s water or something.
nah, they have much more sinister plots that have hatched over the years.
Yep. “We’ll take your water, but heaven help any of your people who come to this country.”
I just can’t resist.
Fuck the South:
Maybe someday they will let us know what they really think? As rants go,…that was pretty good.
Well, it was emotional, anyway. I wouldn’t say it was “good.” Take away the profanity and the obscenity and it’s a single not-particularly-original graf. Language shock value, and nothing more.
I’m sure it made the guy who wrote it feel better, but until he’s capable of expressing his opinions without insulting my intelligence, I’ll treat them with the respect they deserve.
None.
It’s attitudes like this that keep the Confederacy alive. In some ways, the South is still an occupied country. We ain’t too bright down here, ya’ll. Displaying a Confederate Flag doesn’t always have a racial meaning. Sometimes it means I’m Southern, and proud of it.
I’m born and raised in the South. There is truth to some of the stereotypes. I’ve been faced with it more times than I would like to remember. But we also have a lot of nice, smart, hard-working people of all ethnic groups. You’re bigotry is not helping the situation.
If you were upset by my comments, I must say that was not my intent. I read the rant Ed. J. posted from another site, and although it had plenty of vulgar language that some find offensive, I saw some humor in the rant. Perhaps because I spent considerable time in the old south visiting relatives as a kid, I have some direct knowledge of some of the most common stereotypic behaviors. The rant struck a chord if you know what I mean. If I offended, then I apologize. Humor stops being funny when feelings are hurt.
Don’t worry about it. There is some truth to the stereotypes, but that sort of rant tends to make people dig in just to be stubborn.
In general, ethnic jokes are only funny when the speaker and listener are both members of the group. It’s a shared experience then. Now, if you’re Polish, I might have some good jokes for you 😉
I have no use for the south.
Years ago Carl Oglesby wrote a book called The Yankee-Cowboy War which talked about this. Nixon’s Southern Strategy was part of it. The whole military subculture as a means of keeping control of the underpopulation (ie, slaves). Additionally, we have the oil industry, which has been driving our foreign policy over the last forty some years, which is based in the South (Texas and the Gulf Coast). More than additionally, the Big Oil has controlled our government since, uh, JFK was shot in Dallas.
Is the South losing its dominance? It’s not the South anymore, it’s Big Oil, Big Money, and Big Guns. And so far they haven’t let go.
Fifty years from now big oil will be much less of a player, unless they evolve into big solar and big biofuels. There’s also big pharma and big computer that are increasingly power hubs that have the old hubs running scared.
Big money will always be a big player, but even they will take a hit with climate change’s effect on the insurance industry. Of course, as Katrina showed, us little folks will take the brunt of the hit from climate change’s effect on weather.