Colin Woodard’s big piece in next month’s Washington Monthly is an interesting read. I’m not too enamored with these efforts to explain everything by reference to regionalism, but the article is thought-provoking. There’s one part of it that really resonated with me. It’s the part where he discusses the culture of the Deep South and how it explains what we’re seeing from the Republican Party right now.
The Deep South
Established by English slave lords from Barbados as a West Indies-style slave society, this region has been a bastion of white supremacy, aristocratic privilege, and a version of classical Republicanism modeled on the slave states of the ancient world, where democracy was the privilege of the few and enslavement the natural lot of the many. It spread apartheid and authoritarianism across the southern lowlands, ultimately encompassing most of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana, plus western Tennessee and southeastern Arkansas, Texas, and North Carolina. Its slave and caste systems smashed by outside intervention, it continues to fight for rollbacks of federal power, taxes on capital and the wealthy, and environmental, labor, and consumer safety protections.
And:
The goal of the Deep Southern oligarchy has been consistent for four centuries: to control and maintain a oneparty state with a colonial-style economy based on largescale agriculture and the extraction of primary resources by a compliant, low-wage workforce with as few labor, workplace safety, health care, and environmental regulations as possible. Not until the 1960s was it compelled by African American uprisings and external intervention to abandon caste, sharecropper, and poll tax systems designed to keep the disadvantaged majority of their region’s population out of the political process. Since then, they have relied on fearmongering— over racial mixing, gun control, illegal immigrants, and the alleged evils of secularization—to maintain support. In office they’ve instead focused on cutting taxes for the rich, funneling massive subsidies to agribusiness and oil companies, rolling back labor and environmental programs, and creating “guest worker” programs and “right to work” laws to ensure a cheap, compliant labor supply.
I’m sure many will object to Woodard’s harsh characterization of the Deep South, as well as some of his history, but it’s hard to argue that he’s wrong about the big picture. It’s really quite remarkable how the Deep South has been able to move from a one-party Democratic region to a (nearly) one-party Republican region. I hadn’t really thought about it before, but there’s something strange about that. It’s like their culture can’t really tolerate political instability, and it’s not all that interested in democracy. I suppose that makes sense because they’ve always felt that their way of life is under threat, which means they have to stick together. It also might explain why Republican politicians like Mike Huckabee are so fond of voter suppression. Seriously, it’s been remarkable how aggressively and unapologetically the Republicans have turned to voter suppression over the last couple of years. It seems totally foreign to me, as if it isn’t something that should ever happen in this country, and then I realize that the GOP is now carrying the heritage of Jim Crow. It’s the party of the Deep South, and it’s beginning to act in ways that just don’t compute for most of the country.
We don’t want to be treated like sharecroppers. We don’t want to be governed by people like Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.
