My time in South Carolina has been restricted to a few trips to Hilton Head Island I took with my family when I was a small child and numerous trips where all I saw was the interstate and a few rest stops as I transited through. I’m no expert on the Palmetto State. But there are some things I think I know about it. The people are very conservative. They have a natural suspicion of Yankees. They have your typical Southern manners and are generally polite.
None of this would predict any affinity for a blowhard Manhattanite insult-dog of a candidate like Donald Trump. Yet, he’s crushing the competition down there, including even their own senator, Lindsey Graham.
And I have only one explanation for that and it’s the same one that led them to fire on Fort Sumter and for Strom Thurmond to react to the integration of the army by running for president as a Dixiecrat.
I’m sorry, but there it is.
“South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.”–James L. Petigru
what I find humorous is that overt racism per se is not socially acceptable these days on the teevee and yet the south is choc full of hardcore racist who would bring back slavery in a minute if they could get away with it. they’re seething with hate and yet can’t express it in the public square without being called out. now along comes the Donald with his bullhorn-not-dogwhistle style of campaigning and they love it. it’s an outlet for their pent up racism that can’t be expressed in public settings but is deeply held and cherished.
It doesn’t help that the Democratic Party is completely dysfunctional and a non-entity in a lot of the South. So people rarely hear any push-back on the Limbaughisification of the GOP.
pretty soon they’ll come full circle and be right back to Atwater’s ni*er ni*er form of campaigning. highly effective ’cause it works down there. never been more glad to be raised a yank thru&thru. it’s going to take generations for the hate to subside, and that’s once they stop teaching it to the young ‘uns. easier to stay the F away.
And increasingly seemingly in the hands of white Democrats who want to keep it that way.
The SC AA population (as a percentage) is declining. Latinos now 5%.
off topic but of interest
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/boehner-looking-to-move-debt-ceiling-bill-soon-214791
House Speaker John Boehner is looking to move a bill to lift the debt ceiling before he leaves Congress, a tactic aimed at helping his successor, according to multiple sources with knowledge of internal party planning
Trump leading in SC makes no less sense than their two current and elected by decent margin Senators. Superficially socially conservative with a huge heaping of denial. From Strom’s mixed race “secret” child, an Indian-American female governor, the referenced sitting Senators, and House win for “hiking the Appalachian trail” former governor, it doesn’t get much more
Gothic than that.
Except for a bunch of their historical predecessors. The South Carolina term is “colorful”.
A little too early to read what this means. Only 38% of likely voters (curious as to what a “likely voter” screen looks like this far out) support Trump in South Carolina. While that might be over half of white voters, the category “likely” is where GOTV efforts try to push the envelope wider. In addition, 60% of Republicans in South Carolina are not yet firm in their choice.
What white middle-class South Carolina in the upstate and Charleston urban areas is like is a mess of contradictions right now. And politics is less salient and more of rah-rah team sport than, well, team sports. And political season becomes the trash-talking season, just as the run-up to the big game becomes trash-talking even among close friends. That is, politics has always been so reduced in scope in South Carolina (even at the height of the “progressive” governors of the 1960s and 1970s who stood aside for desegregation) that it becomes a pastime instead of serious policy. That is what keeps it the once-and-future one-party state that functions like the weather–that thing in Columbia that no one can do anything about. But the team symbols are taken very seriously, and the Confederate flag coming under attack fronts for unwillingness to further desegregate.
Folks there understand that they rank next-to-last in almost everything of value, but defensively reassert that they are good God-fearing people who treat each other well and are there for each other and “don’t burn down their own communities”….you can guess the rest of that line of thinking.
At this point, those who are telling pollsters that they are supporting Trump are wanting to rile the Yankees whether that is the way they actually act in the primary or the general election.
What is striking about this news is the fall of Ben Carson, who was a favorite back in the summer.
Church-based, chain-email politics drives a lot of it. Good-ole-boy litmus testing and conformance-enforcing drives a lot of it. There is a fear and a practice of excommunication or informal shunning that goes on with people who stray too far from consensus thinking. Those are not unusual small town attitudes, even in other parts of the country. But in South Carolina, the suburbs around even the largest cities in the state are fragmented enough to have the same attitudes, in part because a lot of the residents of those suburbs are country and small town folk come to the big city to seek their fortune.
The shift from traditional churches to politicized churches and entrepreneurial politicized megachurches also has hardened some previously shifting attitudes.
Tell the pollster what he wants to hear is the most likely thing going on even if in the end they go for Trump. Sometime around August, things turned particularly looney in South Carolina; I don’t know whether that was when some of the campaigns cranked up.
Also, blowhard is a common good-ole-boy style. A lot of South Carolinians love Trump for the same reasons they loved Jesse Helms. White conservative South Carolinians love it when the media (or liberals) are outraged about something. It’s a big hoot for them.
You know better than anyone that Jesse was a North Carolinian. Who’s a South Carolina equivalent?
Oh, Strom, of course.
South Carolinians loved Jesse Helms even if they couldn’t vote for him. His era fueled the Republican takeover of the state.
For South Carolina blowhards, you have to go back decades (unless you want to elevate Joe “You Lie” Wilson’s stature). Cotton Ed Smith was one that bedeviled FDR and the New Deal. And “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman was the murderer who pushed through the Jim Crow laws in the 1890s, began regulation of alcohol (state dispensary system), and established Clemson College (from 1963, Clemson University) as a state land-grant military agricultural and technical college. Those are the post-bellum legendary blowhards.
My time in South Naziland was even more restricted than yours. Fortunately, my extremely racist step-father actually hated the south more than I did (he was raised in Mississippi in the summers) so I wasn’t forced to vacation in South-Africa-in-America like you were. I drove through once in 1984. That was enough, thanks.
Polite? Fuck. Lots of places are polite. Spend some time outside Joisey and you’ll see that. There is really nothing special there except extreme racism that supports an extreme wealth inequality, with a 250 year heritage to support it.
Changes are always present everywhere and South Carolina is not exempted.
my reading comp scores were ok but what does this even mean? that incremental change is happening to the south and it’s actually getting better there for peeps not of the caucasian persuasion? maybe we just see the worst of what the south has to offer and I should be a bit more <<pppffffffffttttt>> – yeah, tell me another one. those fuckers aren’t gonna change their minds about black people for another three centuries. how long has it been already – 150 years?