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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsIs the South Dragging the Rest of the Nation Down?
Why poor white Southerners keep voting for policies that screw them and how this hurts the rest of the nation.
In 1978, out of college without a job and having failed to establish Birminghams version of The Village Voice, I took a job as advance man for the Alabama Republican Senate candidate.
One incident that stuck with me was a visit to campaign headquarters by a young Republican adviserI didnt recognize his name, but I remember that he strummed a guitar while talking to us. He told us, Dont ever use the words black and white in an argument. Always say liberal and conservative. Youll turn every argument about race into a political one. You do that, and race will start to disappear as an issue.
Our candidate, Jim Martin, lost the election to somebody named Donald Stewart, who was the very model of the politically ineffectual Democrat who would soon get steamrolled by the new Reagan-led Republican Party. Within a few years, however, Alabama would move, along with much of the South, from the Democratic to the Republican Party. But it was a case of rebranding rather than change. In less than a generation, every Wallace segregationist Democrat I knew had turned into a conservative Reagan Republican; as the guitar-picking adviser had predicted, race almost ceased to be a political issue and, as my friend the late journalist Paul Hemphill put it, George Wallaces role in framing the politics of the new South was obscured.
In 1978, out of college without a job and having failed to establish Birminghams version of The Village Voice, I took a job as advance man for the Alabama Republican Senate candidate.
One incident that stuck with me was a visit to campaign headquarters by a young Republican adviserI didnt recognize his name, but I remember that he strummed a guitar while talking to us. He told us, Dont ever use the words black and white in an argument. Always say liberal and conservative. Youll turn every argument about race into a political one. You do that, and race will start to disappear as an issue.
Our candidate, Jim Martin, lost the election to somebody named Donald Stewart, who was the very model of the politically ineffectual Democrat who would soon get steamrolled by the new Reagan-led Republican Party. Within a few years, however, Alabama would move, along with much of the South, from the Democratic to the Republican Party. But it was a case of rebranding rather than change. In less than a generation, every Wallace segregationist Democrat I knew had turned into a conservative Reagan Republican; as the guitar-picking adviser had predicted, race almost ceased to be a political issue and, as my friend the late journalist Paul Hemphill put it, George Wallaces role in framing the politics of the new South was obscured.
http://www.alternet.org/south-dragging-rest-nation-down
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Is the South Dragging the Rest of the Nation Down? (Original Post)
Pryderi
Jul 2013
OP
The south is a curse on America, the world would be a better place if it never existed as a concept
coldmountain
Jul 2013
#5
Hangingon
(3,071 posts)1. Could that guitar strumming guy be Harvey Leroy Atwater?
cali
(114,904 posts)2. first of all, why the South more than say
states like Texas and Oklahoma and Utah and South Dakota and...
I really think the south bashing is both counterproductive and repugnant.
coldmountain
(802 posts)5. The south is a curse on America, the world would be a better place if it never existed as a concept
Why people defend the concept of the south is beyond me.
cherokeeprogressive
(24,853 posts)3. Nnnnnnope
hobbit709
(41,694 posts)4. Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania.