The South’s victim complex: How right-wing paranoia is driving new wave of radicals

[G_j]

http://www.salon.com/2014/09/30/the_souths_victim_complex_how_right_wing_paranoia_is_driving_new_wave_of_radicals/

New wingnut pols may be laughed at as they enter Washington, D.C. But here's why their anger is deadly serious
MATTHEW PULVER

Southern voters will go to the polls in November 150 years, almost to the day, after Gen. Sherman commenced his March to the Sea, breaking the back of the Confederacy and leaving a burnt scar across the South. The wound never fully healed. Humiliation and resentment would smolder for generations. A sense of persecution has always mingled with the rebellious independence and proud notions of the South’s latent power, the promise that it “will rise again!” Congressman Paul Broun Jr., whose Georgia district spans nearly half of Sherman’s calamitous path to Savannah, evoked the “Great War of Yankee Aggression” in a metaphor to decry the Affordable Care Act on the House floor in 2010. The war, in Broun’s formulation, was not a righteous rebellion so much as a foreign invasion whose force still acts upon the South and its ideological diaspora that increasingly forms the foundation of conservatism.

The persecution narrative deployed by Broun, so woven into Southern culture and politics, has gained national currency. Contemporary conservatism is a Southern politics. Ironically, the Southern persecution narrative, born of defeat, has spread nationwide to form the basis of Republican victories since Reagan and the conservative hegemony that moderated President Clinton, establishing through President George W. Bush nearly 40 years of rightward movement at the national level. It is the South’s principal political export, now a necessary ideological substrate in Republican rhetoric. Lee Atwater, the Karl Rove of the Reagan era, explained the nationalization of Southern politics accomplished with the 1980 campaign and election of President Reagan: “The mainstream issues in [the Reagan] campaign had been, quote, ‘Southern’ issues since way back in the Sixties,” Atwater said in 1981. Likely the foremost representative of that Southern mood was Alabama’s George Wallace, who in his 1963 gubernatorial inaugural address, the infamous “Segregation Forever” speech, invoked Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis and raged that “government has become our god.” Just months later, that omnipotent force would defeat Wallace when President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and forced desegregation at the University of Alabama. Wallace, though, would be rewarded for his stand, and the governor carried five Deep South states in his 1968 presidential run.

A century after the Civil War and Reconstruction, the 1960s was a sort of second federal invasion, with the White House strong-arming Wallace, Supreme Court decisions finally implementing Brown’s desegregation order, and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts radically reshaping Southern politics and culture. “The South went from being behind the times to being the mainstream,” Atwater said. It is helpful to consider the inverse: The mainstream GOP adopted the ’60s-era mood of the South. Atwater does not suggest that the South caught up with a modernized conservatism — i.e., that it ceased to be “behind the times” — but that the larger movement regressed, albeit with rhetorical coding to evade charges of old-school racism.

Since Reagan, then, conservatism’s principal issues cannot be extricated from what animated them in the Southern milieu of their birth. The North, if now only a phantom, prefigured the foreign other always at work in the modern conservatism borrowed from the South. Every major issue is argued in terms of persecution and attack. The racial minority is not the oppressed subaltern but a threat, whether physical or fiscal. Liberatory advances for women and LGBT Americans are assaults upon the family. Religious pluralism and fortifications of the wall between church and state evoke biblical accounts of Christian persecution. Deviations from increasingly neoliberal capitalism are described as authoritarian socialism. Relaxation of military aggression, especially under Obama, is even seen as collusion with the enemy.

...more...

[Duppers]

1. Modern conservatism is borrowed from the South. Excellent article!

It's like a cancer or religion that has spread to all willfully ignorant, Fox watching parts of the country.

The good, the bad, the ugly continued:

Big business and national security Republicans of the party establishment, having benefited from the zeal brought by the martial politics of Southerners, can no longer control the emboldened rogues. The debt ceiling and shutdown episodes, pursued with crusade-like passion by conservative zealots, now frighten big business. Speaker John Boehner revealed the growing rift in a frank press conference after the 2013 shutdown, saying that Tea Party-affiliated groups have “lost all credibility.” Similarly, the intensifying isolationism of politicians like Sen. Rand Paul threatens Republican hawks’ long-standing hold on foreign policy matters.

The anger in the South is real and it's rising again.



(Note, I was born, grew up, and still live in the south and would like nothing better than for it to change; however, except for Virginia, year by year my hope grows dimmer.)

[G_j]

6. it's sad

because this mindset is so negative and hateful. But simply put, it starts with fear. FOX and others have cashed in on it, while helping to nuture it.

[WillyT]

2. K & R !!!

[G_j]

3. thanks

this had sunk with no replies.. good article

[WillyT]

4. Great Article !!!

[Duppers]

8. that's why I had to post

Another kick.

[MFrohike]

5. Yeesh

Salon really shouldn't let anyone but Michael Lind write about the south. It's always the left version of "terra terra terra" when they let somebody else do it.

[Duppers]

7. so, you disagree with things written in this article? nt

If so, what?

[MFrohike]

9. The hysterical ignorance

The author mistakes the flash for the fire. The stars and bars, race politics, and all that other shit is the same as it ever was: a smokescreen to hide the corruption and the looting. It wasn't any damn different when their ancestors were part of the Roosevelt coalition. That's why I say only Lind should write about the south. He's the only one who gets it.

He's also the only one who gets the fact that the anger, which is worldwide not only in the south, is a product of the insecurity of the times, not some mysteriously innate southern trait.

Oh, one other little thing: referencing Sherman in an article about the south is about as trite a cliche as one could imagine. Lewis Grizzard's politics may have been atrocious, but his editorial instinct was dead-on accurate about that stupid, and undying, reference.

[Duppers]

11. Okay, I give you the Sherman references

But having been born into southern culture 60-something years ago, I can tell you it's about racism and religion, not just the insecurity of the times.


(Btw, I'm usually not on speaking terms with my relatives and siblings for these reasons.)

[MFrohike]

14. It's a hype machine

Race and religion are important in the south, but not always in the way they're portrayed. They're almost like Linus' blanket for a great many people. It's easier to think that some "other" is to blame rather than realize that maybe dad was a damned fool when it came to politics. Maybe you should question exactly why the preacher needs a Mercedes. Maybe the civil war actually was about slavery, like the damned people who started it claimed it was (this one always kills me).

I say it's a hype machine because, like Linus' blanket, it's comforting but not terribly thick. The south has its radical history, not only on the wingnut side. Maybe the biggest general strike in American history was mostly concentrated in the south's cotton mills. Civil rights got its start here, mostly because it was the most obvious place not the only place (hi there, still wildly segregated north). Occupy had a pretty good presence in the south. Moral Mondays have spread from NC across the region. All that and I haven't even touched the colonial history, especially in NC, because I don't know it as well as I should.

My point is that southerners do occasionally rise up, but it's not against the rest of the country. It's against our own villains. The biggest problem seems to be that it's often disorganized and somewhat hamstrung by a fear of doing something against tradition. Those are pretty big hurdles to overcome. Add in the fact that you always have redneck thugs willing to shoot people in the street and always have corrupt cops willing to help them out (see the Greensboro Massacre) and it's a tough place to push any line that doesn't feed the corrupt and powerful. Maybe it'll always be that way, maybe not.

The south's become a pretty popular place to relocate in recent years and that may be a good thing. Sure, we get a good number of liberals and further left from other places, but what we really seem to attract are moron wingnuts. Maybe we don't get more of them, maybe they're just the loudest. Either way, I think they might, might I say, be a bit of a Godsend because they're so tone-deaf to how you do things in the south. Brash and insistent might work other places, but it doesn't work outside of the insane asylum of gerrymandered districts. I have a hope that these latter-day carpetbaggers might do a little good work by showing people the unvarnished nature of the modern conservative. I'd like to hold them up and ask if this is how people really want to act and have their children see them act. Oh, I would like that.

I don't know, maybe I'm just romantic about the south. Well, some of it. I don't think I'm terribly romantic about Mississippi or Alabama. I just see reasons for hope in my part of the country. I know some in the so-called blue states think they'd be better off without us, but I have to wonder. After all, Wall Street and Silicon Valley ain't in Atlanta or Charlotte. Social issues will never be an easy sell down here, though not as hard as some think, but the bedrock issues of liberalism, like making a living, will always sell if you do it with conviction.

[Duppers]

15. you are more optimistic than i am

I enjoyed reading your post. Thanks.
But I think they'll continue to vote against their own interests.

[MFrohike]

16. One more thing

It's an article a few years old, but it's got an important, and often forgotten, story of LBJ. Whether or not it's factually true, and with LBJ who knows, he captured one of the most essential truths of the south ever told.

http://www.creators.com/opinion/mark-shields/-lyndon-johnson-would-be-a-happy-man-today.html

Edit: Shields says it was a senator from Texas, but Johnson said the senator was from neither Texas nor Louisiana. It's not important, but I do like to be thorough.

[Duppers]

17. i remember.

Thanks again.

[Wounded Bear]

10. Not a bad write up, I guess, but...

I look more to the religiosity and hyperbole of the Christian "martyrs" out there than the Southern "problem." I know they're intertwined and both are real problems for our body politic, not just for the Republicans, but the national personality of this is religious, not regional IMHO.

[Duppers]

12. Bible Belt?

Or as I'm found of calling it, Buybull Belt.

The American Bible Society identified America's most "Bible-minded" cities, based on "highest combined levels of regular Bible reading and belief in the Bible's accuracy."

Their No. 1 pick? Knoxville, Tennessee.

The complete Top 10 *note they're in the South* :
#10. Charleston, W.Va
#9. Huntsville, Ala.
#8. Roanoke/Lynchburg, Va.
#7. Charlotte, N.C.
#6. Springfield, Mo.
#5. Jackson, Miss.
#4. Birmingham, Ala.
#3. Chattanooga, Tenn.
#2. Shreveport, La.
#1. Knoxville, Tenn.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/gleanings/2013/january/sorry-colorado-springs-top-10-most-bible-minded-cities-in.html

[reflection]

13. thoroughly enjoyed that. thanks n/t