Reply #11: Here's what Nick Lemann says about trial lawyers and the south: [View All]

[AP]

http://blog.johnedwards2004.com/comments.pl?sid=2432&op=&newsid=04/02/22/2258208&threshold=0&commentsort=1&mode=nested&cid=100444


In most places, liberal politics rests on labor unions—but not in the South, because it is a region where unions are weak, and where industries came, in part, to avoid unions. Non-economic liberalism, based on causes like environmentalism, legal abortion, and gun control, doesn't work in the South, either, because it is such a socially conservative region. The South does, however, still have a deeply ingrained underdog consciousness, and one place where that manifests itself is in the personal-injury courtroom. Throughout much of the South, trial lawyers are, in effect, the left: an influential group that, instead of converting populist sentiment into redistributionist legislation, converts it into big rewards for a small number of people who have stories of having been screwed by powerful, uncaring figures. Big jury verdicts in tort cases are what the South has instead of unions. It does not seem at all far-fetched to imagine that this version of liberalism could someday reach a national audience. The country is moving more and more toward a courtroom-style politics of anecdote.

On television, traditional evening-news broadcasts have lost viewers, and "news-magazine" shows often have the feeling of news as tort law, featuring narratives of individuals fighting back against doctors and corporations. Tort-law movies like "Erin Brockovich" and "A Civil Action" are a popular new genre. The airwaves are full of conservative populists railing against the liberal élite, and their force is much more a function of how dramatic their stories and their rhetoric are than of their actual circumstances. (Bill O'Reilly is no less effective as a populist for being rich than John Edwards is.) A climactic moment in every State of the Union Message is the introduction of the heroic "real people" sitting in the gallery next to the First Lady.

Presidential campaigns are always presented as being about the larger-than-lifeness of the candidate, but they embody something going on in the society, too. Edwards is a political novice who aims at communicating to people one wouldn't ordinarily think of as populists—middle-class and lower-middle-class suburbanites—that he completely gets it ("it" being the way the big guys are messing with their lives), and that he's going to do something about it. As a candidate, he is placing a bet that there's much more aggrievement around in the lone superpower than most people think. No matter how his candidacy turns out, he may well be betting right.