Ignorant Southern Right Wing Mouth Breathers Hate Themselves More Than They Hate America

[AlleyCat]

Is 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
Birmingham’s 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 adviser—I didn’t recognize his name, but I remember that he
strummed a guitar while talking to us. He told us, “Don’t ever use the words
‘black’ and ‘white’ in an argument. Always say ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative.’
You’ll 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 Wallace’s role in framing
the politics of the new South was obscured.”

I thought of these words while reading Chuck Thompson’s “Better Off Without
’Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession.” Or rather, rereading. On
its release in August, I dismissed it because the author is rude and obnoxious
and because his chapter on football in the South is utterly lacking in logic
and sound history. Thompson doesn’t think that the Alabama Crimson Tide has
the greatest tradition in college football. But I digress. (More on football
later.)

Over the past months, however, I’ve become more convinced by Thompson’s main
argument, that the South—the states that comprised the Old Confederacy—should
not only be allowed to secede, but both countries created by the split would
be better off.

Most of Thompson’s main points are in the first 40 pages:

—“It’s too bad that we just didn’t let the South secede when we had the
chance.”

—“Everyone has joked about a modern-day secession. Politicians, like Texas
Governor and presidential hopeful Rick Perry, have even threatened it. But
what would the measurable impact be if it actually happened? … In fact, for
both sides, an exciting by-product of separation would be an explosion of
southern tourism. … ”

—“With time, Americans would start thinking of the South as another Mexico,
only with a more corrupt government.”

—“The South has operated like a competing nation in cannibalizing and
degrading Michigan and the American auto industry.”

—“ … [A] union based on such a diametrically opposed approach to social
organization—uncompromising Bible literalism versus protean secular law—is
like a bad marriage that needs to end in order to save the children. … “

—“All these gloom and doomers … whining about a world on the brink of
extinction are descendants of the Lost Cause defeatism fostered and fetishized
in post Civil War southern churches. …”

Let me interject: Ever since the rise of the Nashville Fugitives, a group of
poets, novelists and historians who met at Vanderbilt University in the 1920s,
it’s been a popular argument among Southern academics that the Civil War
wasn’t fought over slavery but in defense of states’ rights. (I’ll never
forget the Birmingham News’ 1963 Civil War centennial issue that proclaimed
“The True Story of the Heroic Struggle for States’ Rights.”) This ties into
one of the primary myths being hammered home to white school kids in the
South: that because slavery only benefited the rich and not the common
soldier/farmer, the latter did not believe he went to war in defense of
slavery.

As historian James M. McPherson noted, the leaders of the Confederacy were
clear before the war that they were quite willing to fight for slavery. Here’s
McPherson from his essay “The War of Southern Aggression” in The New York
Review of Books (Jan. 19, 1989): “Whether or not they owned productive
property, all southern whites owned the most important property of all—a white
skin. This enabled them to stand above the mudsill of black slavery and
prevented them from sinking into the morass of inequality, as did wage workers
and poor men in the North.”



I don’t think racism is the cardinal sin of the South, and it certainly isn’t
exclusive to the South. The South’s cardinal sin is in pretending that racism
didn’t cause the Civil War, and that racism doesn’t survive as a major issue.

On this point Thompson is unrelenting. “We can no longer afford to wait on the
South to get its racial shit together,” he writes. “It’s time to move on, let
southerners sort out their own mess free from the harassment of northern
moralizers.” This is pretty much what William Faulkner wrote in more eloquent
terms some 60 years ago. And, as we approach the 150th anniversary of the
battles of Vicksburg and Gettysburg, Thompson finds plenty of Southerners who
think, as one of them tells him, “We’re on the verge of a civil war.” Thompson
asks, “Between North and South?” The answer: “Between conservative and
liberal.”

It’s attitudes like this that keep white Southerners from understanding that
year after year, decade after decade, they support policies that don’t help
them. “Rank-and-file southern voters—who have lower average incomes than other
Americans—resoundingly defeated Barack Obama in 2008; the eventual president
carried just 10, 11, and 14 percent of the white vote in Alabama, Mississippi,
and Louisiana respectively,” Thompson writes. “An influential percentage of
poor, uneducated, underserved, insurance-less white southerners continue to
cast votes for candidates whose agendas clearly conflict with their own self
interest.” What Thompson doesn’t do—what I’ve never seen anyone do—is offer a
valid explanation for why white Southerners ally themselves with the party
that treats them contemptuously.



Whites in the South overwhelmingly support right-to-work laws, which Thompson
defines, correctly, as “the Orwellian euphemism for ‘the right for companies
to disregard the welfare of their workers.’ ” According to a 2009 survey by
Grand Valley State University, annual salaries for autoworkers in Alabama,
Tennessee and South Carolina averaged about $55,400, while their counterparts
in Michigan averaged $74,500. Thompson notes that Southern blue-collar workers
also have “inferior health and pension plans, less job security, higher risk
of being fired for trivial reasons, and diminished safety precautions. … ”

Not only are Southern workers hurt by their anti-union attitudes, the whole
nation suffers. “Southern economic success,” writes Thompson, “comes at the
expenseof the rest of the country.” By luring foreign manufacturers to
Southern states with promises of cheap labor, “The South is bad for the
American economy in the same way that China and Mexico are bad for the
American economy. By keeping corporate taxes low, public schools underfunded,
and workers’ rights to organize negligible, it’s southern politicians who make
it so. … [The South] is an in-house parasite that bleeds the country far more
than it contributes to its collective health.”

That leads to what is for me the single most baffling 21st century paradox
about the South. The region, home to nine of the nation’s 10 poorest states,
is rabidly against government spending, yet all of its states get far more in
government subsidies than they give back in taxes, as pointed out by Sara
Robinson in a 2012 piece for AlterNet, "Blue States Are the Providers, Red
States Are the Parasites."

I live in a blue state, New Jersey, where we get about 70 cents back for every
dollar in taxes we send to Washington. I work several days out of my year to
support Southern states as well as Western red states like New Mexico and
Arizona, which can’t support themselves. Is Kentucky a Southern state? Well,
it’s red, and it receives $1.57 from the feds for every buck it pays. How does
its senator, Rand Paul, justify this?

“The hard fact,” writes Thompson, “is that the South simply does not pull its
own weight.”

I wish I didn’t have to come back to Thompson’s football argument, but he’s
completely and obviously wrong, and unfortunately this chapter has been the
most quoted from “Better Off Without ’Em.”

Thompson argues that “Between 1950 and 1997 only nine southern teams were
crowned as undisputed national champions.” He seems unaware that until the
Bowl Championship Series started in 1998, just about every year more than one
team was chosen No. 1 by various polls. Having family ties to Notre Dame,
Thompson resents that in 1973 the Alabama Crimson Tide was voted the national
champions by UPI, despite the fact that the Fighting Irish beat Alabama 24-23
in the Sugar Bowl. I guess he isn’t old enough to remember 1966, when
defending champion Alabama finished 11-0 and was still outvoted in the AP and
UPI polls by a 9-0-1 Notre Dame.

He insists that the SEC has been regarded as the nation’s top football
conference for so long because “It’s better than other conferences at media
manipulation.” I wonder what Thompson thought this past January when Alabama
manipulated the media into thinking it had crushed Notre Dame 42-14 in the BCS
title game.

Thompson is right that we are two separate countries with irreconcilable
differences on health care, gun control, abortion laws, gay marriage, voter
registration, subsidies for education, the role of religion in society, the
definition of patriotism and the importance of unions. It could be an amicable
divorce where everyone gets what they want: Southerners want the federal
government to stop spending so much money and get out of their lives, and we
in the Northeast would pay lower taxes because we would no longer have to
support the poorest states in the country. All the crackpots and phonies who
vied for the Republican nomination for president last year—Rick Santorum,
Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Ron Paul and for
good measure I’ll toss in Sarah Palin—were taken seriously only because the
potential nominee would have all the Southern states on their side of the
ledger. (When someone reminds Thompson that Palin is not from the South, he
responds, “Hitler wasn’t from Germany, either. Palin wouldn’t exist if not for
the South.”)

Let all the other states decide which country they want to be part of, and if
Texas really believes it can be self-sufficient, let it declare itself an
independent republic.

To Thompson’s credit, Southerners are allowed their comments. “I think,” one
of them tells him, “you all would be dull as shit without us.” That guy is
right. So much of American culture comes from the South: writers Edgar Allan
Poe, Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Flannery O’Connor, to say nothing of our
music—blues, jazz, country, rock ‘n’ roll. But if we did split into two
countries, we’d still get to enjoy all that culture. Being separated by a
3,000-mile ocean didn’t keep the Brits from loving rock ‘n’ roll.

One of Thompson’s interviewees tells him, “The most fundamental flaw I see in
your scenario is the South has come to really embody the real patriotic
America. If we secede, the USA would become Canada South. We are the real
USA.” I might agree if I saw Southerners expressing their patriotism on any
subject other than war. In any event, it’s of no concern to me who gets to be
the real USA—maybe the competition would do us both good. And right now, to be
frank, Canada South sounds pretty good.