The Bad South

Much effort has been expended by Northerners to understand the Southern mind. Is the South fundamentally different from the rest of the country? Sara Robinson's article in Alternet is a recent attempt to dissect what in the world is going on south of the Mason-Dixon line. Conservative Southern Values Revived: How a Brutal Strain of American Aristocrats Have Come to Rule America separates the average southerner from the elites that shape generalizations in the region and how they project elite values onto the nation. Robinson's article is well-researched and builds on established, if sometimes controversial, scholarship about the American South. Of particular interest is her interpretation of southern "liberty," which is very different from the definition we normally think of and shows how language is such a powerful device in politics.

"When a Southern conservative talks about "losing his liberty," the loss of this absolute domination over the people and property under his control -- and, worse, the loss of status and the resulting risk of being held accountable for laws that he was once exempt from -- is what he's really talking about. In this view, freedom is a zero-sum game. Anything that gives more freedom and rights to lower-status people can't help but put serious limits on the freedom of the upper classes to use those people as they please. It cannot be any other way. So they find Yankee-style rights expansions absolutely intolerable, to the point where they're willing to fight and die to preserve their divine right to rule." (emphasis mine)

Though Robinson does not explicitly state it, this definition of liberty and freedom is what teabaggers screech about at their rallies, and on tv, and on the radio, and in their books, articles, and pamphlets. The rest of us understand their ideas about freedom and liberty as privilege, especially the "fervent belief among these elites that they should completely escape any legal or social accountability for any harm they cause." Think Abu Graib. This is also why when you ask an epsilon semi-moron teabagger what rights or freedom they have lost, you get shouted down because they cannot actually think of one. Elite attitudes are only one dimension of the bad south, as I argued in my Reconstruction post the values of absolute control over others with zero accountability or responsibility seeped from southern planters to northern industrialists.

The South cannot be understood one-dimensionally. I do not mean to generalize too broadly, but to understand what has happened to America we need a starting point. My best friend in the Army was from Charleston, S.C. and he was nothing like the elites described by Robinson. Nor were many other Southerners I knew then. Even the Texans were not all chest-puffing braggots. If you stripped away the manufactured labels, guys from all over had a lot in common even if most of these commonalities involved beer and girls. The point being that many of our attitudes are artificial, the elites go to great lengths to impose their values on the rest of society. Allan Kulikoff examined some of these propaganda campaigns in Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800. Robinson more or less described the elite of the deep south as importing a slave state mentality from the Caribbean, but colonial Barbados had more in common with ancient Sparta than Virginia. Except the color of Caribbean helots, planters and their minions had to practice martial values and remain ever vigilant against the possiblity of a revolt just as the Spartans did. Kulikoff explained that in the Chesapeake, the planters brought in African slaves for the expressed purpose of creating a dispised laboring class that lower-status whites could feel superior to. This is the foundation of attitudes today that always look down instead of up for the source of problems.

Four centuries of reinforcing the class war frame has left an indelible and lasting tradition of racial animosity in America. What Robinson exposed in her analysis of the cruel plantation elite's value structure is the incredible privilege that coincides with deep paranoia and suspicion of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. She quoted Colin Woodward that "Deep Southern culture was based on radical disparities in wealth and power, with a tiny elite commanding total obedience and enforcing it with state-sponsored terror." Today "[o]ur police are being given paramilitary training and powers that are completely out of line with their duty to serve and protect, but much more in keeping with a mission to subdue and suppress." Robinson also echoed Thomas Frank's characterization of trader louts giving the "giant middle finger to their guests" through conspicuous and deeply private consumption. Writing "Southern elites sank their money into ostentatious homes and clothing and the pursuit of pleasure -- including lavish parties, games of fortune, predatory sexual conquests, and blood sports involving ritualized animal abuse spectacles."

To be continued...