When Common Sense Meets Mythology

Sure it was a cultural shock – imagine growing up in Pittsburgh then attending a small liberal arts college in Ohio in the last four years of the sixties, then heading off to graduate school in the South, or close enough. Durham, North Carolina, was sort of the south. Folks there still had a problem with the Civil War – that was always the Late Unpleasantness between the States – not a civil war, really, as they had been right about states’ rights – and the North had been pushy assholes. Driving down the way to Chapel Hill on Saturday mornings – there was a great bookstore there – the first stretch of road was the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway. You learned you didn’t make jokes about that.

You didn’t get used to it. It was like being in a time-warp, or in a foreign country – and the odd red clay and miles and miles of dark loblolly pines, thick to the hazy horizon, just made it all the more surreal. And grocery shopping at The Piggly-Wiggly or Winn-Dixie didn’t help matters. But somehow that was the real America, and it has been for a long time.

Over at the Economist, where the bloggers use pseudonyms or no names all, “Democracy in America” explains:

I’m a southerner myself, but I’ve spent the past twelve years outside the region (in Britain and in New York). When away, I realized in a visceral way, watching news from home, just how southern the top tiers of Washington had become. Everyone had the drawl of my high-school teachers. Bill Clinton (Arkansas) and Al Gore (Tennessee) duked it out with a Republican Congress led by Newt Gingrich (Georgia, who admittedly has no drawl), Dick Armey (Texas) and Trent Lott (Mississippi). Then Mr. Clinton gave way to George Bush (Texas), and after the Senate went briefly Democratic, it went Republican again, with Mr. Lott giving way to Bill Frist (Tennessee) and Mr. Armey to Tom DeLay (Texas). It was southerners in every position of power for an unusually long time.

Maybe they had won the Civil War.

But things have changed, as discussed here back in early August in The Ascendency of the South and Its Sad Decline:

Nixon had had his Southern Strategy – write off the black vote and win over the white Southern Democrats, so pissed off after Johnson had rammed through all that civil rights and voting rights legislation. That worked – they all came across to the Republicans. But Johnson had been a southerner too – Texas is close enough. After Nixon (and Ford) it was Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer from Georgia (with a degree in nuclear physics from Annapolis who should have commanded a nuclear submarine). The first Bush was an outlier, as was Reagan, but Bill Clinton was from Arkansas after all, and the second Bush pretended he was a good old boy from Texas. In all of this the North didn’t matter much. The South was at the center of everything. That was where America could be found.

Yep, forget the North – full of Jews and fags and people pretending to be all European or something, watching French art films and impressed with the likes of Woody Allen. And there were all those bleeding-heart liberals up there, all worried about how minorities felt about being mistreated, and worried about people owning guns. That wasn’t the real America. They didn’t even follow NASCAR.

And now we seem to have elected a black president, from a northern city, Chicago, the former star of the Harvard Law School (in Cambridge, on the edge of Boston). This wasn’t supposed to happen.

And then he put Sonya Sotomayor on the Supreme Court. Damn.

But that was August, and this is November. You’d think people would have settled down and accepted, or made do, with the new reality. Heck, nobly enduring your unfair and unjust exile, playing the oppressed and abused victim of The Man, has its rewards too. It’s a Southern thing. And it’s where most of the conservative right in America seems to be at the moment, over there with that other persecuted, abused and outnumbered tiny minority, evangelical Christians. They’re the last of the real Americans, in a country taken over by the riff-raff, uppity colored folks, sneering Mexicans, and communists and all that. It’s unpleasant, but it makes Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin rich. And playing the victim is its own reward.

But the months passed and you really didn’t expect the Flower of the South to sadly and silently fade in the shadows, did you? Of course not – and now Curt Levey, executive director of the rather far-right Committee for Justice say he really doesn’t approve of President Obama’s judicial nominees. There are the usual conservative reasons he is displeased – judicial activism, or insufficient recognition that the constitution is wholly based on the Bible and whatnot, on the part of those nominated so far – but his real issue is that there is a an appalling lack of southern white males among Obama’s selections.

Once again we have to wonder whether a Democratic bias against southern white men serving on the federal appeals courts is at work.

You see, this sure seems like racism:

Does President Obama or his advisors believe that southern white men are likely to be bigoted, making them unfit to serve on the second most powerful court in the land? We hope not and readily concede that it is difficult to know if any such stereotype lurks in the White House. The absence of southern white male circuit nominees could, instead, be an innocent coincidence or the not-so-innocent byproduct of a judicial selection process dominated by racial and gender preferences.

But regardless of the reason for the pattern we noted in 2007 and again now, even the appearance that Democrats are biased against southern white men is a potential problem for the party generally, and for President Obama’s goal of transcending old racial divisions. At the very least, the pattern merits further thought and discussion, both outside and inside the White House.

Levey specifically points to the southern circuits – the Fourth, Fifth and Eleventh. Southern white males need not apply. They are being unfairly excluded, or it feels as if they are, and that makes Obama and the Democrats look bad, which is the same thing that happens when the uncaring and brutal majority steamrolls a helpless minority.

Of course, over at Right Wing Watch, someone decided to look at the relevant numbers – of the thirty-seven seats in these circuits, twenty are already filled by white guys from the region, who would be actual southern white men. Of the one hundred fifty-seven circuit court seats nationwide, ninety-five seats are filled by white dudes. That adds some difficulty when you try to make the case that the president is neglecting an unrepresented “minority” – white guys – when they already represent a majority. But of course he’s not saying whites are a minority, just being treated like one, and it doesn’t hurt to try. Someone always wants to be angry, and you can help them out by telling them they’re being passed over. Well, not them specifically, but someone like them is getting screwed by the new uncaring and brutal majority, of people who look funny and talk funny.

At American Prospect, Adam Serwer adds this:

Just to put this in perspective, a whopping 18 percent of judges on the federal bench are people of color. But in the eyes of this conservative group, assigning more white men to the federal bench “transcends racial divisions” and that doing otherwise reflects a selection process “dominated by racial and gender preferences.”

Conservatives regularly try to cast affirmative action as racially discriminatory, but rarely does someone openly admit that their only issue with the process is simply who is being discriminated against.

But it almost had to happen. A rift opened up, as Andrew Sullivan here flags some startling numbers from the Daily Kos State of the Nation Poll – Barack Obama’s favorability/unfavorability rating is 28/67 in the South, compared to 68/23 in the “rest of the USA.” As Sullivan says, “America is not just two countries right now; it sometimes feels like two universes.”

So how and why is the South so badly out of step with the rest of the country?

For that, another Economist blogger without a byline but writing from Austin, down in Texas, offers this:

Another way of looking at the poll numbers linked above is that the South isn’t just sour on Mr. Obama. They’re disaffected about everything. Unsurprisingly, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are unpopular; they actually fare worse than Mr. Obama. But so are Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, albeit to a lesser extent: Mr. Boehner gets 26% favorable / 36% unfavorable. Congressional Republicans are at 30/47. The only thing that southerners favor more than disfavor is the Republican Party, and even that isn’t getting majority support (48/37).

So what is going on here, what has put the South “into this season of discontent” or whatever?

This writer offers a few suggestions:

First, obviously, the South skews Republican and both the White House and Congress are Democratic. (During the Bush years the Northeast would have suffered from similar malaise.) Second, a lack of national leadership. None of the key players in the health-care debate, for example, are Southerners. Outside of DC, you occasionally hear the name of Newt kicked around, but with Rick Perry focused on his gubernatorial campaign, and Bobby Jindal still laying low, and Mark Sanford doing the same, you don’t see a lot of Southern leaders onstage these days.

But mostly he sees “a muted national profile” here, where the South doesn’t much matter:

An issue like climate change affects all of us, but it does not have a particularly southern angle. And the states that are getting the most individual attention are places like Michigan and California and Nevada. Not that you would want to be in the news for having an especially bad economic meltdown, but it does seem that the South has been largely ignored for about the past year. Maybe even longer, as states in the Deep South were not battlegrounds in the last presidential election.

Maybe that’s it, but “Democracy in America” adds more:

In 2006, things started to go wrong. Nancy Pelosi (California) and Harry Reid (Nevada) took over the top jobs in Congress. Then Barack Obama (Illinois) was elected president, and declined to balance his ticket regionally by picking a southerner. …

But the Republican leadership shifted too. The party ran two non-southerners for president and vice-president in John McCain and Sarah Palin. The RNC is now run by a black Marylander, Michael Steele. The House minority leader, John Boehner, hails from Ohio. The whip’s job has gone to Eric Cantor who, though Virginian, is an atypical southern Republican in being Jewish. Only Mitch McConnell (Kentucky), the Senate majority leader, is the stereotypical white Protestant southerner. His whip and assistant, John Kyl, comes from Arizona.

Everyone knows where that led:

“I want my country back,” has become a conservative-populist rallying cry. They have not truly lost their country, but have seen a wild swing of power north and towards the coasts. It won’t last, either. But it’s a painful reality right now for a region that once reveled in separatism, then dominated the country as a whole for an oddly long stretch.

See Kevin Drum from just after the election last November:

For many years, the Democratic Party controlled the agenda of American politics and Southerners controlled much of the Democratic Party. So the South had enormous political influence.

Later, most Southerners switched to the Republican Party, but by then it was Republicans who controlled the agenda of American politics. So the South still had enormous political influence.

As of January 20th, however, the Democratic Party will control the American political agenda once again. But Southerners are still Republicans, which means that their political influence will be nearly nonexistent.

In other words, for the first time since Reconstruction, the South will be almost completely shut out of national power.

At the time, Drum considered this a big deal:

There are still a few liberal Southerners who belong to the Democratic Party, of course, but the reactionary, traditionalist South is, for the time being, nearly powerless. They will not control anything, their caucus is a discredited rump, and their influence will be negligible. There is no reason to fear them or to care what they think. Their power to filibuster, itself guttering and only barely alive following the 2008 election, will be all they have left.

This is the first time this will be true in well over a century. So say it again: The South will have essentially no influence over the course of American politics for the next eight years.

We live in momentous times.

And now, a year later, with Curt Levey and his Committee for Justice making their noble stand for the Sothern White Man, Drum says this:

Despite the oceans of ink spent analyzing the electoral shift in 2006 and 2008, I continue to think this transformation has been underappreciated. The Old South has punched above its weight in American politics ever since 1787, and during the few times their influence has temporarily waned (Reconstruction, the 60s) it drove them crazy with fear and persecution mongering. So it’s not really surprising that it’s happening again.

Drum just can’t see what happens next:

Republicans are the party of the South these days, and sure, the GOP will regain power eventually. But will they be able to do it if they remain a party dominated by the culture of Dixie? Demographics suggest pretty strongly that they can’t, which means that eventually the South will have to come to grips with the fact that they no longer hold the whip hand in American politics and probably never will again. This means acknowledging that they’re just another region, one with influence that waxes and wanes but basically corresponds to their population.

I wonder how long it will take for them to do that.

Kevin Drum lives down the coast in Irvine, California. He doesn’t get the South at all.

Think of the South as just another region? They will never acknowledge that. The South will rise again.

And oddly, that’s a matter beyond politics. It’s a matter of a long-standing mythology. You know Gone with the Wind:

There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South… Here in this pretty world Gallantry took its last bow… Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave… Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered. A Civilization gone with the wind…

How are you going to fight that? Common sense is powerless when you’re dealing with a mythology that may be the only thing left to cling to these days. Challenge it at your peril. Or ignore it, as that works just as well when you’re dealing with those seduced by it, and who just aren’t that important these days.