Posted on 05/23/2002 8:52:25 AM PDT by stainlessbanner
Pinnnggggg!!
Well OK here it is in a nutshell...
I would have fought for the South, since I'm Suthrun and whatnot, but I think the North HAD to win in order for this country to advance economically...
I don't know about interstate migration, but the Germans and Irish shunned the South.
This will be news to the Germans who flocked to Texas after the Texas Revolution (signs advising people of San Antonio ordinances were posted on the bridges across the river, in Spanish, English, and German) and who continued to speak German until World War 2 (Chester Nimitz was one of them); or to the German Jews who populated the Katy Prairie west of Houston after the Civil War and gave the city many of its peculiar road names (Silber, Westheimer, Voss, Bingle, etc.). But if more of them migrated to the Northern States than to the Southern, I don't know about the Germans, but it would be so among the Irish because word passed back to the Old Sod pretty quickly when New Orleans Irish began to die like flies in yellowjack and cholera outbreaks.
Who would put up with the disrespect for physical labor and working people that slavery inspired....
Oh, you mean, like strikebreaking and unionbreaking? And using freed blacks and immigrants as scab labor, fortified by swarms of heavily armed Pinkertons, to accomplish the same?
The people who run things in the world today are more and more similar......But governors are almost always solid, conformist types.
Jerry Brown. Jesse Ventura. Edwin Edwards. Dixie Lee Ray. Evan Mecham. The recent governor of Montana whose name I can't recall. Billy Jeff Clinton. Yeah, I know what you mean.
Nations, states and cities are all in competition with each other for investment. Those who win are those who make the best appeal to bankers and CEOs, and the culture of bankers and CEOs today is very different from what it was fifty or a hundred years ago. It is much more of a "liberal," permissive culture. The media and technology also play a role here.
This is the discussion we had above, in which I quoted from James Q. Wilson's essay in The New Urban Politics (Ed. Douglas M. Fox, Goodyear Publishing, 1972) about the difference between "constituency" and "audience". This would seem to be a major area for reform, rather like the British reform of the "rotten borough" system, in order to bring the officeholders back to accountability to the constituents rather than to the audience who are sometimes called, euphemistically, "stakeholders" -- but who have no right, under the laws of a republic, to call the shots as they do, using as their tools the inducements, inevitably, of money and more money.
Your Bush example seems to support my point better than yours.
I was making the point that the Bush family, and their supporters in Texas politics going back two generations, have performed for a Yankee "audience", in the terms that James Q. Wilson used in The New Urban Politics.
But every ten years or so Time Magazine brings me the "Face of the New South," Carter, Clinton, now Edwards.
Yeah, the Northern press is killing off the South and introducing a "New South" that looks like the North every generation or so. The Eastern media are the most enthusiastic players, but the scalawag press in the South, led by the execrable, Southerner-hating, white-baiting Atlanta Constitution (which has the mendacious gall to call itself, on its masthead, "The South's Standard Newspaper": yeah, they're a "standard", all right -- a Yankee battle-flag, carried by one of those black regiments that burned Georgia), also likes to play at burying the South and pronouncing a "new South" every few years. The fact that they keep having to do it again every few years shows they're failing -- and that they're lying SOB's. But Southerners don't pay that stuff much mind, they've heard it all before.
But if you really are to be an independent and prosperous state, what political base is there for the Tillmans, or Watsons, or Wallaces?
The same one that elected Jesse Helms and Phil Gramm to multiple terms -- although Gramm isn't a good example, since he worked for the East Coast banks and the Fortune 500 and was therefore a scalawag, nevertheless the people voted for him because he came down to Texas to campaign as a populist fighting for "Dicky Flatt" (a real person, by the way, whom Gramm appropriated after Flatt, a small businessman, wrote him a letter about his regulatory woes).
But there are Southern congressmen aplenty out there -- the ones the Northern papers complain about as unlettered boobs (if they were lettered and knew anything, they'd read us and obey!) -- who do what the people want, more or less, and don't kowtow to Washington. Ron Paul is a good example in the Houston area, and there are others. And if there's another opening for a "Pitchfork" Tillman, well, hell, I might just apply for the job myself. Haven't anything better to do at the moment. ;^P
To the latter question, his answer appears to be, "in the short run, yes, they could have -- but in the long run, either 'no', or 'it wouldn't have made any difference'." I think that's what he said. He will correct me if I've muffed it.
Now, if I could get you to answer my question about the "Suitors of Penelope"......you remember what happened to them after Odysseus and his companions closed and bolted the doors. Is that what the States got, when they ratified the Constitution? Were they trapped in a locked room with a federal predator?
I love the "unanimous" piece. The state of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations REFUSED to attend. Numerous delegates left, among them John Lansing and fellow New York delegate Robert Yates.
Originally, 70 delegates were selected to attend, but many could not (or would not attend), among them Richard Henry Lee, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Samuel Adams and John Hancock. Of the 55 delegates who did attend the Constitutional Convention sessions only 39 actually signed the Constitution.
Attending but not signing were:
Oliver Ellsworth (CT) - left early
William Houston (GA) - left early
William L. Pierce (GA) - business was failing
Luther Martin (MD) - left in protest
John F. Mercer (MD) - left in protest
Elbridge Gerry (MA) - refused to sign
Caleb Strong (MA) - left due to family illness
William C. Houston (NJ) - left due to illness
John Lansing, Jr. (NY) - left in protest
Robert Yates (NY) - left in protest
William R. Davie (NC) - left early
Alexander Martin (NC) - left early
George Mason (VA) - refused to sign
James McClurg (VA) - left early
Edmund J. Randolph (VA) - refused to sign
George Wythe (VA) - left early
Of note, is the abstention of Elbridge Gerry (MA), who had signed the Declaration and Articles.
I don't know about interstate migration, but the Germans and Irish shunned the South.
My dad's side of the family is from Ireland and Scotland. The came straight in to Virginia, then to South Carolina, and then south Georgia. Long before the war.
Who would put up with the disrespect for physical labor and working people that slavery inspired.
Many southern whites worked beside the blacks, even ate their meals in the fields with the blacks. Slaves thoght poor whites to be beneath them.
So I don't think that an independent South would be that much different or more conservative.
I disagree. Southerners tend to be "clannish" (consider their roots), and take care of their own (their version of SS was via land grants and large, extended, close-knit families). No need for socialism.
But every ten years or so Time Magazine brings me the "Face of the New South," Carter, Clinton, now Edwards.
BIG-city socialists. In Georgia the state is divided as follows - Atlanta and everybody else.
Was slave culture a turn-off for free working people? I'd have to look at the original sources. My own feeling is that if you were part of the "southern family" you took society, its rules and your place in it for granted. If you were an outsider from Germany or Ireland or the North the world the slaveholders made might be something you'd want to avoid. There can be no absolutely binding generalization. You will always be able to find Germans or Jews or Irish or Northerners who fought for the Confederacy and felt at home there. But there should be some way to acknowledge those who avoided the South because of slavery and to put them into our picture of the times.
Does "Northern Liberalism" always win? I'd say that capitalism and technology have been the winners for centuries. They bring some libertarianism and liberalism with them, but I don't think one can say that it's the liberals or Democrats who win in the end. If you look at all the ideologies swirling around in the first half of the 20th century, it's clear that capitalism has been the winner. It's had to make compromises and adapt to local situations and settle for less than absolute victory, but more collectivist or traditionalist or egalitarian or centralizing ideologies have clearly lost out. The next question is what kind of capitalism won out. The answer is a libertarian-egalitarian capitalism, informal with sneakers and sportsware rather than top hats or frock coats or even suits and ties much nowadays. It's a consumerist capitalism with an appeal that isn't so much based on bayonets or principles as on appealing to human desires, satisfying them, and encouraging them anew.
So can you combine this with a more conservative political order? Maybe. Maybe locally. Cutting back on public education and private broadcasting might help. But there will always be the draw of mass culture and consumerism on young people -- and on many older people. Do you deny this? Perhaps a catastrophe will destroy the system and reduce us to poverty. Undoubtedly some people will withdraw and try to live different sorts of life. But barring catastrophe, will people really abandon the "fun society" in order to "live ancient lives" of virtue, piety and dignity?
It's not like I'm happy about the result. But you'd have to show me some place where what you have in mind worked for more than a generation to convince me that it was really possible. Otherwise it's more wishful thinking than anything else.
So many Southern nationalist types go on and on about the virtues of the South as compared to the North -- loyalty, honor, fidelity, tradition, etc. The North wasn't devoid of this virtues, and had others as well. But "in comparison with" is the important thing here. Southernists milk the comparison with the North to hide how much we have in common.
I can't prove this. But look around to other countries, peoples or regions that have won their independence. There's a great hunger for "authentic national culture" in the beginning. Then, when people realize that they are a nation among nations governing themselves, "authentic national culture" becomes less important, and may even be thought oppressive. Nationalism is driven by the ambitious, who expect that once they attain power people will naturally fit into a given political and cultural order. The problem is that once independence is attained ambition and the ambitious don't stop. Some of the ambitious will follow the founders and try to succeed them. Others will join the opposition and try to remake society. Most of the ambitious will get to work in the economy. They end up by remaking the economy and society. They won't care so much about political philosophy or cultural values. You may very well get good, decent, hard working people who care for their families. You won't get people who are very preoccupied with politics or even with national identity.
The presumption people have is "let's stop looking outward and turn inward to build our own culture." But it's a mistake. In the modern world, looking outward at the enemy, the adversary, the opponent, or the foe strengthens the sense of nationhood, cultural uniqueness, and tradition. "Turning inward" means earning a living, learning how to use technology, taking care of a family, enjoying one's spare time, not reciting the tales of great battles and heroes -- or not so much outside hobbyist circles.
There are exceptions. What's happening in Arab countries and in India now, for example. They certainly are concerned with traditions, nationhood, and salvation. But that's because they have enemies to focus their attentions on.
I shouldn't be so certain of my predictions, but it does seem to me that what sustains so much of this Southern nationalism is opposition to the North and wounded pride. But if the South does become independent there would be no sense in making the constant comparison to Yankeeland. You would have to make your own way without always having that opposition to fall back on. You might well have an identity crisis -- as might we. Those who built their self-image on the North-South opposition may find that self slipping away with political questions that are no longer current. Or you might heal that wounded pride by focusing on the future, rather than the past. That means letting go. Most likely you'll find nationalist sentiments fading after you gain independence. If you don't there might be trouble here, as in India or the Middle East.
With thunder rumbling outside, as some small, New England-sized thunderstorms wander across the vastness of the Texas countryside, the atmosphere would seem to be just right to contemplate your vision of a potential separation.
First, any separation would be founded squarely on solid cultural factors that Blue and Red America divide quite sharply on, not merely on reactionary Southern resistance to "Northernness" -- which is shorthand for selfish brio and casual abusiveness justified by its idolators and beneficiaries as "impartiality" and "businesslike impersonality" -- one size screws all.
The values dichotomy is real and deep. First, any departure by the South would condemn the rest of the country to an endless procession of liberal presidents and Congresses, which would have dramatic consequences for the recovering economies of the former Rust Belt states, which are trying to come back as a combination of service and high-technology economies. It isn't just a matter of speechways and folkways. It's a difference in how people are perceived. Beyond stating that obvious difference, I'll leave its elaboration to various people, who, smarter than I, have attempted to mine the Red-Blue Divide for intelligible information and insight.
Sectional and regional differences, remembered loyalties and differences in voting patterns, would, I think, leave the Midwest and Mountain West with the Union. They vote Red (notice how the writer of the original article cleverly avoided assigning Gore the "Red" position, which would have been a little too telling), i.e., often with Republicans....but they would be left behind by the South to become perpetual junior partners of the industrial North, and its helpless thralls. The future of the West and Southwest under such a separation would be imponderable, but I would say as an aside -- I think I've referred to it above -- that any separation of the South from the Union would likely occur as a result of a successful partition of the Southwest by Mexico sponsoring Mexican-American "Aztlanists" to the United Nations and various anti-American world powers, setting the stage for a second collision of the Old Southwest (viz. the western states of the Confederacy) with the new.
Your argument that the differences between North and South are thin and vanishing is itself thin and wishful. You need only read the Christopher Caldwell article in the June, 1998, Atlantic Monthly about "The Southern Captivity of the GOP", which I think I've referred to before, to see the regional differences usefully sharpened for purposes of arguing that the Bushites must be allowed to abandon the GOP's Nixonian Southern (and conservative) base in order to pursue "tent-widening" strategies that avoid the shrinking horror with which voters in Blue America would otherwise inevitably come to regard the GOP. Which is a hell of a long, and usefully circuitous and diverting, way of saying that the Republican Party needs to retrogress to a New York-dominated "me-too" strategy like that employed by the Rockefeller Republicans of 50 years ago, and for the same reasons. But there I leave Caldwell, satisfied that his horror of Southernness presents fairly a regional division that means a lot more than you think it does.
What made the Southern agrarianism of the 1930s so appealing to many was the contrast between the agrarian South and the industrial North at a time when industrial capitalism was in trouble. A rural, agricultural society is always socially or culturally conservative, even when it elects or is led by radicals, liberals or socialists. The ties of family and religion are too strong to be denied.
The idea of the heartless North and the warm South with its strong emotional ties may have appeal as a general rule, but it also has a lot of problems. How much more personalized and non-instrumental were relations in North Carolina textile factory towns than in New England mill towns? Was Birmingham really less economically driven than Pittsburgh? If the argument is that Birmingham was always an anomaly in the South, one has to deal with sharecropping, convict labor and other conditions of the day. The post-bellum may have been more open to the ties of community and extended families than the North at the same time. But it was not less exploitative. Rural Vermont or Iowa may have been more Yankee, but were they really more profit-driven or materialistic than rural Mississippi or Arkansas?
And what does this have to do with the "post-industrial" America of today? Does that old industrial-agricultural parallel still exist? Pittsburgh is no longer what it once was. "Detroit" is as likely to be in Tennessee today as in Michigan. Were such "Blue Zone" centers as San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, ever given over to "dark, satanic mills?" The characteristic of the deep blue zone is an indifference to smokestack industries and industrial regimentation. Today, Vermont and Maine, Iowa and Wisconsin may be more reliably Democrat in presidential campaigns than West Virginia, Pennsylvania, or even Michigan.
If a rural society cannot help but be culturally conservative, even under a radical rulership, a post-industrial society, driven by information, sensation and design, tends towards cultural radicalism, even under conservative political overlordship. The sophisticated urban types are likely to be much the same wherever you go, in Houston or Atlanta as much as New York or Los Angeles.
Of course they would only be a small part of any Southern nation, but their numbers would increase. Rural areas look to industry and commerce to provide work for those who can't support themselves on agriculture. As basic industries become less profitable in the developed world the temptation is to turn to high-tech, style-driven enterprises. That temptation is to embrace innovation, rather than stability or rootedness.
The trauma of many countries has been whether to accept this trend or try to avoid it by adopting or preserving socialist or centralized or social managerial economies. Such collectivist alternatives have generally failed and been rejected. One can't imagine they'd be very popular with those who think secession is about liberty. So the acceptance and enthusiasm for the innovation- and sensation-driven post-industrial economy continues and grows and with it, a movement away from traditional social and cultural norms.
Oppositions between South and North, Cavalier and Yankee will always endure. But what's made of them isn't constant, no more than oppositions between Quebec and English Canada or England and Ireland or Fleming and Walloon. In defense of their interests Quebec went from being collectivist under Trudeau to free market under Mulroney to whatever they are now. Flemish speaking Belgians went from being the poor exploited victims of rich French-speaking Walloons to being the richer, post-industrial adversaries of the Walloons who were still chained to coal, iron, textiles and steel. Protestant Ulster looked down on backward, priest-ridden Ireland. Today, swinging Dublin and even provincial Irish cities pity tired Belfast with its eternal war, decaying shipyards and unemployed.
Traditionalist, obscurantist Eire embraced modernity two or three generations after independence. They still are Irish, but "Irish" doesn't mean the same thing. Stodgy, snobbish, stagnant Ontario went all out for modernism, progressivism and multiculturalism. Clericalist, traditionalist Quebec also rushed into consumerism and individualism. Toronto or Ottawa still isn't New York or Detroit. Montreal and Quebec still aren't Toronto or Vancouver, but the differences and the cities and the cultures they represent aren't what they used to be.
My point is 1) you can't assume that the South will remain true to its rural roots -- it could embrace affluence and modernism or post-modernism with a vengeance -- and 2) one can't expect "Southernism" to be something fixed eternally and immutably. It only looks that way because of the North-South political opposition within a united country.
One can imagine southern "caring" and "familialism" and "traditionalism" being given a collectivist tinge once the Yankee is banished. Look at the change in the US over the last seventy years. The Democratic South and West which supported Roosevelt and the New Deal and their public works projects became the most Republican regions of the country. The Yankee individualist and high capitalist Northeast is now the most Democratic region. What is to prevent another reversal of polarities from happening?
The "it's ours" argument that applied to slavery and segregation may be applied to a more comprehensive welfare system than the cold North provides. If the country does break up, the Northern fragments will likely beat the South to single-payer health care, but you can never tell.
I think you are right about a secession of "Aztlan" acting as a trigger to future secessions. It's hard to see what else could play this role. If one region goes, others may follow. It should be noted that the same might happen in Mexico. The proposed "Republica del Norte" has little use for the Aztec South. So it's a question of what Chicano nationalism is really about.
But if the United States break up, it's a major blow to the "American" model on such things as abortion, capital punishment, gun control, homosexual marriage, national health care and other issues. The pressure to adopt European standards becomes much greater when there's no longer a superpower standing up to it. But it does stand to reason that after we topple the Saudis the next step is to undo our own country.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.