World Wide Woodard: On the Dixification of America He noted Sara Robinson's interesting article:
Conservative Southern Values Revived: How a Brutal Strain of American Aristocrats Have Come to Rule America | Visions | AlterNet Southern values revived - Salon.com SR proposes that the wrong sort of elite has now gotten the upper hand: the nasty Deep South sort of elite that the other elites had kept from power in their areas since the American Revolution.
She notes Michael Lind's book "Made In Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics":
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For most of our history, American economics, culture and politics have been dominated by a New England-based Yankee aristocracy that was rooted in Puritan communitarian values, educated at the Ivies and marinated in an ethic of noblesse oblige (the conviction that those who possess wealth and power are morally bound to use it for the betterment of society). While they've done their share of damage to the notion of democracy in the name of profit (as all financial elites inevitably do), this group has, for the most part, tempered its predatory instincts with a code that valued mass education and human rights; held up public service as both a duty and an honor; and imbued them with the belief that once you made your nut, you had a moral duty to do something positive with it for the betterment of mankind. Your own legacy depended on this.
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Notable Presidents: both Roosevelts, JFK, and George Bush I.
SD continues:
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Which brings us to that other great historical American nobility -- the plantation aristocracy of the lowland South, which has been notable throughout its 400-year history for its utter lack of civic interest, its hostility to the very ideas of democracy and human rights, its love of hierarchy, its fear of technology and progress, its reliance on brutality and violence to maintain "order," and its outright celebration of inequality as an order divinely ordained by God.
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Colin Woodard describes the Deep South culture:
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It was a near-carbon copy of the West Indian slave state these Barbadians had left behind, a place notorious even then for its inhumanity....From the outset, 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. Its expansionist ambitions would put it on a collision course with its Yankee rivals, triggering military, social, and political conflicts that continue to plague the United States to this day.
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SD returns:
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David Hackett Fischer, whose Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways In America informs both Lind's and Woodard's work, described just how deeply undemocratic the Southern aristocracy was, and still is. He documents how these elites have always feared and opposed universal literacy, public schools and libraries, and a free press. (Lind adds that they have historically been profoundly anti-technology as well, far preferring solutions that involve finding more serfs and throwing them at a problem whenever possible. Why buy a bulldozer when 150 convicts on a chain gang can grade your road instead?)
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She continues by describing the Deep South elite's very elitist view of liberty, something that only those on top have a right to a lot of.
Not surprisingly, this includes the right to exploit, enslave, beat, rape, and kill one's underlings with impunity - even family members.
By comparison, Northern conceptions have been more community-based, or else more universally-based.
The two elites fought each other in the Civil War, and though the North won the shooting war, it did not completely win the culture war.
As Michael Lind notes, the northern elites' commitment to national betterment proved to be their undoing, with the New Deal and building of highways and dams and electric-power grids and other infrastructure.
In "Plantation America" SR continues with how the US is becoming more like Deep South ideals, with paramilitary-trained police, torture, extrajudicial killing, and rich people who "flaunt their ostentatious wealth without even the pretense of humility, modesty, generosity, or gratitude." She ends with "Welcome to Plantation America."
The Washington Monthly - Ten Miles Square - On the Rise of the (Deep) Southern Oligarchy Colin Woodard criticizes Sara Robinson's article. He agrees with its overall thrust, and he notes that the Republican Party has become taken over by Deep Southerners. Thus becoming the party of Jefferson Davis. "The central policy goals of Tea Party Republicanism mirror those of the Deep Southern elite: rollback federal power, environmental, labor, and consumer protection laws, and taxes on capital and the wealthy."
He does have some criticisms of her article, however.
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That Yankee elite held sway over our fractured federation during the presidency of John Adams and in the period from the Civil War to the early post-World War II era, but aristocrats from the Chesapeake country generally ran the show in the Early Republic, and Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, Eisenhower, L.B.J., Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were neither Yankees nor Deep Southerners.
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He also notes cultural divisions between the Deep South, the Chesapeake-Bay / Tidewater area, and the Upland South / Greater Appalachia.
Tidewaterites like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison had plenty of
noblesse oblige.
Greater Appalachians tend to reject both Deep Southern plantationism and Yankee communalism, and progressive Texans like LBJ have been Greater Appalachians.
The North is also divided, with the multiethnic Midlanders likewise rejecting both plantationism and Yankee government do-gooderism.
He concludes "So, yes, American politics has been under the increasing influence of the elite of a southern region, but it's a deep southern one."
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