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Political Landscape Preference
The masters of the blogosphere are debating the phenomenon of the cloying liberalism of Southern media types like New York Times editor Howell Raines, Ted Turner and Tom Wicker. Andrew Sullivan takes a typically British approach, arguing that it’s all about class and snobbery: the Southern boys are trying to prove themselves to Northern snobs otherwise inclined to regard the South as a bastion of racist hicks. Virginia Postrel argues that Southern liberalism is a legacy of the civil rights movement, which is understood by the left as a struggle of pure good against pure evil. The notion that these Southern liberals are trapped in a Manichean mentality certainly would explain the fierce, unwavering disdain they have for the right— for them, the right always and everywhere represents segregation—and loyalty to the left—which is always about civil rights. From this perspective, “it is always Birmingham in 1963” (as Glenn Reynolds put it earlier today). (Just as it is always Berlin, 1932 for the intellectuals, journalists and politicians who warn of the return of “fascism” anytime a rightist gains a modicum of popular support.) We know that humans develop preferences for physical landscapes in our early adolescence. Perhaps something similar occurs politically, with the mind hardening around a particular way of seeing the world during puberty. But while it’s all good fun to psychologize other people’s politics, what goes around comes around. Thatcherite Sullivan certainly seems to live in Sussex, 1976. Postrel’s technophile dynamism might be built around opposition to Nixon’s “Southern strategy.” Ginny’s still in Greenville, South Carolina 1972 fighting the reactionaries. Of course, it wouldn’t be too hard to claim that I’ve never left New York City, 1985 since my politics are informed by the permanent possibility of losing civilization to the skells and the impotence of liberalism to prevent this. Comments
I think a lot of Southern liberals hate their own heritage. They see the people around them as backward, uncultured hicks and year for the cosmopolitanism of San Franciscio, New York or even Seattle. Part of this may spring from rejecting the evangelicalism that pervades so much of life. More may come from feeling of isolation due to one’s intellectualism. It also may be the ongoing rejection of one’s conservative parents. Posted by: Jim Carver on September 5, 2002 4:28 PMAnother point: Southern liberals thrive because Southern conservatives do little or nothing to hold them back. TV, newspapers and bookstores below the Mason-Dixon line are just like as those above it. The schools teach the same things and the political disputes are identical. I know paleos love to laud the South, but down-home conservatives do a lousy job of passing their supposedly unique culture from generation to generation. Many of these “Middle American Radicals” are genuinely anti-intellectual, so they are doomed when pitted against liberals with New Class skills. Millions of Southerners sit on their hands, waiting for the rapture to rescue them from modernity. Thousands of others think they can re-fight the WBTS. Another vast horde is so afraid of the pre-1964 past that they do nothing. Posted by: Jim Carver on September 5, 2002 4:36 PM |