by liberal japonicus
This New York Times panel, consisting of Jamelle Bouie, David French and Tressie McMillan Cotton, is like catnip to a cat for me. On the assumption that not everyone wants to listen to it, I’ll pull out soundbites that really hit with me.
- [French] If you are somebody who’s paid attention to Southern culture and politics, [Trump] immediately fit into that mold of a Huey Long, of a George Wallace of a Edwin Edwards from Louisiana.
- [Cottem] I think one of the things they learned is that the most efficient way to control the public’s attention was to just hammer these ideas that I think are deeply, fundamentally Southern.
- [Cottem]…the reason why those ideas are so rich and so powerful in the South isn’t just because the South is uniquely racist. It is because that’s where the nation’s shunts off all of those conversations. And so we tend to hold all of that energy, all those ideas, all of those histories for the rest of the country. And I think that what Donald Trump has figured out is something that national politicians have long figured out in this country is that well, never runs dry.
- [Bouelle] …there has emerged kind of almost generic national, rural culture. It’s a certain kind of country music. It’s a certain kind of pickup truck. You see it if you go to rural New Hampshire, if you go to rural Montana, if you go to rural Illinois, you’ll see it. And it’s very much rooted in a franchised version of a white Southern rural reality.
- [Cottem] I mean, we all get a little Southern when this nation is going fascist
- [Cottem] we produce an idea of America that says, well, we’re not as bad as the South, but also the South wasn’t really always that bad, now was it.
- [Cottem] when you talk about the commerce angle and how much we relied on economic nationalism to save the cultural, moral and ethical failings of the American South, that supposes that economic progress is at odds with racial regression.
- [Bouelle] The first offshoring wasn’t to Mexico, wasn’t to Vietnam, it was to Alabama. It was to Georgia.
- [Cottem] The Democratic Party’s just has to reckon with the fact that if it wants to matter politically, it has to negotiate with black political power.
- [Cottem] (Republicans) have figured out is that if you play to the National impulse of grievance strongly enough, deeply enough, you can get people to buy into national politics because there is no local politics happening around them that they can see.
Cottem had an earlier column that is referenced in the talk.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/11/opinion/columnists/tennessee-house-nashville-shooting.html?unlocked_article_code=1.uk8.b5T9.3bVhxDrcFsH7&smid=url-share (thanks to nous in the comments)
I should note that with the pun in the title, one could assume I am inviting some pain and suffering on the South, but it is just because I can’t resist puns. There are a number of other points that occur to me, but I’ll save those for the comments.
Gift link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/11/opinion/columnists/tennessee-house-nashville-shooting.html?unlocked_article_code=1.uk8.b5T9.3bVhxDrcFsH7&smid=url-share
Thanks nous!
One piece of economics related to the Civil War, and being from Illinois Lincoln was very much aware of it, was shipping on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. By 1860, farmers from Ohio through the eastern parts of Iowa produced large amounts of excess grain. The bulk of the excess went down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to the ports around New Orleans, and by ship from there. Those farmers were very much afraid a separate Confederacy would impose large transit fees and ruin their business.
During the debates in Parliament on whether Britain should enter the American Civil War — and on which side — much was made of exactly how dependent Britain was on grain imported from those states, and that there were no alternate sources.
>And it’s very much rooted in a franchised version of a white Southern rural reality.
indeed.
and there is a similar franchised version of urban reality: every small city in the US eventually ends up with a version of things that started or were popularized in the very large cities (NYC especially, but also LA, ATL, etc). all of the hipster trends, food trends, drink trends, aesthetic trends, music, art, even ways of speaking and thinking get copied. go into any small- or medium-sized city in the US and you will find the same kinds of stores and styles, with people talking about similar things in similar ways.
it seems natural that rural culture should be similarly homgeneous.
it seems natural that rural culture should be similarly homgeneous
The question would seem to be: why is it Southern rural culture which is the model? Why not the Midwest? Or the Mountain West? They all have significant rural populations, too.
I was thinking the other day about that weird time when all of a sudden a subset of the national culture was into CB radio, complete with radios, handles, etc. Making excuses to contact each other just so they could say, “Ten four, good buddy!” When I was in college and working in a restaurant, I had the experience of waitressing a get-together of wannabe Burt Reynolds guys and their wives (who went by handles like “Sugar Cookie”). They stiffed me on the tips, BTW.
And a few years later, the sudden sprouting of TX accents and line-dancing.
Both were inspired by movies that glorified an image of southern living.
Of course I, too, was a local manifestation of a media-driven subculture, so I’m not claiming any kind of immunity or superiority to herd instinct. I’d like to believe that my subculture had better values and retains those values even if the outward manifestations have faded.
But this is all an aside. Yes, it appears that the “Southern Strategy” has gone national, at least in rural areas.
BTW I live in a red rural area, complete with flag festooned pickup trucks and local wackos in city government, but over six hundred people turned up for our No Kings Day event and the majority of people who drove past were supportive with honks and waves.
I was thinking the other day about that weird time when all of a sudden a subset of the national culture was into CB radio, complete with radios, handles, etc. Making excuses to contact each other just so they could say, “Ten four, good buddy!”
I had a most serious crush on Kris Kristofferson, long before Convoy, (and put up with unacceptable behaviour from one of my tutors at law school – e.g. looking at my chest rather than my face while talking to me – because of his resemblance to KK) but I do wonder if that film also did something to make the whole scene attractive to women, and to men because it was attractive to women. Of course, it was presumably a big thing already for the movie to get made…
The question would seem to be: why is it Southern rural culture which is the model? Why not the Midwest? Or the Mountain West?
The South put enormous effort into creating the whole Lost Cause myth, and as part of that emphasized lots of cultural signals: the accent, the cuisine, the whole “southern hospitality” thing. Outside of some cities, the Midwest “accent” is all about not being able to tell where someone is from. The Mountain West is even more so. Southern fried chicken. BBQ. Grits. Greens. Black-eyed peas. All sorts of Cajun. Wash day beans. Buttermilk biscuits. Cornbread as a routine thing.
Where’s my fried green tomatoes?
Re: the Lost Cause myth. Along with that is the faux rebelliousness. I mean the guys with the confederate flag on their hat, pickup or window which they say doesn’t stand for racism because it is an expression of independence, being opposed to excessive government etc. It’s often a self-image thing; “I’m not a follower! I’m not conventional! I’m a free person doing things my way!” Around where I live it goes with long hair, a beard, and sometimes a meth addiction. It doesn’t necessarily go with rightwing politics since some of those guys are too dysfunctional to be political. (And sometimes they are felons).
Yeah, the CB radio craze was a silly waste of time by people that never should have been on the airwaves.
_.__ __._ or GTFO.
Dukes of Hazard. Lynyrd Skynyrd. The latter especially after Ronnie died and Johnny replaced him.
Those two things did more to mainstream the Confederate battle flag as good ol’ boy freedom than anything else.
>why is it Southern rural culture which is the model?
is that actually true, though?
if you look at truck commercials, there’s a lot more “driving around in the mountains” than there is “driving around the giant flatness of MS” or “hauling groceries in the valleys of WV”. and cowboys are more west than deep south. here in NC, people in the country are growing soybeans and cotton, raising pigs and chickens, not riding around on horses roping cattle.
a mythical south (which includes TX and parts of the midwest) might be the model. but the actual south isn’t the same thing.
anyway. hi, y’all.
There is a mystique about the West that’s every bit as bullshit ad the mystique about the South and similar in some ways. There’s the erasing of historical crimes against humanity, the faux claims to independence, and the strange definition of masculinity which includes ‘strength” but not brains. The Southern version has more faux morality. Both have BS about being victimized by outside elites. The West version has A LOT of pity party about not being represented when in fact they are over-represented in government.
I guess my question is: Why is that kind of bullshit the model? Why not a model focused on re-imagined Revolutionary War heritage and New England?
I don’t know why they run the trucks-in-the-mountains ads in the rest of the country. In the 11-state contiguous western states, the vast majority of the population lives in urban/suburban areas but can drive to the mountains in less than an hour.
I’ve long said that the proper picture to represent the modern West should look like this. In this case San Francisco, and the snow is rarer in Las Vegas and Phoenix, but it still happens occasionally even there. Now that the Census Bureau has admitted it’s the 21st century and we can do density based on actual built area rather than county area, the western region is very narrowly denser than the Northeast, and both are much denser than the Midwest and South.
Michael’s point about grain reminds me that it was countered by the King Cotton argument, where mills wouldn’t be able to run without the cotton from the South, so that was the counter-argument to the necessity of having wheat to import and led to friction between the US and Great Britain when the Union blockaded the South. In the end, because Great Britain then sought cotton from other sources, like India, Egypt and (peek at Gemini) Brazil. I think we are seeing a replay of this with Chinese rare earths and US soybeans.
There is an interesting debate in the literature as to whether the Cotton vs Wheat was simply a cover for pro and anti slavery views. The more things change…
<i>Why not a model focused on re-imagined Revolutionary War heritage and New England?</i>
Not necessarily New England, but this was more of a thing when I was a kid in the NJ suburbs of Philadelphia. My grandmother’s house was decorated with plates depicting scenes from the Rev War and other such memorabilia. She had pistols and powder flasks, some of which were obvious replicas and others that may have been genuine. Her house was not at all rare in that regard.
People would display the old “Betsy Ross” flag year round, but it was everywhere around the 4th of July.
I know a few people who currently participate in Rev War reenactments, but they’re NJ Loyalists (i.e. Red Coats). They tend MAGA-ish. It’s kind of odd considering that they aren’t on the side of the rebels. That would give them a sort of commonality with the rebels of the Confederacy. Maybe it’s the authoritarianism they like (not “No Kings” but “Yes Kings”).
I visited Gettysburg a few summers ago. Seeing the American flag there seemed to signal something completely different from what it does when I see it flapping around from the back of pickup truck where I live – pride in the Union that defeated the Confederacy rather than obnoxious faux-patriotic MAGAism.
/stream of consciousness
Somewhat related to the grain thing was the difference in public opinion about the war in Iowa as you went from SE (the longest settled) to the NW (still very much frontier). The last Indian raid in Iowa occurred in 1861. Eastern Iowa sent a high per-capita number of Union soldiers. The prevailing attitude in NW Iowa was that the war was a distraction and we should let the Confederacy go so the Army could get back to its real job of exterminating the Indians.
Mrs. Helkins’ 5th-grade Iowa history class was… unusual.
I notice that Trump is now demanding that the Chinese resume buying soybeans from the US. One suspects that he discovered that Midwestern farmers are seriously upset to have a major market snatched out from under them. (Especially those who didn’t see it coming, and so failedto plant something else this year. Too late now to do anything but plow the crop under as fertalizer for next year.)
He seems oblivious to the fact that the Chinese have found alternative suppliers. Which is to say, they don’t need to buy from us. As opposed to, say, refined rare earths, for which we (and, for that matter the rest of the world) have no alternative sources of supply.
We could develop them, of course — “rare earths” aren’t particularly rare; just challenging to separate from each other. It would just take 5-10 years, even assuming zero regulatory constraints (i.e. no environmental impact reports, no planning permissions, etc.). Can’t expect Trump to grasp that, of course.
I could easily see the Chinese playing hardball on this. If only to show the wannabe his place. Hey, it keeps working for Putin, so why not?
wj – (Especially those who didn’t see it coming, and so failedto plant something else this year. Too late now to do anything but plow the crop under as fertalizer for next year.)
Right about now those farmers are also starting to realize that there is no way to plan for what to plant next year, because there is no telling what The Ancient Orange One is going to decide to add to the tariff pile as his next
tantrumnegotiating tactic.You can’t plan a year out when the yahoo in charge keeps blowing stuff up to keep his enemies – the farmers’ customers – off-balance.
They could plow it all under and try to grow carbon, but TAOO has blown up climate subsidies as well.
Screwed.
Just an ancillary observation, in hindsight, it is almost overdetermined that the first Black president had to have a white mother and be from an exotic locale like Hawai’i. One could claim that his Chicago stint was important, but I think it was more important that he wasn’t from a traditional place we might imagine a black candidate coming from. I don’t think it wrecked Harris’ chances that she went to a HBCU, but it is hard to imagine a male candidate graduating from Howard or some other HBCU.
The comment in the podcast that most connected with me was Bouelle’s statement about it not just being about the South as a geographic area, specifically. I live in blue part of blue MA, and the whole giant American and/or Confederate flag flying off the back of a pickup with Eric Church or similar blasting is all over the place here.
Head out into Worcester or Franklin county, even more so.
Cross the border into southern NH, even more so.
What thinking lately about the whole moment we’re in, and have been in since probably Reagan, is that this country has never successfully come to terms with the negative or darker side of our history. There is a lot that is negative in our history – violent, genocidal, explicitly and thoroughly racist. And we’ve never really found a way to come to terms with it.
So we end up with these weird overcompensating mythologies about American exceptionalism – how special and wonderful and indispensable we are.
And the people who do try to call it out are accused of “hating America”. And some of them seem caught up in our darker corners, like they themselves can’t let go of it or move past it.
And a lot of the really toxic shit has never really gone away. One of the remarkable things to me about the last 40 years or so is the degree to which it’s become OK again to be an unapologetic racist. Or at least a “scientifically based” racist, see also the Bell Curve crap.
Or an unapologetic misogynist, or at least a proponent of the idea that men are somehow supposed to be the bosses. See also Charlie Kirk. Andrew Tate, who is clearly one sick bastard, has over 10 million followers.
I think this ends up – as Cottem points out – being “shunted off” onto the South because that region has the most overt history of, specifically, chattel slavery. The Confederacy was an explicit attempt to establish a state based on the doctrine of white supremacy and the legitimacy of black slavery. It’s an obvious vector for the worst in our history. And, that is an obvious source for resentment on the part of the folks who live there.
But the whole country is complicit in that history, and I think the whole country participates in a refusal to come to terms with it in an honest way.
As a point of contrast, Germany post WWII was able to move past Naziism – to not continually be engaged in arguments about it (I think – right Helmut?) – by owning it, recognizing it as toxic and a point of shame, and making explicit choices to reject it. Until AfD I guess.
And I think the way Trump fits into this is that his own personal pathology mirrors that of the nation perfectly.
russell – But the whole country is complicit in that history, and I think the whole country participates in a refusal to come to terms with it in an honest way.
Look at how the majority of the most geographically racially segregated cities in the US are Northern – Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis,…
Look at how the majority of the most geographically racially segregated cities in the US are Northern – Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis,…
The Black population in all of those arrived as part of the two Great Migrations between 1910 and 1970. Millions of Black people moved out of the South looking for opportunities in the growing industrial cities in northern states. Unsurprisingly, they established neighborhoods and communities of their own. The patterns set then continue today.
When I was in high school I poked through some of the historical patterns in Omaha, NE. Successive waves of immigration each started in South Omaha, centered on the large stockyards: Irish, Black, Italian, and Central/Eastern Europeans. As second- and third-generation kids left that area, they scattered all over Omaha. Except Blacks, who stuck together in the Near North Side.
As a point of contrast, Germany post WWII was able to move past Naziism – to not continually be engaged in arguments about it (I think – right Helmut?) – by owning it, recognizing it as toxic and a point of shame, and making explicit choices to reject it. Until AfD I guess.
a) no one in 1945 could come up with the idea that Germany had not totally lost (unlike 1918 when all fronts were still outside the Reich’s borders and the population did not know that the Western allies would completely overrun them in the spring).
b) The Allies (in both West and East) allowed the broad majority of Nazis to get off lightly while at the same time making clear that this would change should they try to revive the Reich. And they kept that ultimate control long enough for everyone to get used to the new and improved democracy (which was accompanied by the ‘economic miracle’, giving it a huge boost).
c) it took decades (until the late 60ies) and a new generation to really come to terms with the true evil of Nazism. But (see above) the country was provided that time and was protected from anything like the Lost Cause poison.
Maybe, if Sherman had gotten his way and reconstruction had not ended by probably the dirtiest of all cow trades in US history (Andrew Johnson making a deal with the South to save his hide), there could have been something similar in the US.
Personally I think that the AfD is to a large degree a result of the fake enforced anti-fascism of the GDR. Botching the reconstruction of the East after the reunification (a good deal of disaster capitalism happened there plus – at least perceived – large scale carpetbaggery) gave it fertilizer. And now the weed grows all over the country, having surpassed a critical mass. No idea where it will end. Imo most adherents have not lived through the actual GDR (let alone the 3rd Reich) and got infected by a certain made-up nostalgia with no personal experience what an authoritarian regime actually looks and feels like.
I live in blue part of blue MA, and the whole giant American and/or Confederate flag flying off the back of a pickup with Eric Church or similar blasting is all over the place here.
I live in north central Texas, and I never see anything like that.
I live in north central Texas, and I never see anything like that [Confederate flag flying off the back of a pickup].
Would that suggest that the whole point of flying those Confederate flags isn’t about the Confederacy? Rather it’s about “owning the libs”. Thus there is no point to doing it in north central Texas — there aren’t enough liberals there to make it worth the effort.
>I live in north central Texas, and I never see anything like that.
i’m in central NC and i seen it now and then.
there was a big anti-Trump rally in town before the last election and all the local rednecks got their trucks fitted with their Trump & confederate flags and rolled coal up and down the street in front of the anti-Trump folks.
on one of the two main roads into town, there’s an ancient and crumbling cinder-block garage with a huge confederate flag flying on a giant metal pole next to it. the person who owns the property (whose last name is “White” and who lives on “White’s Way”) had a billboard on the property for years, and it showed normal advertisements though an ad agency.
but one day. a local BLM group rented the sign space and put up a “Black Lives Matter” billboard. that sign lasted a few days. but then, Mr White cancelled his contract with the ad agency, and tore down the billboard. then he put a bunch of hand-painted racist signs on top of the garage, and put a fence around his flagpole.
occasionally, he also holds little rallies in front of the garage – all his dim-witted racist buddy line up and wave confederate flags and shout at passing cars.
it’s directly across the street from a “Christian” retirement community. they don’t seem to mind.
every single time i drive by, day or night, rain or shine, i roll down my window and give that flag the one finger salute. one day, that angered some jackhole in a truck in back of me, and he got on my tail and honked and ranted and raved at me until i got near the police station.