The Rise And Fall of the South (again)

So my second-cousin-in-law (to whom I am related in the exact same fashion as I am related to a prominent Senator in the health care reform shenanigans) sent a link to a book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to the South (and Why It Will Rise Again)”. Setting aside the standard comical use of “Politically Incorrect” to somehow imply ‘truth-telling and edgy’ when in fact it generally means ‘rude and hackneyed’, I think the author misses the point just by the title. The South has in fact already risen again, and now sits on the precipice of another fall.

Culturally, it didn’t take long at all. Sixteen years after the Birmingham police were hosing marchers and setting the dogs on them, CBS was running a Friday night back-to-back of “The Dukes of Hazzard” and “Dallas.” (I once took a graduate seminar on Southern studies with another Alabamian and sixteen non-Southerners, all of whom – to a man – said their image of the South originated with “The Dukes Of Hazzard”.) ‘Southern rock’ was a dominant form (Lynyrd Skynyrd, Tom Petty, 38 Special, you name it). Movies like “Urban Cowboy” were grossing tens of millions of dollars (not to mention Grammy and Golden Globe nominations and a multi-platinum soundtrack), artists from Johnny Cash to Glen Campbell and Barbara Mandrell had their own variety shows, and CBS showed the Daytona 500 wire-to-wire for the first time. For their trouble, they got a fistfight in the infield between the Allison brothers and Cale Yarborough while Richard Petty got the checkered flag – and blockbuster ratings. Time Magazine was running special cover stories on “The New South” when they weren’t putting Bear Bryant on the cover – and the Alabama Crimson Tide was quickly displacing Notre Dame at the apex of college football awareness (though not enough for the 1977 poll voters, who jumped the Irish from fifth to first for the title despite a higher-ranked Alabama beating an even higher-ranked Ohio State. I’m not mad).

Politically, the old crop of Southern senior senators went nowhere fast. Names like Howell Heflin, Sam Nunn and Jesse Helms came in to replace the old Sparkmans and Eastlands and Russells, while Strom Thurmond plowed right along. Jimmy Carter won election in 1976. More importantly, consider this: from 1976 to 2004, each election had at least one Southerner on one Presidential ticket every year. In fact, both tickets had a Southerner every year from 1980 to 2004, barring 1984 (Mondale-Ferarro for the Dems) and 1996 (Dole-Kemp for the Repubs). Texas and Florida each became as pivotal an electoral prize as California or New York – after all, the 2000 election hinged on Florida.

To see the real political rise, though, look at the 1990s. The Democrats won two Presidential elections behind an all-Southern ticket of Bill Clinton (Arkansas) and Al Gore (Tennessee). The Republicans countered behind Newt Gingrich (Georgia), who took over the House of Representatives in January 1995 alongside such pivotal committee leaders as Bob Livingston (Louisiana), Dick Armey (Texas), and Tom DeLay (Texas). When Bob Dole left a year later to run for President, the Senate went to Trent Lott (Mississippi), who was succeeded in the 2000s first by Bill Frist (Tennessee) and then Mitch McConnell (Kentucky). Meanwhile, Denny Hastert – who replaced Gingrich and displaced Livingston after both had adultery scares – was effectively a figurehead while Tom DeLay (aka “The Hammer”) ran the Republican affairs in the House. The Clinton/Gore team was succeeded by George W. Bush (Texas) and Dick Cheney (born in Texas but elected out of Wyoming). And the entire Republican succession rested on the final realignment of – the South, where retiring veteran Democrats were almost uniformly replaced with Republicans, especially as VRA created “majority-minority” districts of African-American voters and left behind lily-white Republican safe seats (the transformation of AL-6 and AL-7 is instructive here).

In every way that mattered, the governance of the United States from 1995 to 2007 was effectively Southern, in politics and practice. The style of Southern politics (see previous posts) became nationalized, and cultural populism masked a rush to “business-friendly” policy (most prominently and painfully the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which allowed commercial and investment banking to merge and ultimately gave us the 2008 meltdown).

Meanwhile, the culture of the South continued to metastasize. Atlanta – Atlanta! – hosted the Olympics. The self-proclaimed title of “America’s Team” was shared between the Atlanta Braves in baseball and the Dallas Cowboys in football. NASCAR grew to become the only sport other than the NFL with free broadcast coverage on multiple national over-the-air networks. Country music went wholly mainstream behind everyone from Garth Brooks to Shania Twain to Toby Keith to Taylor Swift. Monday Night Football continues to be opened by Hank Williams Jr, a Detroit rock-rapper cloaked his entire career in Southern imagery (right down to his pilgrimage to Nashville where Kid Rock received the ‘blessing’ of George Jones himself), Jeff Foxworthy got an entire TV career out of “You Might Be A Redneck” jokes, and – astoundingly – a book by a former weathergirl from Birmingham became both a print touchstone of the lesbian experience AND a wildly successful feature film with two Oscar nominations, while another Candide-esque tale of a marginally-bright Alabama boy racked up SIX Oscars and made a blockbuster A-lister of Tom Hanks. (Also launched a chain of the worst tourist-trap seafood joints on Earth.) And most of all, from stem to stern, the national press – just as they had in the 1970s – began to gravitate to the South as the repository of old-time value and virtue in times of crisis, and gladly bought into the notion that the folks with Confederate flags on their trucks (as Howard Dean put it) were, in fact, the quintessence of “real Americans.”

It’s all falling apart now, though. 2008 featured no Southerners on the Presidential ballot. 2009 featured a Republican party in disarray, shedding its non-Southern elements once by one. And 2010 has seen the most talked-about movement in politics revealed as the same sort of irate redneck that scowled through Birmingham fifty years earlier – only instead of bombs on black homes, it’s bricks through Congressional office windows and cut gas lines on a home mistakenly identified as a Congressman’s. And the reason it’s come to that is because, once again, the South’s moment has passed, and those who cling to its values are raging against the dying of the light.

So why is it falling again? Simply put, the South is utterly dependent on a devil. Whether in politics, in religion, in football – there has to be a bad guy, and his defeat is at least as important as one’s own victory. The highest happiness for a Crimson Tide fan is not to see Alabama on top, but to see Auburn on bottom. And as NASCAR goes more and more corporate, as country music becomes less and less Nashville, as American Idol stops being regularly won by folks from the 205 and Southern comics drop by the wayside and the White House goes to a biracial Yankee and the Congress into the hands of a sharp-tongued woman from San Francisco – as the devils win, the South feels itself losing.

Until Southern pride shifts to being “We’re great!” rather than “Y’all suck!”, expect the backlash to continue. If there were an easy fix, it would have been tried in the last century and a half.

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