I’m cutting down from my original 5000-word post to get to this, so here goes:
I grew up in Alabama, where the political culture hasn’t really shifted since the Civil War. Things like policy issues don’t really go over real big, unless you’re flagging something sinful like gambling or swearing that you’re against all taxes ever. Politics in Alabama is the contest of personalities among people whose issue positions are rarely that far apart, and the single biggest driving force is the fear of the different. For the longest time, it was Yankees. Then it was the “outside agitators” in league with black militants (because “their blacks” were perfectly happy with the status quo. Riiiiiiiiight). Now it’s some weird combination of Mexicans, homosexuals, socialists*, militant atheists and Hillary Clinton.
The urge in Alabama is to freeze time. Everything needs to stop right around 1954 – before the Montgomery bus boycott, before Brown v. Board, before broadcast news and an external challenge to the cultural hegemony. Every single electoral struggle in Alabama for the last fifty years has been about whether or not to try to keep things as they always have been. But things change, and things in Alabama changed. And the worst of the state’s politics all came about because of people like George Wallace** and Fob James and Guy Hunt. Irrespective of party label, they all stood for the same proposition: we can make things the way they used to be.
Deep down, that’s the fundamental delusion of the South – that somehow everything can be rolled back. That if you just pull the right lever, Longstreet will hit the left flank a lot earlier and won’t need to send Pickett’s troops up the middle the next day and the Union line at Gettysburg will be broken. That cotton will go sky-high and the soil will stop being depleted and the boll weevils will all up and die. That an old woman will get up and move to the back of the bus quietly and the national press won’t ever notice American apartheid. Hell, that Parseghian would go for a winning field goal, somehow turn the ball over, and lose to Michigan State thus allowing the Crimson Tide to possibly move up to #1.
Faulkner famously asserted that in the South, the past isn’t even past, and people believe it. The idea that somehow, if you just figure out the right lever to pull, everything will go back to the way it was – it’s an insidious little mindworm that permeates everyone, even the most cynical scalawags who have long since fled. But it’s a seductive meme, one that plays on our weakness for nostalgia and our habit of seeing even the worst of the past through rose-colored bifocals. The way it used to be, the way it ought to be, the way it’s going to be again.***
And about forty years ago, one party decided that they could tap that meme, adopt that culture, and ride it back into power. And as soon as they did, the other party fell about themselves with desperation to get those folks back, to the point that they haven’t won with a non-Southerner since.
The net effect is that politically, in every way that matters, we live in the United States of Alabama. And there is no indication that things will change anytime soon. The only thing that would ever break the cycle would be for voters to massively repudiate Southern political culture at the polls, over and over, until running in the ‘Bama fashion becomes a guaranteed kiss of death at election time. It’s not something that will happen in one election, or two, or maybe four or five – it took 40 years to get to this point and it’s going to take a while to get away from it.
Anyway, God knows I hit this hard every two weeks or so, but if there’s one message you need to take away from my version of PSCI 101, it’s this: the fundamental problem of contemporary American politics is the wholesale embrace of Southern political culture, and said culture will continue to be a pernicious influence on American political life until forcibly invalidated and rejected.
The older I get, the better I was…
* What the bloody hell is it with the socialists? I don’t remember anybody talking about nationalization of the means of production. Memo to the necks: not every dollar the government spends is socialist, unless that’s a bunch of Red radicals over there in Afghanistan pushing back on al-Qaeda. Joe McCarthy’s dead, idiots, grow the F up.
** I’m not a big fan of conversion porn. One of the side-effects of the nationalization of Southern political culture is the adoption of the Baptist lust to see the redeemed sinner. Nobody’s more popular than the person who used to be on the other side, saw the light, and now just loves to tell how utterly and awfully wrong they were before coming to the side of the angels. Me, I’m not having it. Grace is a gift of God, but Stagger Lee needs to see you bleed for the cause a while before he’s buying it.
*** Jill Sobule gets a nickel.