Six Days On The Road

I've taken the longest hiatus in awhile from this blog. I just got back from taking a group of students on a road trip through the South visiting historical sites, most of them connected to the histories of slavery, civil rights, and the Civil War. I will talk more deeply about this experience later, but today I just have one main observation.

I have lived in the NYC area for the past eight years, and when I leave to travel in many other parts of the country I am reminded of how much more generally prosperous this region is compared to others. Some of this is general prosperity deriving from the area's economic base, but a lot of it comes from a society that is willing to build a safety net.

There is horrific inequality in this part of the country, but what I saw on this trip was a much bigger bottom much deeper in the hole. The crumbling shotgun shacks in Montgomery, homeless encampments in Atlanta, blighted neighborhoods in Chattanooga, and rusty trailers along countless rural roads all seemed to signal the false promises of the Sun Belt. All the fancy coffeeshops and craft beer bars can't hide that.

This is the region that attracts so many corporations with promises of low taxation. In Chattanooga auto workers voted against a UAW union this month. They are being fed a myth that the race to the bottom somehow means a better life for all. In actuality it's just a continuation of the South's old history of cheap labor being used to keep a group of reactionary grandees at the top. That Southern style of labor relations has been exported to the rest of the country over the past forty years.

This trip prompted a lot of thoughts from me, but the most depressing was that our current worsening inequality is not the precursor to a rebellion of the oppressed, but to a permanent state of brutal hierarchy. White racial resentment is currently the most powerful political force in America, the same force that kept Jim Crow in place for almost a century. I more and more believe that the period from 1965 to 2016, as messed up as it was, constitutes a mere blip in a larger history. I wish that wasn't the case, but it's best to see the world realistically.

Our Current Political Divide May Actually Be a Regional Divide

During the last seven years of my life I have lived in four different states in different parts of the country, and that experience has revealed to me the stark regional differences that exist in this country.  The conventional wisdom about important issues is wildly different here in New Jersey as compared to Texas, the state I just left.  We can see such differences in the recent pushes in states like Arkansas and North Dakota to severely restrict access to abortion when no such movement exists outside of the South or West.  A better example might be the map (displayed above) showing where people were most likely to change their Facebook profile pictures in solidarity with same sex marriage activists two weeks ago during arguments in front of the Supreme Court.  The South and Great Plains are noticeably white on this map, and out of step with the rest of the country.  If you look at the map of the 2012 election below, you will see a great deal of correlation.

Shifts in regional power can make a huge difference in national politics.  As historian Bruce Schulman has argued, the rise of conservatism in the 1970s was driven and reflected by the economic and population growth of the Sun Belt.  Unfortunately for conservatives, Sun Belt states like Colorado and California have become more liberal, and Florida has gone for Democrats in the last two presidential elections.  The South and interior West alone cannot give Republicans the votes they need to win.

The regional disparities in voting and on key issues also might help explain the virulence and polarizing nature of political debate in America. The hard-core, true believer House Republicans hail from districts where people who disagree with their ideas are few.  These same ideas are political poison in other parts of the country.   Many states in the conservative regions have taken a combative attitude towards the federal government by refusing to take part in the Affordable Care Act and passing nullification resolutions.  Because of the ideological uniformity of many of these states, politicians there are free to be as kooky and extreme as they want to be.

There is a world of difference between Connecticut, which recently passed sweeping new restrictions on gun ownership, and states like Montana, where the legislature wants to nullify any new federal gun laws.  I really don't think this divide can be breached; fanatics never compromise.  Because our system was designed to diffuse power, it makes it easy for one chunk of the country to band together and jam up the legislative gears.  Mechanisms like the filibuster, for instance, give minority factions an effective veto.

This is not the first time in our nation's history that regionalism has fed political conflict.  (There was that whole Civil War thing, you know.)  For decades the Solid South banded together in Washington to prevent any moves towards racial equality.  Supporters of segregation filibustered and nullified to their heart's content, successfully blocking progress for quite a long time.  If we are to make any progress regarding gun control, reproductive rights, marriage equality, and a whole host of other issues, this regional conflict must be resolved.  Hopefully it will be settled with less difficulty than in the 1860s.

Is "Southern Honor" Partly to Blame for the Debt Ceiling Hostage Crisis?

I lived in East Texas, a region I see as the westernmost edge of the South, for three years.  During my time there I immersed myself in the history of the South in an attempt to make sense of a place that seemed so alien to a native Midwesterner such as myself.  It is still a place that fascinates and horrifies me in just about equal measure, where I love the food, music and a great many of the people, but despise the religiosity, bigotry, and reactionary politics that still often reside there.  It is certainly a changing region full of paradoxes, with a black bourgeoisie dominating the growing metropolis of Atlanta, culturally progressive college towns like Chapel Hill, and and influx of immigrants.  On the other hand, a large percentage of white southerners still sympathize with the Confederacy.

Both WJ Cash's The Mind of the South and Bertram Wyatt-Brown's Southern Honor helped me understand white southern culture and its historical roots.  These authors talk at length about the South's hierarchical nature, and the role honor plays in that hierarchy.  Even after the demise of slavery, the southern white men who hold positions of power expect to be masters, and others to respect their honor by giving them due deference.  The southern politicos in Washington have had it easy over the past few decades; Obama is the first Yankee liberal to occupy the White House since JFK.  Southern conservatives have not reacted well to this development, to say the least.

George Packer, writing in The New Yorker this week, makes a decent case for the growing political isolation of the (white) South.  He notes that when Congress voted on the fiscal cliff deal, Republicans in other regions were willing to accept it, but Southern Republicans voted against it 81-12.  That got me thinking.  Is this intransigence, both on the fiscal cliff and the debt ceiling not just the outcome of radical conservatism, but also of southern honor?

The men and women (but mostly men) so opposed to Obama in Congress seem to dislike not just policies, but the very fact that he presumes to tell these politicians what to do.  The president has witnessed the kinds of slights and insults from Congress that I have never seen before.  (Joe Wilson's "you lie!" outburst, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell refusing to pick up the phone, Louie Gohmert comparing Obama to Hitler in a House floor speech, etc.)  Much of this has to do with racism and the current heated-up partisanship, but I think both of these things are intensified by the role southern honor is playing.  A certain brand of white southerner simply will not cotton to an "uppity" (in their mind) black northerner setting the agenda or making them do something against their will, even if it be the people's desire.  They will filibuster, obstruct, go over the fiscal cliff and even default on the nation's debt before their position of mastery is compromised.

Reflections on the New New South

Until I moved to East Texas three years ago, I'd had very little personal experience with the South, just four short trips, in fact. As a five-year old I went on a family vacation to Disneyworld, which included stops in Chattanooga on the way in, and Mobile on the way out. For years I vaguely remembered one strange stop where we went to eat at a roadside cafe in the rural South somewhere, and we left without ordering any food. I never knew the reason why until recently; my Dad informed me that this truck stop had refused service to a black customer while we were at the table, and thus took us out of there in disgust. The subject actually came up when we discussed the possibility that I might take a temporary job in Mississippi back when I was just out of grad school.

Except for a trip to DC, where we stayed in suburban northern Virginia (which is quasi-Southern), I didn't go back below the Mason-Dixon line until grad school, where I attended the weddings of friends in Shreveport, Louisiana, and Augusta, Georgia. These were great trips, and when taking them I treated my destination like an exotic foreign land, full of positive and negative stereotypes. On the positive side, I had my formative pop culture memories of Smokey and the Bandit and the Dukes of Hazzard (regrettably, it was my favorite show in my early childhood) as well as a great love for the South's musical traditions, from New Orleans jazz to Kentucky bluegrass to Nashville country to Memphis soul. On the trip to Augusta I distinctly remember riding along the highways of northern Georgia, marveling at the Gothic beauty of overgrown kudzu while "Midnight Rider" played on the car stereo. On the negative side, I had my knowledge of the South's history of slavery and Jim Crow often on my mind. Many of my preconceptions about the South's inferior standards also found vivid confirmation. For instance, I came away from these trips appalled at the fact that just about every gas station toilet I had the misfortune to enter was a disgusting mess. (The worst instance came on a trip this summer to Atlanta where I stopped at a gas station in Alabama where the men's toilet was overflowing with shit. When I mentioned this to the cashier, he gave me a look that said he knew about it, and that I was an asshole for expecting any better.) As I made the move to East Texas, I wondered which imagined version of the South I would inhabit, the birthplace of great American food, literature, music and culture, or a racist, backwards hellhole.

From my perch in New Jersey after three years of southern living, I'm now convinced that the incessant exoticization of the South by those in the region and outside of it prevents real understanding and needs to stop. Although many Southerners claim they are sick and tired of being depicted in an exotic manner, the voices today calling most loudly for the existence of a distinctive Southern way of being reside in Dixie. And yet, as my friend J. who grew up in Alabama likes to note, the South has never been more similar to the rest of the country, and the rest of the country more similar to the South. On the one hand, every Southern town of size has the same ugly growth of the same box stores and fast food chains at its edges, except for a couple of Chic-fil-as thrown into the mix. On the other, country music has saturated the rest of America's airwaves, Southern rappers dominate hip-hop, Southern-style evangelical Christianity has gone national, Paula Deen is making Southern food accessible to the Yankee masses, NASCAR is regularly televised, Arkansas-born Wal-Mart is the biggest retailer and the traditional Southern abhorrence of the public sphere has become the dominant theme of American politics this year.

Yes, there are real differences, but they are increasingly less important, especially in the urban South. (Pockets of the rural South still remain forbiddingly set in their ways, part of the reason I had to get out.) A modern day Faulkner or Flannery O'Connor wanting a truly "Southern" setting for their literary work would have to choose Wal-Mart or a suburban subdivision rather than a general store or Greek revival mansion. In my opinion, there are two recent depictions of this New New South that actually ring true, HBO's series Eastbound and Down and the Will Ferrell vehicle Talladega Nights. While the main character of Eastbound and Down, Kenny Powers, does teach in a place called Jefferson Davis High School (it's hard to believe there are still public institutions named for this nation's greatest traitor, but there are many), he has his comeback at a suburban BMW dealership. These days folks eat their grits at a Cracker Barrel off the interstate rather than a dusty roadside diner, a fact reflected in Talladega Nights, where much of the film takes place in an Applebee's. The "baby Jesus" prayer scene from this film is about as scathing an indictment of the shallow, anti-intellectual version of Christianity common these days in both the North and South as you'll find.

It's in the best interests of those living in both the north and the south to stop fetishizing the latter's eccentricities. Folks up north have a maddening tendency to ascribe racism to the South so as to shift attention from endemic racial inequality in their own backyards. (By the way, my old university in East Texas had more interracial couples on its campus than any other that I've ever been affiliated with up north.) People in the South need to stop bristling at every criticism of their startingly hierarchical society as some kind of Yankee intrusion, or indictment of a unique and cherished "way of life." It's time for Americans all around this country to ask some hard questions about how we got here, and not to retreat into a regionalism that makes the current situation and its attendant problems the result of someone else's behavior, and not their own.