THE WHITE ESTABLISHMENT - It is a cultural reality. The Southern colonies were initially established by the third sons of the English aristocracy, driven by inheritance law and the indentured servants, prisoners, and slaves they brought over. The result was to transport a class-conscious society in which one is expected to know and respect his betters. With this came a primitive view of religion that holds everything is ordained on high. Indeed, a central function of a church in such a society is to justify the social order. It is god's will that the big man lives in the big house (they are, in the current political vernacular, the job creators, you see).
The South was/is a culture dominated by belief structures. It never fully accepted the liberal democratic ideals that sprang from reason and inquiry, so well absorbed in the northern states, populated as they were by a single class of emigrants, most fleeing the rule of the big man.
The northern states evolved a middle class and professional society that emphasized education, free thought, equality, and the pursuit of science. The original tea party was in Boston, remember? The South came slowly and reluctantly to the revolution.
Because agricultural practices were so harsh on the land, the inland southern states were progressively populated from this same cultural pool, moving ever westward for fresh land. Being Southern-born, I have to say the South has its virtues, or rather, there are virtuous sides to its flaws, blind loyalty being one of them; they know how to wave a flag and die for it.
The irony is that the red states' peoples believe themselves to be the true Americans largely based on this type of unquestioning loyalty, but in reality, America's founding political ideals are best expressed in the progressive blue states that drove the original revolution and that have driven the nation's progress and subsidized the South even today as it is still scarred by it perverse refusal to educate and empower its people; this too in the interest of keeping wages low for the big man.
An even larger irony is that the Republican party now owns the Southern side of the ongoing civil war (it has never really ended), and the Democrats have adopted the Yankees. That itself is an interesting story, born in the civil rights movement, where the Democratic party had to choose between the intellectual labor-driven values it had picked up over time and the inherited racism of its geographic roots. The Republican party, for two generations in the wilderness as an opposition minority party, could not resist the temptation to broaden its base at the expense of its own traditional values, and here we are, and here it is, locked into catering and empowering the racist religious ignorance demographic of America. What a tragedy, but Bill does not see it. No, his stress is that the South is losing again.
The South was/is a culture dominated by belief structures. It never fully accepted the liberal democratic ideals that sprang from reason and inquiry, so well absorbed in the northern states, populated as they were by a single class of emigrants, most fleeing the rule of the big man.
The northern states evolved a middle class and professional society that emphasized education, free thought, equality, and the pursuit of science. The original tea party was in Boston, remember? The South came slowly and reluctantly to the revolution.
Because agricultural practices were so harsh on the land, the inland southern states were progressively populated from this same cultural pool, moving ever westward for fresh land. Being Southern-born, I have to say the South has its virtues, or rather, there are virtuous sides to its flaws, blind loyalty being one of them; they know how to wave a flag and die for it.
The irony is that the red states' peoples believe themselves to be the true Americans largely based on this type of unquestioning loyalty, but in reality, America's founding political ideals are best expressed in the progressive blue states that drove the original revolution and that have driven the nation's progress and subsidized the South even today as it is still scarred by it perverse refusal to educate and empower its people; this too in the interest of keeping wages low for the big man.
An even larger irony is that the Republican party now owns the Southern side of the ongoing civil war (it has never really ended), and the Democrats have adopted the Yankees. That itself is an interesting story, born in the civil rights movement, where the Democratic party had to choose between the intellectual labor-driven values it had picked up over time and the inherited racism of its geographic roots. The Republican party, for two generations in the wilderness as an opposition minority party, could not resist the temptation to broaden its base at the expense of its own traditional values, and here we are, and here it is, locked into catering and empowering the racist religious ignorance demographic of America. What a tragedy, but Bill does not see it. No, his stress is that the South is losing again.
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