THE WHITE ESTABLISHMENT - Bill O'Reiley

The White Establishment

It is a cultural reality. The Southern colonies were early largely inhabited by younger sons of the English aristocracy, driven to immigrate by an inheritance law that passed all property and title to the first son.  They came to the South along with indentured servants, prisoners, and slaves, and imported slaves to build and sustain their wealth. 

All involved were influenced by the remnants of a medieval theory of social order called the 

Great Chain of Being, which held that people were born into a class by God's will.  The result was to create a class-conscious society in which one is expected to know one's place and respect one's betters.  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. 

The South has its virtues, or rather, there are virtuous sides to its flaws; blind loyalty is one of them: southerners know how to wave a flag and die for it.  The irony is that the red states' people 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 ever since the Civil War. The South remains scarred by its perverse refusal to educate and empower its people in order to keep 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 values it had picked up from its association with the labor movement and the inherited racism of its geographic roots. When the Democratic Party finally rejected Jim Crow, the Republican Party, for two generations in the wilderness as an opposition minority party after the depression, 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 to 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.