The South Has Risen

Did you notice that both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions were held in the South? This is but the latest evidence of the success of the Republican Southern Strategy initiated by Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater. This strategy was a flagrant exercise in racism and tapped the most heinous socio-political sentiments that have beset this country.

It was specifically the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the anger they generated in the South that the Republicans took advantage of to turn the Democratic “Solid South”, although a thorn in the side of progressives such as Franklin Roosevelt, into a Republican Right Wing bastion.

However, due to the shallowness of American political thinking, the South, once inside the Republican Party, took it over. We have lived with the consequences ever since. The Republican Party became the vehicle for the spread of a long regionalized ethos of virulent racism, gun toting pickups, “right to work” suppression of labor that brought the New England textile mills to the South, the rebel railing against government, the introduction of religious zealotry into politics and a blind patriotism that made the South the preferred military recruiting area for the all volunteer army. While all of these proclivities can be found scattered among the American populace in general, it is the South where they have been nurtured and acculturated.

Is this too strong an indictment? I don't think so. As a young soldier in World War 2 I was stationed for awhile in 1943 near Tampa, Florida. I saw the public drinking fountains and public restrooms for whites only and blacks only. As a California boy, I was appalled that this could be going on in the same country I was raised in. On a bus I got up from my seat near the front to give it to a black woman struggling under a load of purchases, a common courtesy in my home state. I was sharply reprimanded by the bus driver and told to return to my seat. Here it was, almost 80 years after the end of the Civil War, yet American citizens, born free, were being made subservient to others by law.

All this is to point up the fact that the South, with an economy dependent upon slavery, has returned to the distinction it made between master and slave, that is between a superior and an inferior class of human beings, at every opportunity. It is to this kind of societal fault line that the worst in human bigotry and cruelty gravitate. Though the original arrangement was defeated by the Civil War, it found a way through Jim Crow laws and share cropping to achieve much the same end. When that was brought to a halt, wage slavery in the form of right to work laws was used to attract industry to the South. I am aware that New Englanders with their slave ships were deeply involved in this despicable practice, but unlike the South the general populace did not live with the immediacy of the South's intense practice. I am also aware that it has been American corporations who have taken advantage of Southern bigotry to profit from the deprivations of low wage laws. Having set the standard in the South, these corporations have gone on to exploit cheap labor world wide.

A basic irony in all of this is that the political party that had so many of the abolitionists that fought slavery has become the party of the ideological descendants of the slave-owning South. Witness the current efforts of the Republican Party to purge voter rolls of those without prescribed identification, striking heavily against poor black people and that party's vigorous anti-immigrant efforts. Ari Berman's Nation Magazine article How the GOP Is Resegregating the South is especially informative on this matter. It can be found at http://www.thenation.com/article/165976/new-southern-strategy

The recent book by Michelle Alexander and Cornel West titled The New Jim Crow details how Jim Crow segregation is being reintroduced through unjust criminal codes including the war on drugs, deprivation of eduction, etc. They have one chapter titled Thinking Is for Mechanics, Not Racial-Justice Advocates (the title of which I thoroughly disagree with) which articulates problems requiring the most profound thought if massive unrest and violence is to be avoided.

The fundamental social characteristic of slavery and one that continues to characterize its residue in the Republican Party is the pervasive distinction made between classes of people. When these rigid distinctions are made, especially along lines such as skin color and ethnicity which cannot be changed, they become the areas of exacerbated conflict to which many other issues gravitate. These kinds of distinctions between people are so obvious that the ignorant, the traditionalist, and the simple minded can be easily convinced that they have some miscreant meaning. These distinctions are the favorite tools of dictators such as Hitler's use of the Jews to gain support for his Nazi regime. There are reasons why white supremacists are to be found in the Tea Party.

Of course the above condemnation of “the South” refers to an ethos, not particular people; that would be the bigotry condemned herein. Evidence of this can be found in progressives like Molly Ivins, Jim Hightower, Ronnie Dugger, founding editor of the progressive Texas Observer, all of Austin Texas, a city regarded by the majority of the Texas legislature as another planet, as described by Molly. The Southern Poverty Law Center in Birmingham Alabama is another brave testament to progressive tenacity.

The steady march of this Southern bigotry, albeit in a more sublimated form, must be candidly and objectively evaluated, the full dimension of its horrors laid bare, its current forms and future impacts identified, those primarily responsible for the reintroduction of American apartheid identified and a program of countervailing legislation developed. A big order? Obviously yes. A necessity for the preservation of American democracy? Equally obviously yes.

Bob Newhard