Downfall by Andrew Hacker

Author:Andrew Hacker
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510760202
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2020-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

I am pro-guns, anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-tax, and anti-Muslim. (North Carolina)

Obamacare was a big step toward a socialistic system. (Virginia)

Islam is not a religion. It’s a violent, radical crusade. (Virginia)

22

THE REPUBLICAN SOUTH

As few Americans need reminding, the South was a Democratic domain for most of its political history. In 1950, to select a sample year, 103 of its 105 seats in the House of Representatives were held by Democrats. (The other two were in Tennessee.) Its eleven governors and twenty-two senators were also from that party. Today, the region is almost as reliably Republican. No other assemblage of states has made so momentous a shift. So it’s worth taking the time to learn how and why this happened and to ask whether, even with so grand a partisan pivot, Southern politics have basically changed.

The South has traditionally been delineated as the former Confederacy: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. But segments of Florida and Virginia are experiencing cultural changes, due mainly to migrations from more urbane states. Similar shifts are occurring in Texas and North Carolina, albeit at a slower pace. Added to which, Hispanics are now the principal minority in Florida and Texas, altering the dimensions of race and ethnicity.

The South has been America’s most problematic region from its very beginning. Its spirit and structure were indelibly set when nineteen shackled Africans were taken ashore in Virginia in 1619. Viewed as property that could be bought and sold and punished, they became the root of the region’s economy. The legal enslavement of living beings continued for almost two and a half centuries, and was only ended by a gory war. Yet its imprint, more than any other factor, still explains the texture and temper of today’s South.

The choice of chattel labor gave it a pharaonic structure, more primitive than the vassalage of feudalism. Relying on trammeled sweat and muscle, there was no need to nurture the ingenuity that ignites innovation, as in pursuing the promise of technology. Even after bondage was ended, the South did not join the industrial age. It had manufacturing, of course, but not enough to lift the weight of the past. Our time has seen once-backward countries enter the modern world. Think Taiwan and South Korea. But this nation’s South never fully shed the lethargy endemic to enslavement. That, as much as anything, is why it continues to have the lowest living standards in the nation. Indeed, by many measures, lower than in Taiwan and South Korea.

The importation of human cargos brought about a need by those of European lineage to differentiate themselves distinctly from those of African origin. Even with epithets like “rednecks,” “crackers,” and “trash,” it was accepted that those deemed white were full members of the race.1 More explicitly, there was the avowal that no white person, no matter how degraded, could ever be consigned to bondage. To this day, anyone viewed as white can gaze upon anyone deemed black, and muse: “Only your people were enslaved; mine could never be.

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