Chicken-Fried Paranoia: Southernization and the Paranoid Style

The last four posts were about Richard Hofstadter's 1964 essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, how it remains relevant today and how it may relate to our current politics of racial hysteria and the previously successful Southern Strategy.

Although Hofstadter may remain relevant today, it appears that the Southern Strategy is not.  And what that means is that the GOP is in serious trouble.  Obama is the first Democratic President who is not from the South since the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960.  That simple fact is arguably at least as politically significant as his race.  Moreover, the election of 2008 was the first presidential election that the Democrats have won without a southerner on the ticket since 1940. 

Let's take a look at some electoral and demographic maps:

The Political Landscape

First, the 1948 Election results.  The orange states represent the Dixiecrat/Strom Thurmond "States Rights" wins:

Here's the 1964 Election results, with Barry Goldwater's states in red.

Now let's look at the 1968 Election Results.  George Wallace, running on a segregationist, "states rights" campaign carried the states in orange.

And finally, the 2008 Election results:

The key point about the above electoral map is that the Republicans only carried one major state (as defined by population and economic strength) and that is Texas.

To put it another way, when comparing a list of the US states by GSP (Gross State Product, an index of economic output), of the top 10 states, only two (Georgia and Texas) voted Republican.  Of the top 20 states, four voted Republican (Texas, Georgia, Arizona, Tennessee) and 16 voted Democratic.  The map below shows the states ranked by population:

The four key Confederate states of Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Georgia, while reliably Republican and highly susceptible to racist rhetoric are not significant electorally (30 combined electoral votes) or economically (866 billion dollars in combined economic output, equal to about 6% of total GDP).     Even if you throw in South Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky and Oklahoma, you've only got 9 states and 71 electoral votes. So that leaves Texas and it's 34 electoral votes.  More on that in a moment.


Birthers - A Strong Southern Bias
A poll taken in July 2009 by Research 2000, showed the following:

The South Versus Obama
Clearly, there is a strong Southern bias here. Michael Lind had a terrific piece about this last week in the The Daily Beast. 

With the notable exceptions of the two outliers from the far north, Sarah Palin (R., freelance) and Michelle Bachmann (R., Minnesota) the loudest voices against Obama are coming from the former Confederate states of the deep south and Oklahoma and they tend to have distinctly southern accents.

• Jeff Sessions (R., Alabama)
• Jim Inhofe (R., Oklahoma)
• Tom Coburn (R., Oklahoma)
• Jim DeMint (R., South Carolina)
• Paul Broun, (R. Georgia)
• Mitch McConnell (R. Kentucky)
• Rick Perry (R., Texas)

As if the message wasn't clear enough, we have the last name on the list, Governor Rick Perry, openly talking about seccession from the Union.  Now, as easy as it may be to make fun of Rick Perry for being a venal doofus desperately trying to stay in the running in the middle of a  tough primary challenge, stop and think for a second about this.  A sitting governor of a former slave state and member of the Confederacy goes on national television and talks about secession!  That's just... astounding.  

How did "the party of Lincoln's" leadership respond to this?  For the most part, with either smiles of approval or total silence.  And of course, once again, we hear about that old chestnut, "states rights."  Meanwhile, Perry's key aide David Carney says "the GOP should not open itself up like a whorehouse," presumably meaning, let's keep it white, male and Christian.

A winning strategy?  I don't think so.  The demographic trend in Texas is clear.  Texas is already 36.5% Latino, 11.9% black and 3.5% Asian and most estimates have Texas flipping permanently Democratic by 2020 at the latest.  Minority-bashing and Rebel flag waving may not be the smartest way to win an election.

So, what gives? 

Above, an advertisement from the Dallas papers on November 22, 1963, the last time a non-southern Democrat was elected President of the United States. They were upset because he was a Catholic.

So what is going on in the South?   Are they just plain crazy?  I would argue something a bit different.  Although there is no doubt that they are in denial about the demographic changes that are sweeping the country, the roots of that denial are interesting and have their basis in southern history.  The map below shows the Confederate states in dark green and the border states, which had significant Confederate contingents, in light green.

A Brief Digression on the History of the South
The antebellum South was first and foremost a feudal society. There were no public schools in the South until reconstruction. Not one.  There wasn't a state-funded public school until the 1890's.

Although black people were obviously the most oppressed in the old South, so were poor white people.  And sitting on top of the hill, literally, was a tiny rich white land and slave owning aristocracy that fancied themselves the smartest and best people in the United States.   They literally believed that they were better than anyone else.  And many of that same southern aristocracy still do.  As horrible as they were to black people they were equally horrible to the poor white people whenever they had the opportunity to do so.  The feudal aristocracy had a vested interest in keeping those people as dumb as possible and manipulating them to maintain their power.  One of the ways that they manipulated them was by pitting the poor blacks against the poor whites. That's how it was in 1880 and that's how it is now, in many respects.

Southern Politicians Have Always Supported the Rich and Oppressed the Working Class, Regardless of Race
Southern politicians have historically been anti-democratic.  Poll taxes and literacy tests were used to exclude whites as well as blacks.  This general disenfranchisement of the poor was abetted by the - at first, refusal - and later, grudging reluctance to pay for any public education whatsoever.  It's kind of hard to pass a literacy test if you can't read.

What many Northerners never understood about the South is that they weren't ashamed of their low educational standards, they were striving for low educational standards as a matter of policy to keep the population ignorant, uneducated and controllable. Many poor whites never voted in the South until after World War Two.   See Alexander Keysar's excellent "The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States" for more on this shameful subject.

In the now infamous South Carolina Democratic Primary for the US Senate in 1938 (which pitched Ellison D. "Cotton Ed" Smith (photo, right) against the then current governor of South Carolina, a New Dealer named Olin T. Johnston), out of a total population of 1,738,000 people, only 336,000 people voted.  Even though that was only 18% of the population, Cotton Ed was taking no chances. He had teams of red-shirted thugs patrolling poll locations, intimidating both blacks and whites.  "Cotton Ed's" slogan that year was "Cotton is king and white is supreme." Here's a 1938 Time article describing his victory.


I would argue that the hysterical rhetoric that we're seeing now is because the sense of entitlement that these anachronistic feudal lords continue to feel to this day is threatened.  Not just by Obama's race, but by everything about him.  He's from Chicago.  He went to Harvard.  He eats arugula.  He represents everything they abhor.  Sure, it's racial, first and foremost, but beyond that, it's just everything.

Don't get me wrong - there are racists and demagogues and just plain crazy people everywhere, but they reach a certain critical mass in the American South. The powers that be in the South have been arguing against democracy since the first Constitutional Convention in 1787, when they demanded (and got) the  northern states to agree to the bizarre political proposition that slaves would count as 3/5 of a person for purposes of determining political representation but the slaves themselves would have no political voice or human rights.  They applied this same "count but disenfranchise" policy to as many citizens as they could up through World War Two.

Southern Baptists
Both Texas and Louisiana passed laws this year requiring the teaching of  "creationism" in biology classes.  This could only happen in the American South.  How could this happen, in 2009?  And more importantly, why?

The red areas indicate Southern Baptists.  Southern Baptists originated as a unique denomination back in the 1840's, when there was a schism between the northern and southern versions of most protestant churches over the issue of - slavery.  Kind of keeps on coming up over and over, doesn't it?

Convergence
We can see several things converging here: good old-fashioned red-baiting, racism and Christian fundamentalism.  At the same time, the former Confederate states are banding together, threatening secession and getting just plain hysterical when you suggest that there might be something racist about any of this. 

Through some perceptual maladjustment that I am simply unable to comprehend, it's "OK" in some quarters to send out images like the one above but "racist" to suggest that it's racist.  Now THAT'S just plain crazy, but it's the same logic whereby both Rush "Puff the Magic Negro" Limbaugh and Glenn "he hates white people" Beck have proclaimed Obama to be the racist.  Quoting Hofstadter again:

"...a mentality disposed to see the world in this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population. But certain religious traditions, certain social structures and national inheritances, certain historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic energies, and to situations in which they can more readily be built into mass movements or political parties. In American experience ethnic and religious conflict have plainly been a major focus for militant and suspicious minds of this sort, but class conflicts also can mobilize such energies. Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise. The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest—perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands—are shut out of the political process."

Here's a link to the full text of "The Paranoid Style in American Politics."


Conclusions
As Hofstadter points out in the paragraph above, there is always a small portion of the electorate that is prone to this type of paranoia and who are easily manipulated for political gain.  We're seeing that today with the manipulation of the "birthers" and  "teabaggers" by cynical corporate interests who, in truth, have no political values or ideological interest other than making money but who have an interest in suppressing both dissent and democracy. And who aren't ashamed to pander to that minority's basest racist instincts in order to win.

The South has dominated American politics for more than 200 years.  The first 76 years of American history were basically spent arguing over slavery until it finally erupted into the Civil War.  Then came  the Civil War which left 600,000 Americans dead,  followed by twelve brief years of attempted Reconstruction until the Federal troops were removed and the South was allowed to return to its old evil ways.  A corrupt Supreme Court permitted segregation and we had 88 years of Jim Crow (between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965).  Ending Jim Crow required sending federal troops back in, because, as is their historical wont, the South would defy Federal law whenever they felt like it unless compelled to do otherwise by force of arms. 

What we're seeing now is the last, dying gasp of a sub-culture that has had a vastly disproportionate influence on American politics since the founding of the country.  We need to understand what it is and call it what it is.

And most importantly, we need to let it pass away.