The last post looked at the winners and losers in the rapidly changing post Great Recession economic front. Not surprisingly, with few exceptions which mainly have energy industry or entertainment industry ties, most of the cities that fall into the "winner" category" are not in the South. Why? Because the South is not welcoming to diversity, knowledge and innovation thanks to the twin pillars of racism and backward thinking, intolerant religiosity. As I have argued many times before, innovators and entrepreneurs simply do not want to relocate to areas that are socially toxic and unattractive to educated employees who have numerous options on where to live and work. A piece in Think Progress makes the case that racism in particular (followed by religious extremism) is a poison that hurts the South's prospects for the future. Here are highlights:
The debt ceiling crisis may be over (at least until February), but the crisis created by the Republican Party’s sharp reactionary turn emphatically is not. I’ve argued that the Tea Party, is the legacy of structural racism in the South dating back to the 1930s, and will remain a powerful force in the Republican Party absent tectonic shocks to the political landscape on the level of the civil rights movement.
The buried story of Wednesday’s government-opening vote in the House was a split between Republican Southerners — and everyone else. Southern Republican whites voted overwhelmingly against the deal — 73 against, 18 in favor. Other Republicans were evenly split (69 in favor, 71 against) and Democrats, of course, unanimously supported the deal. Roughly the same thing happened the last time House Republicans almost took the United States off the default cliff.
The overwhelming Tea Party conservatism in the Southern delegation reflects the region’s exceptionally conservative bent. In a brand-new American Politics Research article, Columbia University’s Steven White ran a series of regressions analyses aimed at separating out the effect of region and religion on Southern political views. White found “very substantial support” for the idea that Southern whites were across-the-board more conservative than whites in the rest of the country. Moreover, whites in the Deep South (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina) were more reactionary than their also super-conservative peers in the Peripheral South (Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia).
Southern political uniqueness appeared to be partly religious — but only partly. Roughly half of America’s evangelicals live in the South, a pattern dating back to the early 1800s. . . . . Since then, Southern Oregon University’s Mark Shibley documents, evangelical faith has dominated spiritual and cultural life among Southern whites in a way that it hasn’t anywhere else in the United States.
Something else, something distinctly regional, explains why the South, both Deep and Peripheral, has more conservative views across-the-board than the rest of the country. Race, and its historical legacy, appears to be the key.
Three political scientists at the University of Rochester found that, when you control for series of potentially confounding factors, white Southerners in the Mississippi Delta-to-Georgia “Black Belt” were “less likely to identify as Democrat, more likely to oppose affirmative action policies, and more likely to express racial resentment toward blacks” if their county housed high percentages of slaves prior to the Civil War. This effect survives controls for the percentage of African Americans in-county today, inclining the Rochester scholars to believe that racial prejudice (in mutating forms, to be sure) has been passed down continually among Deep South whites from parent-to-child since slavery.
Race and religion, then, have always set the South apart. So the South’s turn away from the Democratic Party over race, beginning in the 1930s and finalizing in the 1990s, is a pattern of evolution consistent with the region’s long history of racial conservatism. That the religious right became a dominant force in both the South and the Republican party in the 80s and 90s is the other side of the coin.
The South, in short, was a region uniquely well suited for the modern conservative movement’s “fusion” between social and economic conservatism. It’s no surprise that the South is the driver of hard-right conservatism today. That’s what its racial and religious heritage would suggest.
[T]he Religious Right’s growth was tied up in the South’s race problem. . . . . “It was not the school-prayer issue, and it was not the abortion issue,” Weyrich said. “What caused the movement to surface,” he told Columbia University’s Randall Balmer, “was the federal government’s move against the Christian schools.” After Brown v. Board of Education, many Southern whites moved their kids to private schools (“segregation academies,” in common parlance). Many of these academies were religious in character.
Bob Jones University, which was fully segregated until 1971 and subsequently continued to ban interracial dating, become the flashpoint. In in 1970, the Internal Revenue Service began proceedings against BJU and, in 1975, the IRS revoked its tax-exempt status, citing its racially discriminatory practices. Weyrich and his allies spun IRS’ action into a liberal campaign against the Christian way of life. The Religious Right as an organized movement grew in significant part out of the defense of Bob Jones and other similarly “persecuted” Christian schools.
Evangelical Christianity was politicized by conservative activists who exploited the legacy of Jim Crow to mobilize evangelicals as foot soldiers in the emerging Republican and conservative Southern establishment that itself was born from segregation’s ashes. It isn’t religion that explains the South’s conservatism; it was the rise of conservatism that explains the powerful political role Southern religion plays today.
Studies of Tea Party attitudes suggest a pervasive fear that America is no longer “their” country. Sociologist Theda Skocpol, one of the foremost scholars of the political movement, sees a tinge of racism and xenophobia in that, but more importantly “they also resent young people – including in their own families.”
They believe, according to Skocpol, that younger folks “hold ideas that are not very American.” In reality, these younger folks hold ideas that are not very traditionally Southern.
Things are changing, but nowhere rapidly enough. As a result, until more of the older generations of Southerners die off, the twin evils of racism and religious extremism will continue to haunt the South and, unfortunately, the rest of America.
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