Well, as a matter of fact, there are three groups, two of which post here.
One is the faculty Marxists like Eric "the Red" Foner of deeply-pink Columbia University (which was denounced, along with NYU, back in the 50's by Louis Budenz as a hotbed of Stalinist agents of influence), who have been enabling leftist Clintonoid initiatives to "contextualize" the Civil War at all national sites under the care of the United States Government. This has usually involved hanging the "it was all about slavery" smear on the South, with the intention that the slavery reminder should resonate with black and liberal voters and invigorate Democratic finger-pointing, hate-puppet "identity politics" that liberal opinion-mongers have been waging against Southern conservatives since even before Newt Gingrich took the Congress away from them.
The Clinton/Rat/Left political strategy is to demonize modern Southerners by constantly pointing the finger and ranting about slavery and civil rights (never mind that Clarence Thomas enjoys his just fine, thank you).
The objective is that Northern and Midwestern (e.g. Ohioan) Republicans and "Reagan Democrats" would feel compelled to back away from any position or candidate supported by real conservatives, who as Newt et al. showed with the 1994 Contract, are the real political competition for Clintonism ("Totalitarian Leftism with a Moderate Face"). The "anti-Southern Strategy", or "South-Bashing Strategy" is simply to make Southerners, and by extension all conservatives, radioactive. Invective is their tool. That is the first group of South-bashers.
The second group is the neoconservatives. One of our strongest South-bashers in this forum is a liberal Zionist and nominal Republican from Beantown who lives in New York. There is a clutch of these guys, most of them living in the New York piece of Megalopolis, who check in to troll the Civil War threads and rip Southerners every chance they get as categorical racists, segregationists, and whipcracker-wannabe's. This attack is grossly prosecuted with a broad brush and as such is unfair, but these guys won't back off for a New York second. They despise the South utterly -- that's not too strong a phrase -- and they tell other Republicans very frequently that the presence of Southerners in the GOP is a moral stain on the Party and an embarrassment. You don't think they post that, I can link you.
Like here: Neocon screed.
Why the vitriol? I don't know -- but I think it stems from the fact that a neoconservative is a liberal at heart, and that one of liberals' fixed values is that the South is the home of evil. (Like some FReepers allege that Ithaca is the City of Evil, or something like that, because of the presence of Cornell and its cadre of mouth-breathing liberal 'bots.)
What is incontestable is that this anti-Southern neocon bias, this occasionally strong prejudice, has been expressed in serious opinion forums, like the 1998 Christopher Caldwell thinkpiece about the future of the Republican Party in The Atlantic Monthly. Caldwell was a senior writer for Bill Kristol's Weekly Standard and a card-carrying neocon. His thesis was as outlined above: a warning to Republicans that they had to break out of the "Finkelstein Box", named for legendary Republican Rat-squasher Arthur Finkelstein, by attracting moderate Democrats in big states bordering that "box" of "red" states in the South, Midwest, and Mountain West that reliably vote Republican year after year. To appeal to voters in these "battleground" states, Caldwell argues, the GOP has to soft-sell conservativism and put the Southerners in the back of the bus. Better still, lock them in the attic. His article was titled "The Southern Captivity of the GOP", and it was basically an invitation to Southern conservatives to get lost -- except at election time.
Why would Caldwell think this? Well, let him tell it:
As southern control over the Republican agenda grows, the party alienates even conservative voters in other regions.....The most profound clash between the South and everyone else, of course, is a cultural one. It arises from the southern tradition of putting values -- particularly Christian ones -- at the center of politics. This is not the same as saying that the Republican Party is "too far right"; Americans consistently tell pollsters that they are conservative on values issues. It is, rather, that the Republicans [i.e. Southern Republicans] have narrowly defined "values" as the folkways of one regional subculture, and have urged their imposition on the rest of the country.....Southerners now wag the Republican dog. How did the party let that happen?
-- Christopher Caldwell, "The Southern Captivity of the GOP", The Atlantic Monthly, June, 1998, p. 55ff.
Not just writing a hit piece on the South, Caldwell mulled various areas of Republican and national politics and assigned blame to the prominence of the NRA and its, and the GOP's, vulnerability to charges of extremism and to bracketing with Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. But the Southern cultural element, he insisted, was a political deal-breaker with important constituencies.
A new article treating this continuing intraparty politics, which has now established the "big tent" as the policy of the GOP under George W. Bush and Karl Rove, is on the cover of American Conservative this month.
That's the second group.
The third group is like the second; these are Straussian "moderates" who follow Harry Jaffa in his strong defense of Abraham Lincoln against any revision or review. They are located mostly around such Straussian strongholds as Northwestern University in Chicagoland and Claremont-McKenna College in Pomona, California. The "Western Straussians" are almost exclusively the students of Harry Jaffa and include e.g. former ambassador and recent senatorial candidate (Illinois) Alan Keyes, and they frequently refer to themselves as "Declarationists", from Jaffa's political theory that all political legitimacy flows from the Declaration of Independence and from political adhesion to its statement of ideals.
The problem for Southerners with Declarationism is that the Declaration was used by Lincoln as a justification of his departure from, and flouting of, the Constitutional restrictions on his actions and policies, to rid the United States of slavery by the institution of an internecine civil war to "purge" the American body politic. This politics, like the Leftists', relies on what the Left in other circumstances calls "blaming the victim" to justify a war policy (in my own provisional opinion) for resolving political differences that Lincoln himself, in his correspondence from 1855, admitted could not be resolved within the constitutional forms of a federated republic.
The original Marxist attack on the South, dating from the first Clinton campaign and a New York Times press campaign dating from 1991 or earlier, sought to point afresh the finger of moral inculpation first levelled by the Abolitionists. That renewed moral attack, which has upset the national compromise enjoined by the Civil War veterans themselves, brought out a strong reaction by revision-minded Southerners, including Thomas DiLorenzo, who with better or worse tools and arguments, went to work on the policies of the Lincoln Administration and the politics of Abraham Lincoln himself. This didn't so much energize the Straussians to come to Lincoln's defense as it enraged them, judging by the response on this forum, so that the Straussians find themselves in bed with neoconservatives and Marxian academic Leftists in attacking the South -- the better, in the Straussians' case, to defend Lincoln and his Declarationist politics.
The DUmmies? PLEASE! They can't frame a coherent argument, they're too full of vitriol and THC.
Not logical to you and me, perhaps, but they're good at putting together the kind of vitriolic "politics of personal destruction" that Media Research Center's Brent Bozell warned about after the 1994 election, as the Left, realizing their peril, went to war on Newt Gingrich in order to preserve Bill Clinton's reelection in the 1996 election.
There is a clutch of these guys, most of them living in the New York piece of Megalopolis, who check in to troll the Civil War threads and rip Southerners every chance they get as categorical racists, segregationists, and whipcracker-wannabe's. This attack is grossly prosecuted with a broad brush and as such is unfair, but these guys won't back off for a New York second. They despise the South utterly -- that's not too strong a phrase -- and they tell other Republicans very frequently that the presence of Southerners in the GOP is a moral stain on the Party and an embarrassment. You don't think they post that, I can link you.
Kudos on an excellent analysis. Spot on.