Thanks, this loooks like a definite must-read, but I'll have to bookmark it for later.
Hmmm, I was born in CT and have lived in MA most of my life so I guess I'm a pacifist, right?
Well I have the guns and the DD214 that suggest otherwise.
That is the best article I have read in days. Thank you.
Well I can only say one thing.
DON"T PISS ME OFF.
}:-[
I was riveted until the author pegged Dallas a conservative stronghold. Now I figure that if he'll lie about Dallas, he'll lie about other things.
Lind is a brilliant cultural observer.
A culture built on violent male prowess is self perpetuating in that women choose men who will be attractive to their friends and families. On the southern football field and the inner city basketball court, alpha males show off their prowess for the women. Sports is an incredibly important part of southern and black life.
Touching on the subject of basketball, blacks brought to it the flashy moves that impress chicks. The slam dunk. The three point shot. The behind the back dribble. Northern whites don't emphasize flashy chick magnet moves so hockey is boring to watch.
"In the long run, demography may favor the southern coalition."
I have Fischer's book titled "Albion's Seed" where he describes the "folkways" as he sees them.
If 9/11/2001 doesn't make some Americans willing to fight, nothing will.
Sorry, but this Yankee ain't no dove in the war on terror.
bookmark
One thing Lind sems to leave out is the loss of the basis of the "Calvinist" "messianic" "new Jerusalem" mindset in the north. These roots are largely forgotten in "Greater New England" having been replaced by secular humanism and relativism. In contrast, The Judeo-Christian tradition with its Biblical absolutes of right and wrong is much stronger in the south. People who believe in absolutes of right and wrong are much more likely to put their lives on the line to fight for what's right and against what's wrong.
^4L8R
Good article. Bump.
To some degree, this was because the U.S. military has almost always been dominated by southerners.
The reason for the collapse of Cold War liberalism in the Democratic Party was not Vietnam but the transformation of the party's base. Even if there had been no Vietnam War, the Democratic Party probably would have become more isolationist in the 1960s and 1970s as its demographic base moved northward. Many of the antiwar activists and politicians came from backgrounds or regions formerly associated with Republican progressivism and anti-interventionism.
These regional differences reflect the divergence in moral systems between the post-Calvinist Puritanism of Greater New England, which shuns violence as a means for resolving disputes, and the cultures of honor of the Scots-Irish Highland South and the Anglo-American Tidewater South. The two southern cultures are quite different. But compared to Greater New Englanders, both Highland and Tidewater southerners approve more of violent retaliation for insults. Southerners are not indiscriminately violent. The difference between northern and southern homicide rates stems almost entirely from the violent responses of southerners to personal offenses: arguments, insults to women, lovers' quarrels, and family disputes. The researchers Richard E. Nisbet and Dov Cohen discovered that, at the same university, white southern students were more likely to respond aggressively than white northern students to the same set of insults and provocations. The same researchers have pointed out the similarities between the culture of honor of white southerners and that of inner-city African Americans, most of whom are descendants of southern migrants.
However, I continue to maintain that the South I know (the Protestant Upper South, though I am Anglo-Saxon rather than Scots-Irish) has more in common with old New England than most people insist. I also do not believe that contemporary New England liberalism is the unvarnished continuation of Puritan theocracy that its opponents often brand it.
One example of an area which both the author and many FReepers miss the boat is the assumption that Southerners are/were opposed to alcohol and tobacco prohibitionism. Many contemporary conservatives prefer to forget the Prohibition Era, which saw the greatest solidarity between New England and Southern Protestantism in American history. It was the South and West, the rural areas and small towns, who (like the New England "radicals") supported Prohibition while urbanites and Catholics opposed it. Prohibition remains America's forgotten era (at least so far as ideology is concerned). I must also attest (contrary to the general perception) that conservative Fundamentalists are now, and long have been, opposed to the use of tobacco as a moral vice. How is advocacy of the outlawing of vice "liberal?" After all, would we not all like to see our traditional laws against homosexuality (another and far greater moral vice) reinstated? I fail to see why so many conservatives who support laws against so many vices (ranging from sexual immorality to narcotics to gambling) suddenly become libertarian when it comes to tobacco. This most certainly opens us up to charges of hypocrisy and misses an opportunity to explain our advocacy of "legislating morality" in contexts our enemies can understand.
I again feel the necessity of defending the Federalists who were, after all, the original conservatives (as opposed to the radical pro-Jacobin Jeffersonian Republicans). Federalist opposition to the War of 1812 was based partly on interest (the war disrupted trade with Britain, the region's greatest trading partner) but also partly on traditional Federalist Anglophilia and hostility to the "French atheists." Ironically (and in one of those gems of historical irony) it was anti-war Federalists who championed loose constructionism and states' rights at that time, though this was a reversal of their earlier (and later) ideology.
I also wish to point out that many of the most "radical" abolitionists (such as Thaddeus Stevens and William H. Seward) got their political starts in the Anti-Masonic movement, which served as the "halfway house" between conservative anti-Illuminist Federalism and radical abolitionism. I used to be a John Bircher, and I have always resented their dishonesty in ignoring the inconsistencies in their conspiracy theory (ie, their tortuous support of the early anti-Jacobin Federalists and the Confederacy, and their ignoring of the fact that the originally anti-Illuminist Anti-Masonic movement was part of the loose constructionist "national bank" wing of American politics, which they also attack). In actual fact the anti-Illuminist Federalists morphed into the national bank loose constructionist ideology while strict constructionist anti-bankism is descended from the pro-Jacobin "democratic societies."
A similar point seldom pointed out is the similarity in the ideologies of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, both of whom advocated both domestic and foreign interventionism. Conservatives have a congenital hostility to these policies in FDR while ignoring the similarity those of Theodore (who was also anti-German and anti-Japanese and who was an extreme interventionist during World War I).
I appreciated the comment on then similarities in "Southern" and urban Black culture (an obvious fact ignored by the partisans of both groups). The almost bushido-like philosophy of the duel is totally foreign to me and I could never react to it other than to lable it barbaric. Does that make me a "New Englander?" Actually, what many political scholars identify as "Southern" is alien to me (what with my Fundamentalist moralism which does not advocate "tradition" per se but rather submission to the Law of the True G-d; in fact much of the calls for "tradition" by rightwing "civilizationists" sounds to me identical to the worship of the ways of "indigenous pipples" by the Left). The South I grew up in and am familar with is not particularly violent or obsessed with "honor" and is as stern and puritanical as Jonathan Edwards (what, ain't you ever seen our prune-faced preachers on television?). While I am not a pacifist (because I regard wars an inevitable part of human life so long as the true G-d is not acknowledged and His Will is made manifest in all things) I most certainly represent the puritanical, anti-secret society, anti-gambling, prohibitionist strain of Federalism/Whiggery/Republicanism.
I wonder where Pat Buchanan fits on the author's ideological map???