The South Just Isn’t What It Was

Shortly after Barack Obama won the presidency, the gleefully snarky Web site Gawker.com trumpeted "North Finally Wins Civil War." Speaking on behalf of what Sarah Palin and other conservatives famously dismissed as the "un-American" parts of America, Gawker rejoiced that the South is no longer the big dog of national political discourse, citing the New York Times and other respectable news outlets, which claimed Obama's new Midwestern wave drove old Dixie down.

Certainly Washington is minus the likes of Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Bob Graham and Elizabeth Dole. President Obama's Cabinet will have the fewest Southerners since the Kennedy administration. The Arkansas exuberance and Texas braggadocio that ruled the capital for 16 years have been replaced by no-drama Obama reserve.

Still, it's tough to be left out. U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia complained, "Where is the South in this administration?"

Actually, Obama's press secretary Robert Gibbs comes from Alabama, new EPA head Lisa Jackson from New Orleans, and environmental adviser Carol Browner from Florida. Yet while there's something delicious about a white Republican fussing about a lack of representation with the nation's first African-American president in the White House, the congressman's question raises another: Is the South over?

A postelection analysis dated Nov. 11, 2008, in the New York Times asserted that the South and Appalachia had "decisively" abandoned the mainstream. Writer Adam Nossiter pointed out that while 43 percent of whites nationally had voted for Obama, less than a third of Southern whites did. Democrats owe much of their recent success to unions, the thinking goes, so naturally the antiunion South will be left behind in favor of Rust Belt strongholds.

The Christian Science Monitor and others reported that Obama had considered some well-connected, long-serving Southerners such as Reps. James Clyburn of South Carolina and Georgia's Sanford Bishop Jr. for administration posts, but passed them over in favor of Westerners and Midwesterners.

The dissed, deflated and diminished South is fast becoming conventional wisdom. The Southernization of American politics is "absolutely over," according to Thomas Schaller, author of the 2006 Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South. Obama may have triumphed in three states of the Old Confederacy, but Schaller calls that "a decided New South victory" and "not a NASCAR victory."

True, most working-class white Southerners are not progressive Democrats. So should Democrats write off the South? In an editorial for Texas Observer on Dec. 12, 2008, Bob Moser thinks not: "A growing number of Anglos in Dixie are willing and able to punch their ballots for not only a Democrat but a Democrat of color."

Moser's new book Blue Dixie: Awakening the South's Democratic Majority, is a kind of rejoinder to Schaller, arguing that far from being a rump Republican backwater, the South is emerging as an engine of national change. Chris Kromm, director of North Carolina's Institute of Southern Studies, agrees. "The South's political clout is growing."

Kromm acknowledges that there are fewer prominent Southerners in Washington post-2008: "The lack of Southerners in Obama's Cabinet is actually out of step with where the nation's center of political gravity is located."

But he points out that 10 of the 13 Southern states boosted voter turnout in 2008 — Virginia and North Carolina by 7 to 8 percent — and Southern blacks and Latinos participated in the process as never before. Moreover, he says, Obama's "biggest losses with white voters were not in the South but in Idaho, Utah and Wyoming."

Kromm cites Census Bureau figures suggesting that Georgia, Texas, Florida and North and South Carolina will pick up nine congressional seats in 2010. Even though the recession has slowed the rate of growth, he says, long-term trends show the South gaining in all areas.

The region is urbanizing faster than anywhere else, and attracts an increasing number of Latinos. Indeed, Latinos made a difference for Obama in Florida: He won 57 percent of their vote. Latinos helped Democrats win in North Carolina, too, not just putting Obama over the top but kicking out incumbent Republican Sen. Elizabeth Dole, too. "I'm surprised at how rapidly North Carolina has become competitive," says Schaller.

Of course, these supposedly startling changes in Southern voting behavior prompt discussions of what counts as the South. Reacting to Barack Obama's poll lead in some Southern states during the campaign, John Warner, then Virginia's senior senator, explained that his state, North Carolina and Florida are "different," not really Southern.

"Every time a Southern state starts voting for Democrats, people say, 'Oh, that's not the real South,' " says Kromm. When Barack Obama won North Carolina, Virginia and Florida, some "wanted to magically declare them somehow un-Southern."

The "Southern" parts of the South seem to be shrinking, at least to those who define "Southern" as white right-wingers who say "y'all." Virginia isn't Southern because of all those D.C. suburbs full of transplants who don't hunt, don't eat grits and associate Manassas with a mall rather than a Civil War battle. Yet those people voted for the gun-toting, Bible-quoting, self-defined "Scotch-Irish Southern" Democrat James Webb, now Virginia's senior senator.

North Carolina isn't Southern because it's attracting Midwestern retirees, Latinos and tech types. Plus, there's the Research Triangle, the constellation of great universities, labs and libraries so despised by Sen. Jesse Helms. Real Southerners don't cotton to book learning.

As for Florida, it's full of Yankees, Spanish speakers and refugees from the snow-shoveling states. Never mind that Latinos from the former plantation cultures of Cuba and Puerto Rico have much in common with the traditional "Southern" persona (obsession with the past, over-defined gender roles, flamboyant hospitality, a cuisine based on pork and corn). Never mind that in social attitudes, race relations, spending on education, etc., Florida's peer states are not New York or California, but Alabama and Louisiana. Never mind that Florida was the third state to secede from the union in 1861.

At this rate, the South could soon consist only of Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and South Carolina — minus Huntsville (too many rocket scientists), Memphis (too many transplants), Columbia (too many professors). Or maybe we need to redefine "Southern."

For a long time (and still for some TV political pundits), "Southern" meant white. It often also meant socially conservative evangelical Christians who love, as Rush Limbaugh said, "babies, guns and Jesus." Certainly there are still plenty of them underfoot: Florida's anti-gay marriage amendment passed last November, after all. But what about African-American Southerners, Cuban-American Southerners, Asian-American Southerners, gay and lesbian Southerners, Southern Greens, Southern feminists, Southern Jews, Southern Muslims?

Even in Alabama, the state the New York Times chose to illustrate the South everyone thinks they know — complete with white ladies scared of "aggressive" black men and good ol' boys worried about the new president's "Muslim name" — more people voted for Obama in 2008 than for John Kerry in 2004. The South looks to the past, yes, but perhaps not as much as before.

"To deny this," says Kromm, "is to say that the South is forever mired in history. But the South is dynamic."

Thomas Schaller acknowledges that Democrats can compete in "New Economy areas with a lot of nonnative Southerners." The South, he says, is "losing its monolithic identity and the degree to which it does so is the degree to which it regains its political clout."

Or it may be that Virginia, North Carolina and Florida aren't Southern aberrations but the beginning of a new New South — that New South we've been promising ourselves since 1865. Kromm says, "There will be hiccups, there will be backsliding. The South will not be on a straight line up to enlightenment. But the overall trend is change. We are changing."

Diane Roberts, a former member of the Times editorial board, is professor of English at Florida State University.

*********Gawker rejoiced that the South is no longer the big dog of national political discourse, citing the New York Times and other respectable news outlets, which claimed Obama’s new Midwestern wave drove old Dixie down.******

Citing the New York Times as a respectable news outlet was as far as I got before being taken over by the giggles.

We have been invaded by liberal Yankees and Illegals from the South of the border. The election of Obama puts us in the position of the Apaches and Cheokee Indians. More of them than there is of us. Simple math should tell you the rules of a pure democracy will take over. The HUGE government that we have allowed is and will be controlled by THEM. The math is not there to win any more elections. It is checkmate and they know it.

Northern White liberals have been invading the south for decades and are becoming a majority. They bring their liberal disease with them. It's slash and burn agriculture, first you destroy a state, then you move to another one to destroy it as well, then you move on again. Happens in the Amazon with land, happens with politics here.

Ideas are more powerful than guns. If we don't let our people have guns, why should we let them have ideas?
-- Josef Stalin

Go Gators indeed! The writer and much of the sourcing is dead wrong about the South. The descriptions of the “South” were of pockets of urbanization. Freepers should note the South sat out Obama. Obama did not win on white males anywhere, and also conservative white females (ie. the non-Oprah vote). The demographic is not Southern it is white male. Note the use of the word “Latinos”— are these citizens or are they illegals. We do not use Latinos in FL we say: “Puerto Rican-American” or “Cuban-American”. More and more the generalization of “Latino” is an insult to the Hispanic immigrants who bring conservative family values with them. This article fails to note the effect of the “Latino” and black voters on Prop 8 in California. The South sat Obama out, knowing, with great prior experience (since we Remember Reconstruction and fake black exploitative politicians very well)that he is a complete dumbass fraud put there by Northeastern liberals. And, somewhere along the way, McCain should have learned Spanish. But then, why would he— he is the classic Western gated community country club white RINO. The Bush Jrs. all speak Spanish- Jeb quite fluently. The naturalized and 2-3rd generation Hispanics are outraged at illegal aliens voting in the last election. That too, is Obama’s legacy and fraud. A true conservative Spanish speaking Republican who relates to the South culturally and can voice this will win the country. Como se yama, y’all. The article’s author is a lite weight. St. Pete? the land of Scientology.

Democrats owe much of their recent success to unions, the thinking goes, so naturally the antiunion South will be left behind in favor of Rust Belt strongholds.

Oh the irony. The author notes the union's political success, but by usage of the term "Rust Belt," acknowledges what strong union presence does to a region.

The poster who noted the lack of Espanol on McCain's part is onto something. Dubya gave some campaign speeches in Spanish, and he got 44% of the Hispanic vote in 2004. McCain doesn't speak Spanish, and he got 31% of the Hispanic vote in 2008. This doesn't strike me as rocket science.

And I got a big kick out of that line at the end of the article about "the South may not take the straight up path to enlightenment." I'm glad someone has figured out what enlightenment is, and how well we're doing at moving towards it.

This article is garbage from beginning to end.

I have already been called racist for not voting for Obama.

I didn't vote for Obama for the same reason that I didn't vote for Kerry, Gore, Clinton, Mondale, Dukakis, Carter, and Democrats in the House or Senate. Socialism is not good for America. I try not to vote for anyone who will pull our country in that direction.

Obama has two notable accomplishments on his record. He was opposed to the successful surge. As a community organizer he forced banks to make sub-prime loans. These people rate themselves. John Kennedy, like Reagan, was a tax cutter and was anti-communist. So I can, and am happy to, give Kennedy credit. I'll happily give Democrats credit, once they earn it.

I'm a Huntsville native, and my father was one of those rocket scientists. I'm here to tell you that the city is a bastion of Protestant southern conservatism, and that those rocket scientists are overwhelmingly conservative. So I'm not sure how the author reaches her conclusion. Possibly lack of research.

As a native Louisianian and now living in Georgia, I have never felt any states were truly south except the Deep South, Old South, however you want to say it. Unless you were from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, or Georgia, you were a Yankee to me!

No relevance to article really, I am just sayin :)

"We have been invaded by liberal Yankees and Illegals from the South of the border.

What the yankees did to the south the muslims are doing to America.
They move to escape conditions they don't like and immediately start trying to recreate the conditions they just escaped.

When yankees move to the south they say two things:

We love it here in the south - the southern people, the culture, the spirit of freedom and independence are so refreshing
We are so glad to be rid of the high taxes and oppressive, meddling, liberal nanny state governments up north

Then they do two things:

They start to whine about all the great things they got from government "back home" but don't have in the south
They push for taxes to recreate the oppressive, meddling, liberal nanny-state governments they left up north

So they weasle their way into local and state governments, raise taxes, spend money on grandiose projects (so out of place in the south), then push for rules and laws to diminish the southern people, change the culture, and replace the spirit of freedom and independence with overbearing governments that intrude into every aspect of life.

They aren't happy until they build performing arts centers, symphony orchestras, and musems that benefit no one except the displaced yankees and their friends. Their dream projects must be constructed and supported by raising taxes on native southernners who would rather be off to the beach, the mountains, fishing, hunting, trapping, four-wheeling or farming.

As a New England "Yankee" who spends a lot of time down South (and has a lot of family there), I have to call foul on that. While transplants undoubtedly contribute somewhat to the "liberalization" of the South, it is for the most part native born Southerners who are responsible for introducing nanny-state big government in their areas.

I'm old enough to remember when places like Georgia and Alabama were mostly made up of self-reliant farmers but those days are long gone. Now we have a great many native Southerners spending most of their time in their darkened air-conditioned trailers watching television and aimlessly moving from dead-end job to dead-end job, often on the government dole, and bitching about how little the government is helping them. Don't shoot the messenger, I'm just calling it as I see it.

Obviously there are still great patriotic Americans in the Southland (just like there are up North) but their numbers are declining rapidly as younger generations, brainwashed and made brain-dead by the trash culture that permeates TV, are replacing them. Thanks to mass media, the newer generations of Southerners are becoming indistinguishable from their counterparts elsewhere. They are even losing their distinctive accents. And the obesity and meth-use down there with the younger crowd...it's absolutely out of control. Don't argue with me on that, I frequently go down there and I see it firsthand.

This entire country needs a wake-up call.

They aren't happy until they build performing arts centers, symphony orchestras, and musems that benefit no one except the displaced yankees and their friends.

_________________________________________________

Wow.

NEVER FORGET

Why did WALTER CRONKITE go to a Year 2000 London World Conference to publically call for the 11 Southern States to SECEDE from our Union..?

Just like WALTER CRONKITE publically proclaimed that America lost the TET Offensive during the Vietnam War, when America really won it..????

For...
the Enemy is now within
and always has been,
...perhaps..?

NEVER FORGET

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