Trailer trash: fightin' mad, want Dubya (the “realism & idealism” of academia loses to hillbillies)

One particularly overlooked group will keep the White House Republican next week, writes Peter Hartcher.

On the face of it, it seems ridiculous that George Bush should have any chance of re-election next week. He is the first president to oversee a net loss of jobs in the US economy since the Great Depression. He has led his country into the most controversial war since Vietnam.

Yet he has an excellent chance of winning four more years. The polls are confused, signalling a close contest. At one extreme, Bush has a 7 percentage point lead, according to the Fox News poll; at the other John Kerry has a 3 percentage point advantage, according to the Associated Press-Ipsos survey.

How does one of Washington's leading professional political analysts interpret the data? "I have no idea who is going to win this election," Charlie Cook, publisher of The Cook Political Report, confessed forlornly to his clients this week. "I really don't."

The betting shops are more emphatic. The punters on the Iowa Electronic Market, an accurate predictor of the outcome since its inception, covering the last four presidential elections, are pricing Bush as the favourite with odds of 60:40. What is Bush's secret? With such a poor record, how can he still be in the race, much less the favourite?

The first point to make is that while John Kerry has sought to fight much of the election campaign on the economy, it is not the dominant issue. There is something else preoccupying the American mind: "Nobody asked Abraham Lincoln what the unemployment rate was in 1864, as the Union forces marched to victory in the Civil War," quips Walter Russell Mead, one of America's foremost analysts of foreign policy.

The dominant theme of this presidential election, the first since September 11, 2001, is national security. The No. 1 issue of importance to voters is the Iraq war, according to Gallup, and the No. 2 issue is the threat of terrorism. So the two top issues in the minds of the American voter are both national security matters, and here we begin to unravel the mystery of Bush's political resilience.

When the US is at war, there is a powerful group of Americans, overlooked in American politics most of the time, whose feelings are stirred, whose resolve is stiffened, and whose intensity forces itself to the centre of national political life.

It's a group that constitutes the hardy core of the American folk, and it was introduced by the novelist and ex-Marine James Webb in these terms: "This people gave our country great things, including its most definitive culture. It is imbued with a unique and unforgiving code of personal honour less ritualised but every bit as powerful as the samurai code."

"This people", wrote Webb to his fellow Americans, "are all around you, even though you probably don't know it". They are the Scots-Irish. They arrived in America in the 18th century in small boats to find existing English settlements, and so pushed on inland to occupy the harsh mountain wilderness along the Appalachians. They fought the Indians, then they fought the British. From the beginning, they formed the core of the American fighting forces.

In his new book, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, Webb explains that the heavily Scots-Irish people of West Virginia, who make up only 0.6 per cent of the national population, ranked first, second or third in military casualty rates in every US war of the 20th century.

They reshaped American politics by taking hegemony from the aristocratic English-Americans and starting the populist movement.

And, surveying an ancestral Virginia graveyard, Webb, a former senior official in the Reagan Pentagon, writes that they are his people: "The slurs stick to me, standing on these graves. Rednecks. Trailer-park trash. Racists. Cannon fodder. My ancestors. My people. Me."

The first president to emerge from the backwoods ferment of America's Scots-Irish was Andrew Jackson, 1829-37, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans and the man who brutally purged the native tribes of America from their east coast homes and forced them westward.

His contemporaries described him as fighting mad. His people, he said, were the "farmers, mechanics and labourers". And it's in his honour that Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations has named the strong populist strand in American attitudes to war Jacksonianism.

Mead describes Jacksonian America as a "community of political feeling" and "in many ways the most important in American politics". Understanding these people, whom he estimates to be 30 to 40 per cent of the US electorate, is central to understanding how America behaves in times of war or crisis.

While the academic debates about US foreign policy are conducted on a rarified understanding of the distinctions between realism and idealism, Mead says Jacksonians are concerned with a code of honour, unacknowledged but real. Its elements are self-reliance, equality, individualism, a certain recklessness with credit he calls financial esprit, and the crowning quality, courage.

They are the gun lovers of contemporary America, and the founders of the Bible belt.

From this code of honour come the rules for the American political conduct of warfare. Once Jacksonian honour is engaged, America will fight ferociously, tirelessly and without restraint. "For the first Jacksonian rule of war is that wars must be fought with all available force," writes Mead. "The use of limited force is deeply repugnant. Jacksonians see war as a switch that is either 'on' or 'off'.

"To engage in a limited war is one of the costliest political decisions an American president can make. Neither Truman [Korean War] nor Johnson [Vietnam] survived it."

Jacksonians voted Democrat until Nixon, then moved to become solidly Republican. This is the group that is keeping Bush competitive in the election, despite the 1100 American war dead in Iraq and the $US150 billion in costs. This is the group that Kerry courts when, despite a lifetime as an advocate of gun control, he goes shooting for the cameras during the election campaign. And this is the group that Kerry tries to appease when he tries to out-macho Bush with his tough talk about killing terrorists and waging war.

And this is the group that explains the phenomenon that the Lowy Institute's Michael Fullilove captured in the title of a new paper on the US election: Bush is from Mars, Kerry is from Mars too.

The fighting-mad Jackson, says Mead, is alive and well in American political life in this time of war.

And a very good say, sir. I salute you and would not want to be at odds with you. I don't know how to shoot and do not own a firearm though I believe strongly in the 2nd Amendment and everyones right to own one, if they want. I don't hunt, fish, hike, or do any other outdoor stuff other than trying to maintain the bit of property I reside on. I wish I knew more. I have used my fists more often than not when I was younger but my last time was back in the 80'2. I am retired Navy and though my service time was not extraordinary, I am proud of the time I put in and love most of the moments. But when push comes to shove, I will stand with you and people like you. I too, just want to be left alone but feel a day is coming when the young healthy ones like us will have to fight the terrorists overseas while us old codgers have to fight the enemies within back here in the states. As they say on Sean Hannity's program, you're a proud American!

LET me tell you about those dumb hillbillies. They are the ones who will stop and help you if you are standing by the road with a flat tire. They are the ones who will organize a clothing drive and invite you to stay with them if your house burns down and you lose everything. EVEN IF they only met you last week.

They are the first ones to sign up for the military when our country is attacked, and hillbillies are big on flag stickers for the backs of their cars and poles with old glory flying in the front yard.

They go to church on average more often than any other part of the country, volunteer to coach little league more often and take their kids hunting and fishing more often.

Let's talk about the kids for a minute. On the average, a more polite, well mannered bunch of kids could not be found than a bunch of kids from a hillbilly school. That's because they were raised right. Raised to act like citizens, not junior gang bangers.

Apparently us HILLBILLIES are slowing down the progressive push in this country...well boo hoo. If they don't like it, they ought to declare Taxachussetts a separate socialist republic and put up a nice high red brick wall around them.

I say go for it. What is the downside?

I'm not aware the Scots-Irish had a major impact on the settlement of Australia. The largest emigration from Northern Ireland occurred in the 18th Century, before Australia became a major focus of emigration from the British Isles. After 1800, the increasing industrialization of Ulster, the removal of legal barriers from Protestant dissenters, and the relative non-dependence on potatoes as a staple tended to keep them in Northern Ireland. The most significant British Isles group to settle Australia was the English, especially those around London, which explains the resemblance between Cockney and Australian English. In the latter 18th and early 19th Centuries, London drew many settlers fron East Anglia and the Midlands, basically the same area from which the Puritans originated before emigrating to New England. The second group were the southern, or original, Irish. Many Irish Australians trace their ancestry to Potato Famine era immigrants, although Irishmen were among the first white settlers of the continent. I suspect most of Famine-era immigrants have fourth and fifth cousins in places like Boston, New York, and Chicago. Most of them are Catholics, and a majority of that nation's Catholics (about 25% of its population) are probably of Irish descent.

The British Isles component of the Australian population is basically the same as the British Isles component of the U.S. Northeast and Great Lakes regions: Eastern English (Puritans who morphed into Yankees) and Southern Irish. (Until 1960, Australia received little Continental European immigration and none from outside Europe.) The political lines in Australia resembled those in the Northeast in the late 1800s: English Tories (like the Yankee Republicans) were the political establishment; Irish Laborites (like Irish Democrats) being the main challengers.

The Scots-Irish derived from a different region of the British Isles. The 17th Century emigrants to Northern Ireland came mostly from the Scottish Lowlands and the English border region. They were Protestant, mostly Presbyterian, and their ancestors had spoken English, or more precisely Lallans, for centuries prior to their immigration to Ulster. Racially, they were a mixture of Germanic (Anglians, Vikings) and Celtic (Picts, Britons, Gaels) strains. In Northern Ireland, they mixed further with Highland Scots, English, Huguenots, and the original Irish.

A majority of the Scots-Irish that emigrated to America in the 18th Century settled the interior of Pennsylvania and Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. Pennsylvania Dutch and Tidewater English also settled these areas. From these crucibles, a wave of mostly Scots-Irish settlers spread westward and southwestward. Their descendants dominate Appalachia, the Upper South, the Ohio Valley area of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, the border states of Missouri and Kentucky, and the Southwestern states of Texas and Oklahoma.

These people, who wholly identify themselves as Americans, are very well represented in the military. Along with the mostly English descended citizens of the Lower South, they represent the core group supporting traditional values, conservative politics, and evangelical Christianity in America. To a great extent, they have prevented this nation from going as far down the road to Gramscian Marxism and socialism as have the other Western democracies, Australia included.

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