Yanks Go South - The rednecks take over the country.

n the late 1960s, Willie Morris left Dixie for the lights and litterateurs of New York City, and wrote a celebrated memoir, North Toward Home, about finding his place among the intellectual elite in Yankee Babylon. Forty years on, another conflicted son of the South, conservative radio talker Michael Graham, has discovered there's no point in lighting out for the North to deliver oneself from rustication. The whole damn country has done gone redneck.

So he claims in Redneck Nation: How the South Really Won the War, a laugh-out-loud funny rant that twits the north for its hypocrisy while mercifully steering clear of sentimentalizing the southern way of life. You might call Graham a self-hating southerner, but this is a man whose Menckenesque scorn for boobery happily knows no geographical bounds. He is appalled to have found that the worst elements of traditional southern culture — the kinds of things thoughtful Yankee liberals rightly opposed a generation ago — have been reinvented in the contemporary north as liberal virtues.

"From my vantage point, Northernism represented meritocracy, the celebration of individual ability and achievement over race, class and family connections," Graham writes, of the North he grew up admiring from afar. "Northernism held high the standard of reason, and demanded that all traditions and superstitions and heartfelt prejudices be judged by that standard."

That was then. Today, Graham sees that the "essential southern principles of race, irrationality, fear of merit and a love of the insipid," which he calls "the fundamental ideas of the South of forty years ago, are now the fundamental ideas of America." (In case you miss this thesis the first time, he repeats it on two or three more occasions in the first chapter or two).

Graham takes a swipe at trendy educational theories that maintain that students learn differently because of their ethnicity, and that therefore black students have to be treated differently from whites and others. "So let's see if I've got this straight: We run a public school system where the districts are drawn based on race. We use education theory based on the idea that black and white children are inherently different and cannot be taught the same way. Black children need to be taught in separate (but equal?) schools from white children where they can learn the principles of racial loyalty. And all this is happening in public schools outside the South? Somebody owes Governor [George] Wallace an apology."

The idea of Southern exceptionalism ("It's a Southern thing, you wouldn't understand") was used back in the day as a rhetorical device to combat criticism of institutions like Jim Crow. Northerners refused to be cowed by the "that's the way we do things around here" argument, and pressed their reasoned moral case for equal justice under the law, using the force of law when necessary. Nowadays, says Graham, exceptionalism has become the philosophical basis for multiculturalism. Here he is on media hypocrisy when it comes to criticizing Islam in America:

That's Redneck America, a place many people consider the province of wild-eyed Bible-thumpers with a prohibitionist streak. They're not far off the mark, as Graham, an Oral Roberts University graduate, attests. But here too, argues Graham, what Yankees see as redneck primitivism is hardly different from what they accept as enlightened thought among their divines. Writes Graham: "It's not uncommon for Northerners, especially those who like to use the word 'spirituality,' to believe in all manner of metaphysical events, while not believing in the Big Guy. 'Religious' people go to church and read the Bible, and Northerners view them as intolerant, ill-educated saps. 'Spiritual' people go hiking, read Shirley MacLaine or L. Ron Hubbard, and are considered rational, intelligent beings." Who, then, is the real redneck?

Graham is particularly entertaining when he mocks American popular culture, and quite sensibly observes that many contemporary cultural icons, when they're not NASCAR drivers (stock-car racing is the fastest growing sport in the country), are rednecks manques. Woody Allen, the cerebral Ur-Yankee, used to be worth admiring, says Graham, "until he went southern and started sleeping with his children." HBO's Sex and the City may be the last word in trend-setting drama, but to Graham, Carrie Bradshaw and her horndog pals are just well-groomed sluts (not that he has a problem with that). "And it is just as clearly the case that if you took these same four women, stuck Confederate flag ball caps on their heads, and dropped them in a West Texas truck stop, they would be indistinguishable from the hardworking local gals." Yup.

Though Redneck Nation is smart-mouthed and light-hearted (you will not be surprised to learn that Graham once worked as a stand-up comic), and it doesn't pretend to be a serious political book, its author does make some sober points between the riffs and jibes. On the subject of race, he says that today's left-wing neo-segregationists are morally worse than the white Jim Crow supporters, like his grandmother. "But she didn't grow up with the memory of a martyred Martin Luther King, Jr., and she couldn't benefit from forty years of intense public struggle over the ridiculousness of racial obsession. You and I have," he writes.

In the end, I don't know that Graham is right that America has become a redneck nation because it's become southernized, or if we've simply become a more democratic culture. Most people in the world, from Greece to Ghana to Gatlinburg, Tenn., are rednecks, at least by Graham's definition. What's changed is that the (non-southern) cultural elite in this country lost faith in classic American ideals just as those ideals triumphed over redneckism in its most aggressive and unabashed form. It's more ironic than tragic, but history is filled with more ironies than tragedies.

Take Sen. Trent Lott (R., Yoknapatawpha County), who was inadvertently making Graham's case the other day when he said that America would've been better off if it had voted for Segregationist Strom for president in 1948. Well, that did it. Now Lott is being instructed in righteousness by the Boss Hogg and Roscoe P. Coltrane of black America. I refer, or course, to Jesse Jackson and his not-so-bright disciple Al Sharpton, the most notorious racialist hornswogglers north or south of the Mason-Dixon line. Few media people seem to find this objectionable, or even particularly funny, because hey y'all, we're all rednecks now.

They also ran a Q&A with the author, here it is.

December 16, 2002, 9:00 a.m.
Talking Redneck
Michael Graham explains that we're all rednecks now.

A Q&A by Kathryn Jean Lopez

ichael Graham, who has been a contributor to NRO over the years, is author of the new book, Redneck Nation: How the South Really Won the War. Graham can be heard daily in the Beltway (and anywhere, online) on Clear Channel's AM 570 WTNT. His website is here.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: What's the most ironic part of this whole Trent Lott gaffe crisis?

Michael Graham: Democrats assailing the Dixiecrat politics of Strom Thurmond is certainly ironic given that, if Strom were alive today, he'd be a liberal. (He is? Are you sure?)

In 1948, Strom Thurmond was a politician obsessed with race. The modern American liberal is obsessed with race. Strom Thurmond thought schools and courts should treat citizens differently based on their skin color. Liberal supporters of, among other things, race-based admissions policies and hate-crime laws agree. Strom promoted the "multicultural" view that institutions like Jim Crow and segregation might appear irrational or unjust to outside agitators, but they were a perfect fit with southern culture. Liberal apologists say the same for modern Arab-Muslim culture all the time.

Hey, Democrats: What's the problem?

Lopez: By the way, do all southerners believe the world would be a better place if Strom Thurmond had become president in 1948?

Graham: Even with the head of the state KKK living around the corner from me back in South Carolina, I have rarely heard even the most knuckle-headed racist pining for the "good ol' days" of Jim Crow. Though I have heard some folks wax nostalgic over Strom's first run for the White House — when he almost tipped the election to Tilden in 1876.

Lopez: Not to speak ill of Mr. 100 or the South, but why the heck did the people of South Carolina elect him that last time?

Graham: Strom Thurmond. Bob Jones. The Confederate Flag. Fritz Hollings.

Graham: Strom Thurmond. Bob Jones. The Confederate Flag. Fritz Hollings.

South Carolina: Our headlines are America's punch lines.

Lopez: Do you think that the Democrats, after this past election are going to undergo a successful facelift or will they just get more redneck than they already are?

Graham: I spent six years working fulltime as a GOP flak, and I've learned that a party is only as strong as its individual candidates. In 1992, you could have given a candidate like Al Gore the entire Bill Clinton "new Democrat" message, and Gore would have lost. Bill Clinton's individual political skills and strengths carried the day, as did Reagan's in 1980.

Which is bad news for the Democrats. Look at the bench: Al Gore, Dick Gephardt, and even a rumored candidacy by Gary Hart? Park the DeLorean — I think we've hit 1988. And when geezers like Frank Lautenberg and Walter Mondale are running for the Senate again, you've got to start wondering if the top of the 2004 Democratic ticket might be Adlai Stevenson and William Jennings Bryan.

Lopez: How about the GOP? Expect more Strom-gates and the like?

Graham: Look down a GOP gun barrel and you'll inevitably discover it's aimed at a GOP foot. There is no election so safe that we can't find a way to blow it.

Having said that, I think 2004 is going to be a solid year for Republicans in part because the Democrats are going to continue playing ethnic-identity politics (which I argue in Redneck Nation they learned from white southerners).

To be a Republican, you have to believe something. To be a Democrat, you have to be something — a union member, education bureaucrat, part of an ethnic minority, etc. By that definition, they can't expand their base, but we can.

Lopez: What's a redneck exactly?

Graham: My Uncle Bobby is a redneck, exactly. I cropped tobacco for him one summer in North Carolina and it was like working the back lot of In The Heat Of The Night.

But when I talk about redneckery in Redneck Nation, I'm not talking about the Jeff Foxworthy stereotypes. I'm writing about the ideology: What did a typical white southern "redneck" believe at the beginning of the civil-rights movement 50 years ago?

He believed that race mattered, that race was determinant.
He believed that free speech was dangerous, spread by "outside agitators" who never learned the southern speech code: "If you can't say something nice…drink."
He believed that all women were either delicate creatures in need of special social protections, or they were road house trailer trash who would spank you and call you "Daddy."
He believed that the more irrational and ridiculous your religion, the more fervently you believed in God.
He believed the most entertaining way to spend a Saturday night was to watch something get "blowed up real good."

And on and on.

Lopez: How are we becoming a redneck nation?

Graham: Just look at the list above. Having fled these attitudes among my rural southern neighbors, I know live in a modern, liberal America where Ivy League colleges are building segregating housing because "race matters." I actually heard one modern defender of segregated public schools (blacks-only academies) say "black people learn differently from white people." Gee, I haven't heard that since I was 12 — from a klan member!

Thanks to the efforts of northern liberals, we now live in an America where:

Conservative newspapers are regularly burned on the Berkeley campus and Harvard is developing speech codes to keep students from saying anything that might upset their neighbors.
Where feminist professors are having works of art like Goya's The Naked Maja removed from classrooms because they create a hostile work environment; and where the model of modern womanhood is the Sex In The City, a.k.a. "White Trash On The Hudson."
Where evangelical Christians are mocked by West Coast liberal elites who wear healing crystals, have conversations with trees and watch John Edwards — TV psychic.
And where the number one spectator sport from Maine to Malibu is — -NASCAR!

Lopez: Are you a self-hating southerner? I think I learned more redneck stereotypes from your book....

Graham: I was a self-loathing southerner for many years — in fact, that's the premise of the book: I left the South looking for some place in America that was significantly different. I wanted to live in that mythical meritocracy called "The North." It took me 20 years to figure out that the only difference between Brooklyn, New York and Birmingham, Alabama is that you can't get a gun rack in a Trans-Am.

Redneck Nation concludes with a love note — or a "mash note" at least — to the South: the good-hearted people, the excellent food, the fundamental desire there to make life an enjoyable experience for as many folks as possible, even people you don't really like. That's my home. I may be a reluctant southerner, but I am a southerner nonetheless.

Lopez: You pick fights on issues like date rape. Why bother?

Graham: Because the most angering thing about America today is the deference we give to self-proclaimed "victims." There are true victims of rape, and racism, and injustice, and it is an insult to them to grant victim status to anyone who claims it. So I put the burden of proof on the so-called "victim" to demonstrate they've actually been victimized, as opposed to buying into the ridiculous (redneck) notion that if you feel offended, I have to take your feelings seriously.

That's why I say there is no such thing as "date rape." Either you were a real victim of sexual violence or you weren't. This pseudo-crime of "I don't think I really wanted to have sex when I got in bed with him, but I was so drunk I'm not sure" isn't rape. Date rape is a concept invented by sorority girls who suddenly realized they just slept with a loser.

Lopez: What're the ingredients for a good rant?

Graham: Hypocrisy, pomposity, and lots of obvious sexual innuendos.

Lopez: What does the life of a pundit and that of a stand-up comedian have in common?

Graham: One makes his living inspiring laughter by making irrational and ridiculous statements, and the other works in a comedy club.

Lopez: You live in D.C. now. That must be like redneck central now, following the premise of Redneck Nation?

Graham: Absolutely! One of my favorite stories in the book is a Washington Post article written by Natalie Hopkinson, a black Post staffer who was upset that so many white people were moving into her neighborhood. D.C. is "Chocolate City," she insisted, and white people were ruining it by moving in.

"From our perspective," she wrote, "integration is overrated…We not only have to invest in the inner city, but we can't let white people beat us to it."

Her arguments could have come straight from the minutes of a "White Citizens Council" meeting from the 1960s, steeped as it was in racism, segregation, and imply intimidation ("We don't want your kind 'round here"). And the Post ran it!

When readers complained about this overtly segregationist screed, the Post ombudsman ran a piece explaining that (I'm paraphrasing) segregation is O.K. as long as black people like it. This inspired an even greater outcry. The values of 1960s liberalism — rationalism, merit, equal treatment under the law — are so dead, and the redneck values so prevalent that the Washington Post never saw the controversy coming.

Lopez: What's the funniest thing in your book?

Graham: The lack of noun-verb agreement.

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