THE WHITE ESTABLISHMENT - It is a cultural reality. The Southern colonies were initially established by the third sons of english aristocracy, driven by inheritance law, and the indentured servants, prisoners and slaves they brought over. Hence a class society in which you are suppose to know and respect your betters. With this comes a primitive view of religion that holds everything as ordained on high. Indeed a central function of a church in such a society is to justify the social order. It is god's will that the big man lives in the big house (they are the job creators you see) and god's will that blacks should be slaves.
The South was/is a culture dominated by belief values that never fully accepted the liberal democratic ideals that sprang from reason and inquiry, so well absorbed in the northern states, populated as they were by a single class of emigrants, most fleeing the rule of the big man.
The northern states evolved a middle class and professional society that emphasized education, free thought, equality and pursuit of science. The tea party was in Boston remember, the South came slowly and reluctantly to the revolution.
Because agricultural practices were so harsh on the land, the inland southern states were progressively populated from this same cultural pool, moving ever westward for fresh land. Being southern born I have to say the south has its virtues or rather there are virtuous sides to its flaws, blind loyalty being one of them; they know how to wave a flag and die for it.
The irony is that the red states peoples believe themselves to be the true Americans largely on the basis of this type of unquestioning loyalty but in reality America's founding political ideals are best expressed in the progressive blue states that drove the original revolution and that have driven the nation's progress and subsidized the South even today as it is still scared by it perverse refusal to educate and empower its people; this to in the interest of keeping wages low for the big man.
An even larger irony is that the Republican party now owns the Southern side of the ongoing civil war (it has never really ended) and the Democrats have adopted the yankees. That itself is an interesting story, born in the civil rights movement where the Democratic party had to choose between it intellectual labor driven values it had picked up over time and the inherited racism of it geographic roots. The Republican party, for two generations in the wilderness as an opposition minority party, could not resist the temptation to broaden its base at the expense of its own traditional values and here we are and here it is, locked into catering and empowering the racist religious ignorance demographic of America. What a tragedy but Bill does not see it. No, his stress is that the South is losing again.
The South was/is a culture dominated by belief values that never fully accepted the liberal democratic ideals that sprang from reason and inquiry, so well absorbed in the northern states, populated as they were by a single class of emigrants, most fleeing the rule of the big man.
The northern states evolved a middle class and professional society that emphasized education, free thought, equality and pursuit of science. The tea party was in Boston remember, the South came slowly and reluctantly to the revolution.
Because agricultural practices were so harsh on the land, the inland southern states were progressively populated from this same cultural pool, moving ever westward for fresh land. Being southern born I have to say the south has its virtues or rather there are virtuous sides to its flaws, blind loyalty being one of them; they know how to wave a flag and die for it.
The irony is that the red states peoples believe themselves to be the true Americans largely on the basis of this type of unquestioning loyalty but in reality America's founding political ideals are best expressed in the progressive blue states that drove the original revolution and that have driven the nation's progress and subsidized the South even today as it is still scared by it perverse refusal to educate and empower its people; this to in the interest of keeping wages low for the big man.
An even larger irony is that the Republican party now owns the Southern side of the ongoing civil war (it has never really ended) and the Democrats have adopted the yankees. That itself is an interesting story, born in the civil rights movement where the Democratic party had to choose between it intellectual labor driven values it had picked up over time and the inherited racism of it geographic roots. The Republican party, for two generations in the wilderness as an opposition minority party, could not resist the temptation to broaden its base at the expense of its own traditional values and here we are and here it is, locked into catering and empowering the racist religious ignorance demographic of America. What a tragedy but Bill does not see it. No, his stress is that the South is losing again.
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