Redneck Nation (3 page)

Southern scholars like C. Vann Woodward insist that this southern inferiority complex is rooted in the fact that (if you ignore
that Vietnam thing) we’re the only Americans to lose a war. Not me. I trace the southern ethos and its struggle against Northernism
to the civil rights battle of the 1950s and ’60s.

Let’s turn again to the example of Senator Lieberman, who in 2000 bravely traveled across the South (those parts directly
between Connecticut and Miami, anyway) as a liberal, Democratic, somewhat observant Jew. Despite the predictions and hand-wringing
before the campaign, there were in fact no more cross burnings or synagogue bombings or yarmulke snatchings in Macon, Georgia,
than in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Nevertheless, Senator Lieberman’s southern campaign was instructive. It offered some interesting symbolism for the astute
observer of history, for this wasn’t Joe Lieberman’s
first tour of the old Confederacy. He made another important trip in 1963, during the Civil Rights Movement.

According to the
New York Times
, “Mr. Lieberman was among 67 Yalies who formed the first large group of Northern white students to travel south for the cause
of civil rights.” Lieberman also participated in the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King, Jr., shared his dream
with America.

One of the things I like about Joe Lieberman is that he hasn’t attempted to exploit his youthful stand for civil rights. “I’m
very proud that I went. It was a very important experience in my life. But, you know, there were others who were there much
longer and did much more than I did,” Lieberman told the
Times
.

His efforts were modest and, to his credit, so is he. It wasn’t until Al Gore and Donna Brazille—the Slobodan Milosevic of
the Democratic Party—revamped his résumé that Lieberman was offered to voters as the Harriet Tubman of the 2000 election.

Lieberman and the thousands of other Northerners, black and white, deserve credit for traveling to the Jim Crow South, and
for all the right reasons. They didn’t go there to learn from it or study it, but to defeat it. These “outside agitators”
were waging a war against the southern culture of the time, and rightfully so.

What these civil rights warriors brought with them wasn’t just a specific view of social justice or the rule of law. They
brought a philosophy: Northernism. They saw up close the evils of racism, cronyism, anti-intellectualism, irrational religiosity,
and general bad taste. They heard Southerners make claims of ethnic exceptionalism, arguing that what appeared unfair or irrational
up North made
perfect sense down home, and rejected them. These civil rights volunteers fought repeatedly against legal restrictions on
the freedom to speak and to dissent. They would eventually support the creation of a federal television and radio network,
in part to bring something resembling culture and enlightened entertainment to the region H. L. Mencken immortalized as “the
Sahara of the Bozart.”

We Southerners fought back—hard. We defended our traditions of racism, irrationality, and good-ol’-boy opportunity. We fought
to keep things bad, and the Northernists (including some white Southerners) were pushing for changes to make things good.
That’s how it seemed to me as I grew up in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights struggle.

From my vantage point, Northernism represented meritocracy, the celebration of individual ability and achievement over race,
class, and family connections. It represented culture, people who listened to jazz and attended operas without the word “Ol’
” in the title. Northernism held high the standard of reason and demanded that all traditions and superstitions and heartfelt
prejudices be measured by that standard.

These are broad generalizations, and many Southerners will no doubt scramble through their recollections of the Jim Crow South
for the contrary example. But the fact that we can see and articulate this culture clash is proof that the two cultures, North
and South, exist. And thanks to the efforts of people like Joe Lieberman and millions of others, the America of the 1960s
and ’70s was as northern as at any point in my lifetime. Southernism as an idea and practice had been defeated, dismissed,
and discarded.

And today, watching and listening to one of those advocates
of Northernism—now a U.S. senator from the state of Connecticut—championing the ideas of the modern, twenty-first-century
American liberalism, the question immediately comes to mind: What happened to the real Joe Lieberman, and is the man on my
TV set a pod person from another planet?

Virtually every idea he came to the South to fight in 1963, Joe Lieberman now champions forty years later. The old Joe Lieberman
and his liberal friends fought against racial segregation in public schools. Today, those same liberals support race-based
school admissions in places like California and Massachusetts that keep black children out of public schools because of their
skin color.

The old Joe Lieberman opposed restrictions on free speech and fought against attempts by southern communities to squelch or
suppress public debate. Today, northern liberals support restrictions on campaign ads under so-called campaign finance reform,
and their children are the first people on liberal campuses to burn school newspapers for printing unpopular opinions.

The old Joe Lieberman reviled the claims of Southerners who said that their Confederate heritage and traditions could not
be judged by northern standards. It was wrong to call southern institutions good or bad, Southerners argued, they were just
different. Today, those same northern liberals promote multiculturalism, the belief that no culture—not even the barbaric
culture of Islamic fundamentalism—can be judged by the West. There are no good or bad cultures, just different ones.

As for politics, much has been made of the infamous red/blue map of America in the 2000 presidential election between George
W. Bush (a Southerner born in Milton,
Massachusetts) and Al Gore (a Yankee from Carthage, Tennessee). George W. Bush won a massive victory over Al Gore when measured
by square miles but lost the popular vote by 500,000 or so.

But to see the North versus South cultural divide, ask yourself this question: Which presidential candidate in 2000 ran a
campaign most reminiscent of old-style southern politics? Was it the campaign appealing to voters based on their race or religion?
Was it the candidate who ran on a strategy of targeting uninformed voters through churches and bringing them into the polls
to cast ballots based on instructions from the pulpit? The candidate who largely rejected intellectual appeals based on political
principles and instead tried to connect with voters by using superficial shows of emotion and the good old-fashioned southern
technique of pork barrel “What’s In It For Me?” campaigning? Was this the true candidate of the South?

No, I’m not talking about George W. Bush. This race-based, lowest-common-denominator campaign was inflicted on America by
Al Gore.

Gore ran a quintessentially southern campaign for president: race-based politics, antirational populism, playing the religion
card (albeit from the kosher end of the deck) with his choice of Lieberman—who did everything but serve seder at his campaign
events. Everything about Al Gore’s presidential campaign was southern because all the essential ideas of America are the ideas
of the Old South.

The only reason Gore and Lieberman lost the election was that they weren’t quite southern enough: In a national election that
was, essentially, a tie, George W. Bush beat
Al Gore in the thirteen states of the old Confederacy by 3.5 million votes. That’s a larger margin than Ronald Reagan’s
entire
margin over Jimmy Carter in 1980.

The Joe Lieberman generation supported government-funded radio and television to bring quality programming and access to fine
arts to Southerners still enamored of drag racing and cockfights. Today, the children of the Civil Rights Movement from Boston
to San Francisco Bay have made NASCAR America’s number one spectator sport and spend their evenings glued to TV shows featuring
has-been celebrities beating each other up and shame-free citizens wolfing down unmentionable pig parts for fun and profit.

In other words, the northern idealists of the 1960s like Joe Lieberman who once envisioned an American melting pot of opportunity,
meritocracy, rationalism, antiracism (in theory, at least), progressivism, and individual enlightenment have devolved into
acolytes of the United States of the Confederacy—a country of race-obsessed, ethnic clans dedicated to the proposition that
it’s not what you know but who you know; a society where intellectualism, if not actually feared, is looked upon as suspect;
where superstition has so trumped reason that popular TV shows feature “psychics” talking to the dead victims of the September
11 terrorist attacks; where baseball—once the most popular sport of the American masses—is now considered “too intellectual.”
Instead, the modern American sports fan ensures that eight of the top ten most popular cable TV shows each week involve grown
men wearing masks and hitting each other with folding chairs.

America, the Redneck Nation.

W
hen I say the South “won the war,” I don’t mean
the
war. The defeat of the Confederacy was total. In fact, the Civil War was a classically southern enterprise: A handful of
clods—without an army or a navy—come up with the lousy idea of starting a war, and their fellow Southerners are too polite
to tell them how stupid they are. After attacking Fort Sumter, the South proceeds to get its butt kicked from Appomattox to
Yazoo City, then announces, “We never wanted slavery, anyway,” and blames the whole thing on the Yankees.

Before 1860, the South was one of the most wealthy and influential regions of America. From 1789 until 1856, nine of our nation’s
fourteen presidents were Southerners. America wouldn’t elect another Southerner president until JFK was assassinated and Texan
Lyndon Johnson was able to run as an incumbent in 1964.
^*

After 1865, the South was a destitute backwater on the verge of collapse. The wealthiest state in the Union—South Carolina—became
the poorest. The southern intelligentsia, such as it was, was decimated or discredited. The blended Euro-Caribbean culture
that was so alluring to nouveaux riches Northerners collapsed with the slave economy that maintained it.

The devastation was so thorough that sixty years later, H. L. Mencken wrote his classic commentary
Bozart of the South
, which noted the painfully obvious truth about the American South of the first half of the twentieth century: “In all that
gargantuan paradise of the fourth-rate, there is not a single picture gallery worth going into, or a single orchestra capable
of playing the nine symphonies of Beethoven, or a single opera-house, or a single theater devoted to decent plays.” Most southern
poetry and prose was drivel, he charged, and “when you come to critics, musical composers, painters, sculptors, architects
and the like, you will have to give it up, for there is not even a bad one between the Potomac mud-flats and the Gulf.” Nor,
Mencken added, a historian, sociologist, philosopher, theologian, or scientist.

This was not a culture on the verge of national domination. Southern culture was on life support, full of poor white trash
and even poorer scrabble-road blacks and a handful of self-declared gentry whose family wealth couldn’t have bought them a
midsize department store in Pittsburgh. Fifty years ago, telling people you were a Southerner was tantamount to telling people
you were a failure, an oddball, or a rube.

Then came the 1960s and the American struggle for civil rights, a fight that most of us assume the South lost.
Outside agitators, thoughtful white Southerners, and determined black Southerners applied so much pressure that the Jim Crow
era finally collapsed on itself. The laws changed. The lunch counters desegregated, as did the schools and office buildings—though
the communities themselves did not.

For contemporary Southerners, the struggle of the 1960s was the battle that defined North and South. The 1960s were when the
Confederate flag left the Klan rallies and climbed atop state capitols, when southern instincts were hardened into ideology,
and when the stereotypes, North and South, solidified.

But the fundamental ideas of the South have become the fundamental ideas of America. The ideas that northern progressives
went South to fight are now the enervating ideas of America. This is the war the South won.

I challenge you to name one significant idea the southern states fought to maintain in the Civil Rights Movement that has
not become part of the American fabric.

The most obvious example is the most fundamental: racism. What is the core philosophy of all social life in the South? It’s
the idea that race matters, that race is determinant, that race is important, that your neighbors, your employers, and your
government should treat people differently based on race.

This used to be called Jim Crow. Today, its name is Uncle Sam. It’s hard to imagine a nation more obsessed with race and ethnicity
than our own. Listen in on a meeting of state legislators in New York or a group of liberal city councilpersons in Wisconsin
and it sounds like a beer-hall putsch of Balkan warlords, dividing the spoils between the tribes.

When I was hosting a talk radio show in Charlotte, North Carolina, the local superintendent of schools attacked me publicly
after I pointed out that the magnet school program he supported denied children admittance based on their race. There were
approximately five hundred empty desks scattered across the district, but the thousand or more children applying were the
wrong color—the magnet programs they wanted were already “too white” or “too black” to accommodate them.

“This is the same system used in schools all across the Northeast,” he insisted on WBT one day. “How could it be racist?”