Understanding the psychology of U.S southern ultra right-wing
fanatics like Alex Jones:
BY MICHAEL
LIND
EnlargeA Confederate flag flies outside the South Carolina State
House. (Credit: Reuters/Chris Keane)
In understanding the polarization and paralysis that afflict
national politics in the United States, it is a mistake to think in
terms of left and right. The
appropriate directions are North and South.
To be specific, the long, drawn-out, agonizing identity crisis of white
Southerners is having effects that
reverberate throughout our federal union. The transmission
mechanism is the Republican Party, an originally Northern party
that has now replaced the Southern wing of the Democratic Party as
the vehicle for the dwindling white Southern tribe.
As someone whose white Southern ancestors go back to the 17th
century in the Chesapeake Bay region, I have some insight into the
psychology of the tribe. The
salient fact to bear in mind is that the historical experience of
the white South in many ways is the opposite of the experience of
the rest of the country.
Mainstream American history, from the point of view of the white
majority in the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast, is a story of
military successes. The British are defeated, ensuring national
independence. The Confederates are defeated, ensuring national
unity. And in the 20th century the Axis and Soviet empires are
defeated, ensuring (it is hoped) a free world.
The white Southern narrative — at least in the
dominant Southern conservative version — is one of defeat after
defeat.
First the attempt of white Southerners to create a new nation in
which they can be the majority was defeated by the U.S. Army during
the Civil War.
Doomed to be a perpetual minority in a continental American
nation-state, white Southerners managed for a century to create
their own state-within-a-state, in which they could collectively
lord it over the other major group in the region,
African-Americans. But Southern apartheid was shattered by the
second defeat, the Civil Rights revolution, which like the Civil
War and Reconstruction was symbolized by the dispatching of federal
troops to the South. The
American patriotism of the white Southerner is therefore deeply
problematic. Some opt for jingoistic
hyper-Americanism (the
lady protesteth too much, methinks) while a shrinking but
significant minority prefer the Stars and Bars to the Stars and
Stripes.
The other great national narrative holds that the U.S. is a nation
of immigration, a “new nation,” a melting pot made up of immigrants
from many lands. While the melting pot story involves a good deal
of idealization, it is based on demographic fact in the large areas
of the North where old-stock Anglo-Americans are commingled with
German-Americans, Polish-Americans and Irish-Americans, along with
more recent immigrant diasporas from Latin America, Asia, the
Middle East and Africa.
But even before the recent wave of immigration from sources other
than Europe, the
melting pot never included most of the white
South. From the early 19th century until the
late 20th, the South attracted relatively few immigrants. Who
wanted to move to a backward, rural, apartheid society dominated by
an oligarchy of a few rich families? Apart from several
encapsulated minorities — Cajuns in Louisiana, Germans in central
Texas — most white Southerners remained descendants of colonial-era
immigrants from the British Isles, chiefly English and Scots-Irish.
And while Irish and German Catholics and Jews diversified the
religious landscape of the North, the South was dominated by
British-derived Protestant sects like the Episcopalians, Baptists
and Methodists from Virginia to Oklahoma and Texas.
Two maps illustrate the demographic distinctiveness of the white
South. The first shows
the close correlation of evangelical Protestantism with the states
of the former Confederacy. The second map
is even more revealing. It shows the concentration of
individuals who identified themselves to census takers as
non-hyphenated “Americans.”
It is clear from the map that most self-described unhyphenated
“Americans” are, in fact, whites of British descent — many if not
most of them descendants of the Scots-Irish diaspora that emigrated
from Ulster to the British colonies in the 1700s.
The point is that many white Southerners do not
think of themselves as having any “ethnicity” at
all. Others — German-Americans,
Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Jewish-Americans,
Mexican-Americans, Chinese-Americans — are hyphenated Americans.
White Southerners tend to see themselves as “pure” Americans,
“real” Americans, “normal” Americans. Long after Mayflower
descendants were submerged by waves of European migration in
New England, large regions of the white South remain the last
places in the country where local majorities can trace their family
ancestry back to before 1776 in British America.
As difficult as it may be, outsiders should try
to imagine the world as viewed by conservative white Southerners,
who think they are the real Americans — that
is, old-stock British-Americans — and the adherents of the true
religion, evangelical Protestantism. In this perspective, the rest
of the country was taken over by invading hordes of Germans, Irish
and other European tribes in the first half of the 19th century,
leaving the South, largely unaffected by European immigration, as
the last besieged pocket of old-stock British-Americans, sharing
parts of their territory with subjugated and segregated
African-Americans.
This local British-American ethno-racial hegemony in the South was
eroded somewhat by the migration of Northeasterners and
Midwesterners to the Sun Belt following World War II and the advent
of air-conditioning. And now, predominantly nonwhite immigration
from Latin America and Asia threatens to make white Southerners of
British Protestant descent a minority in their own region. Texas
and Florida are already majority-minority states. It is only a
matter of time before the same is true of every state in the South.
Southern whites will go from being a minority in the nation as a
whole to a minority in the South itself.
If Southern culture had a tradition of assimilating immigrants,
then cultural “Southernness” could be detached from any particular
ethnicity or race. One could be an assimilated Chinese-American
good old boy or a Mexican-American redneck. To some degree,
that is happening. And Southern whites and Southern blacks have
always shared many elements of a common regional culture.
But it is difficult, if not impossible, for many
white Southerners to disentangle regional culture (Southern) from
race (white) and ethnicity (British
Protestant). The historical memory of white
Southerners is not of ethnic coexistence and melting-pot pluralism
but of ethnic homogeneity and racial privilege.
Small wonder that going from the status of
localHerrenvolk to
local minority in only a generation or two is causing much of the
white South to freak out.
The demographic demise of the white South is going to be traumatic
for the nation as a whole. A century ago, when European immigration
made old-stock Yankee Protestants a minority in much of the
Northeast and Midwest, one response was hysterical Anglo-American
nativism. In a 1921 essay in Good Housekeeping titled “Whose
Country Is This?,” then Vice President Calvin Coolidge, an
old-stock Yankee from Vermont, explained: “Biological laws
tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The
Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the
outcome shows deterioration on both sides.” Patrician Yankees
promoted immigration restriction to prevent “inferior” European
races from further contaminating America. Some eminent Americans of
New England descent, including Henry James, T.S. Eliot and Ezra
Pound, all of them nasty anti-Semites, took the extreme step of
expatriating themselves. James and Eliot became British subjects
and Pound made anti-American broadcasts for Mussolini during World
War II.
Just as white Southerners today are gerrymandering congressional
districts and contemplating gerrymandering the Electoral College to
compensate for their dwindling numbers, so the outnumbered Yankees
of the North sought to dilute the political influence of European
“ethnics” in the early 1900s. When the 1920 census revealed
that largely European urbanites outnumbered mostly old-stock
Anglo-American rural voters, Congress failed to reapportion itself
for a decade, because of the determination of small-town
Anglo-Americans to minimize the power of “white ethnics.”
By the 1970s, the social divisions among old-stock Anglo-Americans
and the “white ethnics” had faded to the point that most white
Americans in the North had ancestors from several Western European
nationalities. Similarly, the trans-racial melting pot in the
U.S. will probably blur or erase many of today’s racial differences
by the middle of the 21st century.
But the old-stock Yankees in the Northeast and Midwest did not
accept their diminished status in their own regions without
decades of hysteria and
aggression and political gerrymandering.
The third and final defeat of the white South,
its demographic defeat, is likely to be equally prolonged and
turbulent. Fasten your seat belts.
Michael Lind is the author of Land
of Promise: An Economic History of the United
States and co-founder of the New America
Foundation.
http://www.salon.com/2013/02/05/the_white_souths_last_defeat/
