Wayne O'Leary

Southern Discomfort

We’re not all in it together and don’t want to be. Nor do we share Rodney King’s appeal to just get along. In fact, we, the citizens of the United States, are no longer one people; we comprise two separate nations that, increasingly, are talking past one another without making eye contact.

It’s sometimes said the political-cultural divide in today’s America pits urban/suburban against small-town/rural, and there’s considerable truth in that dichotomy. But more specifically, the split is between the South, the states of the old Confederacy (along with some border states), and the rest of the country. It’s a division that’s been there since the Civil War ended in 1865, but lately it’s become an ever-widening chasm impossible to bridge except with the utmost difficulty. Differing values and beliefs that have coexisted uneasily for well over a century have become seemingly irreconcilable under the psychic pressure of the Trump years and can’t be smoothed over.

Part of this is race-based, and relates to changing demographics in the country and the reaction to anxieety over increased immigration and white displacement. Part of it is also based on religion, and the split between moderate mainstream sects and a resurgent “old-time” Christianity, in particular conservative evangelicalism and its recent radicalized response to the issues of abortion and vaccination.

The movement of race, culture and religion into the political realm has developed into an explosive combination. And in the case of the South can be added a traditionally negative view of the role of government that varies from the national norm and has migrated wholesale into the Republican Party, where it’s become the conventional wisdom. The end result is a new Solid South that votes in lockstep for Republican candidates on the following basis: the more conservative, the better.

The original Solid South was Democratic, a reaction by white Southern voters against the Republican Party that won the Civil War and imposed Reconstruction on the defeated states of the Confederacy. That “redemptive” Solid South, which tolerated the economic liberalism of Wilson and FDR through the 1930s, began to fracture during the Dixiecrat revolt of 1948; it largely ended in the 1960s with Lyndon Johnson’s civil-rights acts and Richard Nixon’s subsequent Southern strategy.

By the 2000s, the South had become politically solid again in the opposite direction and beyond the reach, by and large, of national Democratic candidates. Only in purple-trending Virginia, an Upper South anomaly, were Democrats able to break through consistently after 2008. Donald Trump swept every state below the Mason-Dixon Line except Virginia in 2016 and 2020, and Georgia in 2020. The one-party South is now another country politically.

It’s another country in many ways. In its resistance to combating the coronavirus, for example, the region stands out in striking fashion. Of the dozen states with the lowest COVID-19 vaccination rates as of the end of August, two-thirds were in the South, where the Delta variant’s been surging, including the two worst performers, Alabama and Mississippi. And masking-up is a subject you can raise only at your peril across the Southern tier. Sickness and death take a back seat to ideology and the culture wars in the land H.L. Mencken memorably called “the Sahara of the Bozart.”

Donald Trump, who appeals to something deep in the Southern psyche, is responsible for a lot of this contrarianism, which clashes violently with majority opinion, but not all of it by any means. Evangelical religious fervor, a longstanding feature of Southern life, accounts for as much, if not more. There are 41 million white evangelicals in the US, most of them in the Southern states, including the 14 million members of the influential and hard-line-conservative Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s leading Protestant denomination.

Approximately half of these believers (45%) told pollsters from the Pew Research Center earlier this year that they would absolutely refuse COVID vaccinations for a raft of semi-rational, quasi-religious reasons — belief in faith healing, hostility to secular science, distrust of public health agencies, and an unfounded suspicion that vaccines contain aborted fetal tissue.

They’re part of a long tradition. Today’s Southern evangelicals are people whose grandparents — they were called fundamentalists then — provided the only regional popular support for William Jennings Bryan’s anti-evolution crusade of the 1920s, which ended ignominiously in the famous Dayton, Tennessee, Scopes “monkey trial.” The current generation, by contributing to the uncontrolled spread of the coronavirus down south, is undermining the health of the entire nation.

There is another way in which the South differs sharply from other regions and, quite frankly, threatens to drag down the rest of the country in the process of acting out its bizarre conception of “freedom.” By now, most everyone is familiar with the partisan project being implemented wherever Republicans control state governments (but especially in the South), aimed at disenfranchising voters whose loyalty the GOP cannot command.

The strategy is vote suppression, and its tactics include purging voter rolls, limiting registrations and mail-in ballots, enforcing draconian voter-ID laws, disempowering local nonpartisan election boards, shortening vote times, “auditing” unsatisfactory election outcomes, and (if necessary) placing partisan state legislatures in charge of arbitrarily determining official tabulations. Hanging over it all is a not-very-subtle threat of physical violence, should desired results not pan out — a recourse hinted at recently by disappointed Trumpian Congressman Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.).

A descriptive term for this is “antidemocratic,” and it recalls the last time the South refused to accept a national election result: Lincoln’s victory in 1860. In fact, the South is the country’s most undemocratic region, the sorry legacy bequeathed by its leading antebellum statesman, South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun (1782-1850).

Calhoun devised the fiendish theory of “the concurrent majority” (thankfully, never constitutionally adopted), designed to protect the minority property rights of the slave South. It was based on his notion that numerical majorities (that is, democracy), which he totally opposed, were inherently inferior to majorities of community economic interests (e.g., Southern agriculture) expressed through the states, which should either carry equal weight in the federal system, or have the right of veto (nullification) over federal law. Thus was laid the groundwork for secession, states’ rights, Jim Crow, and the Southern-based antidemocracy movement of today.

Should Lincoln have allowed the South to secede? Maybe so. This would be a much more progressive country, if he had.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2021

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