Who is MS is more likely to have a rebel flag on their truck?

terrell9584

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Mon Apr-12-10 10:36 AM
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Who is MS is more likely to have a rebel flag on their truck?

Edited on Mon Apr-12-10 10:57 AM by terrell9584

A. Union member shipyard worker in Pascagoula who listens to nothing but country music, goes out to honky tonks on weekends and who has several ex-wifes. Considers himself a Democrat

B. Soccer mom in an upper-middle class neighborhood in Rankin County (suburbs of Jackson). Listens to Michael Buble. Calls herself an Independent but votes Republican most of the time.

C. Fundamentalist revival preacher in Wiggins. Listens to only Christian radio. Is on the state Republican committee?

The answer to that one is A. I bring this up to bring up a point about some of the stuff I've seen about the South and I want to dymystify to you why the Lost Cause is such a big deal for Southerners and why it does not work for our cause to try and criticize things that actually fall within the politically correct domain in the Southern view.

I'll give you a hint. It's not about the war. The war is ancillary. Yes, most Southern boys if they got a civil war video game will choose the gray over the blue but there is something more important. It all goes back to Reconstruction. If Reconstruction had gone smoothly there never would have been any traction for the lost cause philosophy in the South.

What causes the Lost Cause philosophy to be so strong is because when the Union soldiers marched through the South they destroyed fields, raped women and in general abused the general population. The "total war" was then followed up by Reconstruction where Northerners came to the South and divided the population against each other for political control, looted virtually every government in the region causing almost all to file some form of bankruptcy between 1870 and 1890, anatagonized and harassed the population and allowed for what was essentially a 10 year period where the South was a wild west situation where you could get shot for looking at a person the wrong way.

Almost no child outside of the South learns that General Ben Butler ordered that all women of New Orleans were to be regarded as prostitutes and treated as such. Most Southern kids do when they're old enough. Of course, it was not so much Reconstruction even as what it did.

Reconstruction prevented any major agricultural recovery in the region and also made it so no Southern government would have enough financial solvency or willingness to address their problems. Because Reconstruction was a destructive process and because the North took absolutely no interest in helping the Southerners struggling from the problems they created after the war this lead many previously independent yeoman farmers into the arms of sharecropping and abusive company towns. They knew who was to blame for it and that's why they all adopted the Lost Cause as their rallying cry because in their mind the war and Reconstruction is what brought their family into poverty and it was compounded by the fact that the Southern political tactic of the time was to blame ALL of the regions ills on Northern malevolence.

Southern identification with the Democratic Party was solely based on identity politics and nothing else and remained that way from the mid 1870s to the 1940s, with a brief break during the Populist revolts of the 1890s. The first wave of Republicans in the South were almost all from the anti-Roosevelt wing of the Democratic Party, the people who backed Thurmond over Truman at the state party meetings in '48. That's who supported the Republican Party in the South before the 1990s. From the period of 1968-1994 class identification was the main determinant of whether a white voter was Dem or Rep. After 1994, it settled back into the pattern of white voters having a partisan affiliation because of identity politics and not idealogy.

Now, despite how it may look to the national media, things like Confederate Heritage Month declarations are routine in the South. Both Democratic and Republican governors do it. The last Democratic governor of South Carolina actually owes his election to his Republican opponent's advocation of taking down the flag from the capitol and he himself lost his job for the same reason.

For Southerners, it's not about the war or anything to do with the war. It is about what happened after the war and the fact that the United States government has never apologized to Southerners for what they did in Reconstruction and the crimes committed during the war, or for the desolation & poverty Southerners had to deal with in the aftermath, because they feel as if they were left to drift by their countrymen for years and years without any respect, because they always see themselves portrayed in the media only as ignorant hicks or eccentric society people and because you almost never hear a Southern accent on a media program unless its a politician or a local Southern program, as if somehow having one makes you less intelligent or whatever.

Until those greviances I mentioned above are addressed and redressed Southern whites will never give up their historical symbols and will react hostilely towards anyone who suggests they that they should or that somehow their ancestors or their cause were wrong. And truthfully, it hurts our side more than it hurts the GOP because this is one great issue with which they use to lure voters that by all rights should be ours into the GOP column.