Please detail any “neo-Confederate” rhetoric coming out of the GOP. If they’ve been proposing secession or slavery, I must have missed it.
And of course the voters bear responsibility; but not Southern voters in particular. I can keep linking to the map if you need me to.
He does? Where?
The Representative for my district is the tolerable Andy Barr, who got my vote. I’ve done my part.
So, you won’t or can’t link Jackson’s comments to your claim that opposition to the ACA and Medicaid expansion is caused by a desire to “keep down” minorities?
That’s not germaine to his remarks about black children not being raised in two parent, monogamous families.
Everyone gets to choose consequences when they are readily foreseeable. The consequences of having children out of wedlock, particularly as a teen, are quite foreseeable: poverty. This is a problem, and confronting it is a fine and noble cause.
The spirit of his remarks - intact families are important, and the lack of them is harming the community of which he speaks - are easily defended.
Fine. I’m convinced you don’t see what I’m driving at. I’m going to ask that you take a look at John Calhoun’s “South Carolina Exposition and Protest” in which the basic theory of nullification is laid out. This, in effect, is the tactic today’s GOP is following. Will they take it all the way to secession? I doubt it, but who knows, these guys’ capacity for fighting settled battles seems inexhaustible.
When there is a relevant distinction between the voting behavior of the GOP in Congress at large and the Tea Party in particular, I will recognize a distinction. As it stands, this is literally a distinction without a difference.
I’m not familiar with Barr. For all I know he could be allright (my beef is not really with the GOP, but with elected morons). Did he vote for this shutdown? Would he vote to end it? As it stands, my targeting of the South remains in place regardless.
Well I’m sorry but I thought that point was self-evident. If a guy gets up in front of a crowd and says that Medicare is worse than slavery, in a place where poor black people have the most to gain or lose based on how Medicare plays out, how is that not an attempt to “keep down” minorities? It certainly seems clear to me, but ya never know I suppose…
The hell it isn’t. Let me quote you some numbers from the August Harper’s Index:
And from the September Index:
Under the circumstances, it appears unseemly to blame black individuals’ character flaws for the problems cited by E. W. Jackson when there are such obvious external forces in play.
If you’re really into family values, you would support a genuine safety net for the poor, affordable insurance if a national health care plan isn’t possible, stronger unions, a higher minimum wage, and other reforms that promote social stability- the foundation of family stability- instead of some cockamamie GOP economic philosophy fantasy that tilts crazily in the opposite direction.
I sure don’t. The 1832 South Carolina Nullification crisis isn’t a Confederate anything, as it pre-dates the Confederacy, and was confined to South Carolina. Today’s GOP is not nullifying anything: the ability to opt-out of the Medicaid expansion comes from the Supreme Court ruling on the ACA, and the government shutdown can’t be said to be nullification as it’s occuring at the federal level and has nothing to do with states illegally refusing to implement a federal law.
Even if the opt-out was nullification, you’d have to explain to Idaho, Montana, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Utah, Nebraska, South Dakota, Kansas, Maine, Missouri, Alaska, and New Hampshire how their position was “neo-Confederate”. Good luck with that.
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When there is a relevant distinction between the voting behavior of the GOP in Congress at large and the Tea Party in particular, I will recognize a distinction. As it stands, this is literally a distinction without a difference.
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I’m not familiar with Barr. For all I know he could be allright (my beef is not really with the GOP, but with elected morons). Did he vote for this shutdown? Would he vote to end it? As it stands, my targeting of the South remains in place regardless.
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He is part of the shutdown gang, yes, though he advocates a short-term resolution to fund the government on the condition that negotiations with the Senate and President continue.
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Well I’m sorry but I thought that point was self-evident. If a guy gets up in front of a crowd and says that Medicare is worse than slavery, in a place where poor black people have the most to gain or lose based on how Medicare plays out, how is that not an attempt to “keep down” minorities? It certainly seems clear to me, but ya never know I suppose…
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For one, he didn’t say anything about Medicare or Medicaid in particular. Given that his remark was:
That doesn’t describe Medicaid, so much as it describes welfare: an income stream that allows single mothers to get by without a husband, and to choose partners on the basis of attraction or what-have-you instead of long-term outlook as a provider. Of course, AFDC is actually from the New Deal, not the Great Society, so either Jackson’s wrong or I’m misinterpreting him.
For two, he doesn’t say that Medicaid is worse than slavery, full stop. He says:
He says these programs, and not slavery, are responsible for the decline in two-parent, monogamous families in the black community observable from the late '60s to today. He could be wrong (though I don’t think he’s wrong to say slavery isn’t directly responsible, since before the '60s the rate of out-of-wedlock births was much lower, about 15% of all births in 1930, vs. 30% in the late '60s and 70% in the mid-90s. Something changed in the '60s, a hundred years after slavery ended, so it’s hard to attribute that shift to slavery. Whether it’s the result of government programs or not, I don’t have the data to say, (there are rival theories, such as Pinker’s "Decivilizing Process) but it could have played a role by changing the incentives for women in choosing partners, as noted above.
If Jackson’s 20% figure is correct, then the 1-in-9 number isn’t solely responsible, now is it? Look at the near-70% out-of-wedlock birth rate for a better explanation.
Further, if one wishes to avoid being imprisoned for marijuana use, there’s a simple remedy: stop using or possessing marijuana, an illegal drug. Yes, it’s a serious problem that enforcement is disproportionately targeted at black folks, but black folks aren’t passive victims unable to control themselves or better their situation, they are people just like any other.
The external factors include a culture that doesn’t value the attributes needed to succeed in a modern society and keep out of poverty as much as other cultures do. That can be, and needs to be, addressed at the same time as police issues. There’s not one simple remedy here.
Those ideas have value, sure. But the devil’s always in the details. Well-meaning programs can and have had adverse consequences, if they create perverse incentives or have unintended consequences. Unconditionally supporting your platform there is as reckless as unconditionally opposing it.
Also, there must be cultural factors at work as well, because lower rates of out-of-wedlock births, for instance, pre-date those programs and reforms. Not every problem can be fixed by the government, or at least not by the government alone.
Didn’t mean to drop out, I just get swallowed up by other things. I’ll try to get to the rest later.
It is part of the basis of the Confederate way of doing things, and one crisis in a string of crises that ultimately led to the Civil War (and which continued through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights era, and, yes, the debt ceiling showdown). Bloomberg has a nice article about it, though I think they’re wrong when they say all this was sparked by the ACA- I think it starts with Obama’s election.
What I’m driving at is that every day of the shutdown/debt ceiling crisis (and for the GOP, every day since Obama’s election) is something like Confederate Memorial Day. See The South is holding America hostage. I’d like to trace out for you the sting of historical events, starting from clashes between Madison and Calhoun, through the Civil War, up to the present day, which make up a single, coherent phenomenon that can be fairly described as “Neo-Confederate”.
For now though, I am afraid I’m doing a sloppy job. I just don’t have enough time, I’m sorry. I’ll be back to try and nail it down some more and respond to your other points.
Ah, Michael Lind. That explains a lot. He’s never one to led nuance or inconvenient facts get in the way of a good narrative, especially a polarizing, eyeball-grabbing narrative. Notice his telling reliance upon the makeup of the Tea Party caucus, which a) doesn’t even make his point, 63% doesn’t make it a Southern phenomenon, no matter how badly certain folks want it to be a Southern phenomenon (Confederate-baiting is the new red-baiting), and b) is misleading. The Tea Party is a Republican phenomenon, and it’s strongest wherever Republicans are strongest. Look at the electoral college map. Non-Southern bastions like Kansas and Nebraska send fewer Representatives to Congress than their Southern peers, because their population is smaller. Wyoming could be 100% in the bag for the Tea Party, but they still only elect two Senators and one Representative. Georgia, will two Senators and 14 Representatives, can exceed that figure even if it had fewer Tea Party-dominant districts.
Yeesh. Is this what political discourse has come to in this country?
I hope that I haven’t overlooked someone else’s post of the 2012 election results according to population density:
Notice that in Deep South there is a wide trail of blue that meanders across Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. Do you think everyone in the blue sections are African-American?
The blue doesn’t show up so much in Tennessee, but it certainly isn’t red except in the far eastern part of the state. Tennessee’s two largest cities supported Obama in 2008 and 2012 – Memphis and Nashville.
I think that one thing some of you forget is the ethnic origins of a large percentage of the South.
In Nashville, the white population is slightly below two-thirds. African-Americans are around twenty-five percent of the population. One in every ten people does not fit into either category. That’s a lot of diversity for one area which some would describe as “neo-Confederate.”
We don’t allow a handful of lunatics demonstrating in Washington or even one person with a Confederate flag to speak for our state. We are individuals.
Anyone know what state the kid with the Confederate battle flag came from? It really doesn’t matter. He is one person and he doesn’t represent his own state nor a section of the country.
No. I spent one sentence bashing Lind, then the rest of the paragraph addressing his point.
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But ok, if you can’t accept Lind, let’s discuss it from here:
Read the whole thing. Let’s talk about this.
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Yes, let’s. That article actually gets at the real divide:
That’s the reality of what’s going on, and it explains why this supposedly “neo-Confederate” phenomenon includes so many states that were not part of the Confederacy and share no common culture with the former Confederate states, other than being more rural than urban, something that neither Lind nor yourself have been able to account for.
And, again: nullification was illegal. Haggling over the budget is not. The duly elected Representatives in the House are free to work toward whatever budget they feel benefits their constituents and the nation. You can disagree with the Republican position, as I do, but it’s got nothing in common with a state illegally refusing to enforce a federal law.
I often hear Northerners complaining that the South needs to let go of the Civil War, and yet every time the South does something they disapprove of, suddenly half the articles about it mention the Civil War and disparage the current Southern position as echoing the Confederacy.
I’m partly in agreement with your overall point, but as some of the recent protests show, at nearly every Tea Party and allied demonstration against Obama there’s a few folks waving Confederate flags. This is a recurring problem. The Republicans and Tea Party supporters generally brush this off and say that’s just a few fringe elements, or it’s just not a big deal at all. They really ought to have a zero-tolerance policy for it- Rebel Flag-wavers should be completely unwelcome at Republican and Tea Party events… as long as they’re welcome to come along, it’s reasonable to assume that organizers are at least OK with being allied with flag-wavers.
Waving the Rebel Flag should get the same response as waving a swastika flag- it should just be unacceptable. That symbol needs to die, and the Republicans and conservative Southerners need to kill it. As long as it continues to show up, those groups are going to be associated with the Confederacy, and therefore, associated with brutal oppression.
And in Kentucky, Louisville and Lexington are visible as deep blue blobs in a sea of red. Louisville is in the 3rd District, represented by a Democrat. The rest of the state is represented by Republicans.
Or, look at Arkansas on the above-linked map, and compare it to this map of population density. The densest areas, Little Rock and Fayetteville, are the blue spots. Zoe pointed out how Tennessee follows the same pattern: blue cities, red countryside.
It’s rural vs. urban, folks, not North vs. South.
Sure, but there’s a lot of inertia to overcome. It’d hard to do away with something that’s not seen as a problem by the people doing it. It’s certainly do-able though, there was plenty of inertia in the way of stopping casual sexual harassment or use of racial slurs, and they’ve waned considerably. If there was a new symbol that could be phased in, it’d be helpful.
It’s on the books in Kentucky, but I’ve never heard of it actually being celebrated.
Well, sure - why risk alienating the base, and being replaced by a new leader who doesn’t threaten a cherished symbol? There’s nothing to gain and plenty to lose. It’s symbolic in it’s own way of the problems the Republican Party faces nationally: there’s enough extremists to knock moderate candidates out of primaries, but not enough to win the Presidency. So, the Republican candidates are fighting over the lunatic fringe instead of building a coalition and reaching out to moderate and right-leaning Democrats like Reagan did. In this sort of climate, no one will risk going after the stars and bars, that’s a ticket to being labelled a RINO and booted in the next primary.
If you believe the paper I linked to upthread (which I haven’t read) the South would look a lot like the rest of the country if you reversed the 1860 incidence of slavery on a county-by-county basis.
As for the yahoo waving the confederate flag in front of the White House, Ta-Nehisi Coates argues that, “The behavior of such idiots, while alarming, should not necessarily be taken as an indicator of the aims and thrust of the protest. On the contrary, it is not so much the behavior of the lone idiot that matters—but the tenor of the crowd around him.” And the crowd I assume came from all over.
I had never looked closely at the Kentucky flag. I have to concur: it achieves awesome.
Back to the thread:
Setting aside what the confederate flag meant to those who resurrected it during the 1950s, I’m somewhat dubious about the necessity of a trans-southern symbol. Now it might be expected. But let’s recall that no other region of the country feels similarly tribalistic - though I concede some states do (Texas, Hawaii, Louisiana and the territory of Puerto Rico come to mind).
In a way I could understand Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas having a chip on their shoulder as they are the poorest three states in the union. But Virginia and North Carolina both have high tech corridors. Atlanta is the city that’s too busy to hate. Florida is weird, but it’s also a fairly interesting place -pretty diverse really. Meanwhile, the Yankee bluebloods have completely fallen from power. Look, I get that there’s a Southern identity. But a lot of the underpinnings are slipping away, not least due to the high rates of migration within the US.
[hijack]All of which is profoundly undemocratic: leaders in a 2 party system should gravitate towards the mainstream, not the squirrelly backwaters. But discuss doing away with the primary system and 90%+ of Americans will balk - it seems undemocratic! Though it also peculiar to the US’s version of democracy. [/hijack]
There’s some degree of that in the PacificNorthwest as well. But, bear in mind that no other region of the country was (with due cause, of course, but still) invaded, burned, and forcibly changed by the rest of the nation. That forges a tribal identity toot-sweet; look how many nationalist movements come out of wars or oppressive occupations.
Any new Southern symbol would be for transitional purposes, that is, weening. You’re correct, due to immigration and communications technology, all regional identities are becoming less powerful, both in the U.S. and worldwide. It simply can’t endure without isolation. The good stuff - bourbon, barbecue, roots music, blues, fried chicken, hospitality, pretty girls in sun dresses - endures and spreads to the rest of the nation, the bad stuff will fall away as tribalism grows weaker. We’re seeing it already, with Southern cities voting the same way Northern cities do, and Southern countrysides voting the same way other rural areas do.
For the Presidency, at least, the Democrats have elected consecutive moderate centrists, so it’s working there. It’ll work for the Republicans once the civil war within the party is resolved in the next decade or so. Congress is a different animal, and the House especially, due to gerrymandered districts. Not sure when we’ll get our Blue Dog Democrats and Rockefeller Republicans back.
This has come up before, but it is a myth that the Confederate flag was “resurrected” in the 1950s. It had been around all along as a generic symbol of “Dixie.” As I noted in that earlier thread,
None of that is meant as a defense of displaying the flag, just a correction to the historical record.
Thanks for the correction, Spoke, but clearly your “in these parts” was for your parts, not the South generally, right? Because I see the flag all the time.
Why risk it? Because its wrong, that’s why! The GOP leadership, spineless whelps as they are, need to take a lesson from people like MLK and Rosa Parks, stand up to the crazies, be willing to brave attacks, and do the right thing
That’s stating it rather strongly, displaying the Confederate flag isn’t wrong, it’s just in poor taste, and counter-productive to the New South.
When it comes to standing up the crazies, the GOP rank-and-file has its hands full. Keeping demonstrations free of Confederate flags is pretty low on the list; as a disaffected Republican, I’m far more concerned with efforts to teach Creationism, mindless opposition to everything the White House endorses, and voter suppression.
