# Southern pride: Why? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 26, 2008, 1:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-pride-why/435041 "2008-01-26T01:29:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 15
**Author:** ![JohnnieEnigma](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/dfb087/32.png) [@JohnnieEnigma](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnnieEnigma)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2008, 3:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-pride-why/435041/281 "2008-02-01T15:51:40Z")
[QUOTE=jsgoddess] It seems every time there’s a discussion about the Confederate flag, someone will defend its use by saying it’s a symbol of “Southern pride.” But Southern pride makes no sense to me. I don’t feel any Northern pride. I don’t know anyone who carries or displays a symbol of their Northern-ness. To me it’s like me having pride I wear a size 11 shoe, or having pride that my wisdom teeth fit, or having pride that my parents were really poor when I was born. What has it to do with me? Those of you who have Southern pride, what has it to do with you? [/QUOTE] maybe they have to feel some kind of pride since they lost the civil war? It’s like a solidarity thing? or don’t you recall in Gone With the Wind, how they referred to the southern “cause” pretty often. Well, there’s this cause they were fighting for; their cause, their way of life, their culture, and the confederate flag represents their “cause”. Just speculating here. ---
**Author:** ![Labrador\_Deceiver](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7c8e57/32.png) [@Labrador\_Deceiver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Labrador_Deceiver)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2008, 3:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-pride-why/435041/282 "2008-02-01T15:57:54Z")
[QUOTE=What Exit?] Just curious, are you currently in Georgia or New Jersey? I couldn’t tell from your post versus your location. If you care, I hope you choose to stick around. I also like your user name. Jim [/QUOTE] I’m in Georgia, but I spent a bunch of time in NJ when I worked in marketing. To refresh your memory, I posted in the “NJ Driving” thread. Just paid the money. ---
**Author:** ![Spoke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a88e57/32.png) [@Spoke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoke)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2008, 4:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-pride-why/435041/283 "2008-02-02T16:27:52Z")
(Sorry for abandoning my post. Life called. Now where were we…) > [@Maeglin](#): > > > [@spoke-](#): > > > > Not sure what point you’re making here. How else could the compact have originated but among the squabblers? Color me unimpressed. Democratic government tends to be the default position among small squabbling groups, wouldn’t you agree? Who could have imposed their will in the absence of a consensus, do you suppose? > > > > It was strictly an ad hoc response to anarchy, and not the product of any idealism or utopian vision. If they had planned it out that way before leaving England, I’d be more impressed. > > Then you should have little difficulty naming, say, five of them that existed prior to Plymouth. Go ahead. Well, the histories of small squabbling groups don’t often get written. It only happened in New England because a certain class of folk there wanted to glorify their ne’er-do-well ancestors as a means of claiming some dubious pedigree meant to elevate them over later arrivals. But, since you ask, the example of Caribbean pirates from the 1560s forward springs to mind. A pirate crew was often just a loose confederation of thieving rabble collected aboard a single ship (much like the Mayflower passengers). They often found that the most effective form of government to prevent squabbling was a rough form of democracy. As for the Mayflower Compact, its value as precedent has been greatly overblown. Our own Constitutional government bears a much closer resemblance in form to the Virginia House of Burgesses. We have a president and a legislature with an upper house (the Senate) and a lower house (the House of Representatives). The President has veto power over legislation. Virginia had a governor, his appointed council (which functioned legislatively as a rough equivalent of the Senate) and the democratically-elected Burgesses. The governor had veto power over legislation. What the founding fathers did was not built on the foundation of the Mayflower Compact. (If you contend otherwise, provide a **contemporary** source to support your position.) Instead, the founding fathers simply tweaked the more familiar parliamentary form to render it more democratic. Regarding Virginia’s “year of precedence” in democratic governance, you are missing the point, **Tom**. Every Thanksgiving we are fed the notion of the Mayflower passengers arriving alone on America’s shores and inventing democracy for us. :rolleyes: In fact, they were alone only because they were incompetent navigators. If they’d made it a bit further south, they’d have found a thriving colony of some thousand souls already practicing (in rough, semi-democratic form) the sort of government that would one day be the American standard. _That_ story rarely gets told. (And Tom, I think if you’ll go back and read more carefully, you’ll find that my syntax was directly correlated to and in response to the syntax you had chosen. But hey, if it pleases you to think yourself grammatically superior, you knock yourself out.) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-pride-why/435041.md?page=14)