# Why is the South so conservative? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [June 15, 2003, 5:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-south-so-conservative/181972 "2003-06-15T05:56:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Sofa\_King](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/58956e/32.png) [@Sofa\_King](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sofa_King)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2003, 8:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-south-so-conservative/181972/41 "2003-06-16T20:38:26Z")
**Bruce\_Daddy** , does your lovely town of Greenville have a “black district”? Are the roads poorer there? Does it have above-ground phone and electrical lines when other neighborhoods have them below ground? Are the property values lower there, and yet for some reason it’s difficult to get that affordable property commercially zoned? What side of the railroad tracks is it on, and how close? Ever heard the name Josh White? I’ll sure as hell bet you’ve heard of Bob Jones. Do you know when I learned that Booker T. Washington supervised a school in my one-time home town of Christiansburg, Virginia? About an hour ago, when I was preparing a post for this thread. Nobody ever taught me that when I went to high school barely a mile away from the remains of the [Christiansburg Institute](http://www.christiansburginstitute.org/). I had answers to most of the questions above which seem to indicate an undercurrent of racism, fear, financial isolation, oppression and historical amnesia in the southern town in which I grew up, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence at all that conservatism goes hand in hand with it. What in the hell do you see? ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2003, 12:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-south-so-conservative/181972/42 "2003-06-18T00:34:33Z")
Anyone interested in this thread should check out the websites of the following organizations, which express the spirit of “Southern conservatism” pretty well: The Knights Party (political vehicle of the Ku Klux Klan): [http://www.kkk.com/](http://www.kkk.com/) The Southern Party: [http://www.southernparty.org/](http://www.southernparty.org/) The Southern Independence Party: _[http://www.southernindependentparty.com/](http://www.southernindependentparty.com/)_ I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that **Himmler** belongs to one or more of these. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2003, 12:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-south-so-conservative/181972/43 "2003-06-18T00:36:14Z")
Sorry, that would be: The Southern Independence Party: [http://www.southernindependentparty.com/](http://www.southernindependentparty.com/) ---
**Author:** ![tracer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tracer/32/20578_2.png) [@tracer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tracer)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2003, 1:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-south-so-conservative/181972/44 "2003-06-18T01:31:47Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by sqweels \* > \*\*Why so much hostility toward gays–to name just one issue-- in the South? They’re not exactly agents of the Big Government. \*\* Because those gays are secretly implementing the [The Homosexual Agenda](http://www.bettybowers.com/homoagenda.html)! 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Bruce\_Daddy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/85f322/32.png) [@Bruce\_Daddy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bruce_Daddy)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2003, 1:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-south-so-conservative/181972/45 "2003-06-18T13:34:44Z")
**Sofa King** , of course there are social and economical differences in a community. I fail to see the connection between that and > [@](#): > > Southerners have not liked certain changes: abolishing slavery, integration, voting rights, etc . Huh? The logic is that because Southerners supposedly wish for slavery, segregation and no voting rights for Blacks (which is truly the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard) that the Black man is kept on the poor side of the tracks. What’s the excuse elsewhere in the country where there is a “hood”? That’s what the hell I see. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2003, 9:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-south-so-conservative/181972/46 "2003-06-18T21:10:49Z")
Ugh! A neo-Nazi has taken a crap in my nice thread. I feel… sullied. ☹ “Run away, Scar. Run away and never return!” :mad: ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2003, 11:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-south-so-conservative/181972/47 "2003-06-18T23:27:03Z")
In his book _Vietnam: The Necessary War_ (New York: The Free Press, 1999), Michael Lind notes that southerners were much more likely than people of other regions of the country to support the Vietnam War – and to support every prior American war in history. What is at the root of this Southern militarism? The following discussion is from pp. 122-125: > [@](#): > > The real reason for the persistence of sectionalism in U.S. foreign policy can be found in the ethnoregional theory of American politics, which has been developed by the historians David Hackett Fischer, Daniel Elazar, D.W. Meinig, Kevin Phillips, and others. The ethnoregional theory holds that in the United States powerful ethnic and regional subcultures are more important and enduring than political parties or ideologies. . . . > > The greatest insight of ethnoregional theorists is that immigrants in the United States do not assimilate to a uniform American national culture; rather, they assimilate to one of a small number of preexisting regional cultures. The historian Wilbur Zelinsky has defined a thesis he calls the Doctrine of Effective First Settlement that holds: “Whenever an empty territory undergoes settlement, or an earlier population is dislodged by invaders, the specific characteristics of the first group able to affect a viable, self-perpetuating society are of crucial significance for the later social and cultural geography of the area, no matter how tiny the inital band of settlers may have been.” . . . > > Historians differ on the question of how many of these enduring regional cultures there are in the United States. Most agree on three: a Yankee culture that spread westward overland from New England; a Quaker culture originating in Pennsylvania; and a Cavalier culture originating in the coastal South. Most, but not all, identify a fourth regional culture, that of the Scots-Irish Highland South from Appalachia to the Ozarks and Texas. In his magisterial _Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America,_ David Hackett Fischer argues persuasively that these four “hearth cultures” originated in different regions of early modern Britain and were transplanted to North America by four waves of immigrants. In the first wave (1629-40), Puritans from the eastern counties of England settled New England. The second wave (1642-75) brought anti-Puritan, royalist Cavaliers from the south of England to Virginia. Quakers from the North Midlands of England colonized Pennsylvania and the Delaware Valley after emigrating during the third wave (1675-1715). The fourth and final major Anglo-American migration, which lasted from 1717 to 1775, transplanted so-called Scots-Irish from northern England, lowland Scotland, and the north of Ireland (Ulster). > > In addition to having distinctive folkways and dialects of English, these four groups of British-American immigrants had their own unique variants of a common individualistic and liberal British political culture. Fischer describes the New England ideal as “ordered freedom,” the Quaker ideal as “reciprocal freedom,” the Scots-Irish ideal as “natural freedom,” and the coastal southern ideal as “hegemonic freedom” (deference to traditional elites). . . . > > These British-American regional cultures have been overlaid and altered by waves of European and, more recently, Latin American and Asian immigration. The concentration of European Catholic immigrants in the industrial belt more or less effaced the older midatlantic Quaker region. By 1955, New England itself had ceased to be Yankee; thanks to European immigration, fewer than 30 percent of the inhabitants of Connecticut had ancestors who had lived in New England for more than two generations. The Yankee tradition therefore lived on chiefly in the Great Lakes region, the upper prairie, and the Pacific Northwest. Along with the Scots-Irish Highland South and the Anglo-American Tidewater South, the western section of Greater New England has been little affected by large-scale immigration, other than that of German- and Scandinavian-Americans whose cultures have tended to reinforce Yankee norms. These three regions show greater continuity in attitudes toward foreign policy than do areas such as the industrial belt or California and the Southwest, where populations have been churned by massive immigration and relocation. Contrary to popular belief, regional cultures tend to be far more stable than the ethnic cultures of immigrant groups, which usually fade away after a generation or two. > > The ethnoregional theory provides the answer to the mystery of American sectional differences with respect to war. Regional disagreements about war are part of a larger pattern of regional disagreement about the legitimacy of all forms of violence. “Historians of Southern mores are agreed that violence as an aspect of Southern life clearly distinguished the region from the rest of the country,” writes historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown. Of the southerner, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that “the energy which his [northern] neighbor devotes to gain turns with him to a passionate love of field sports and military exercises; he delights in violent bodily exertion, he is familiar with the use of arms, and is accustomed from a very early age to expose his life in single combat.” Southern states lead the nation not only in military academies but in homicide rates and death penalty laws and in low penalties for domestic violence. Northern states have the lowest homicide rates and the greatest number of statutes requiring a citizen to retreat before attacking an assailant or intruder in his home. > > These regional differences reflect the differences in moral systems between the post-Calvinist Puritanism of Greater New England, which shuns violence as a means for resolving disputes, and the cultures of honor of the Scots-Irish and the Anglo-American Tidewater South. The two southern cultures are quite different, but compared to Greater New Englanders, both Highland and Tidewater southerners look with greater approval on violent retaliation for insults. But southerners are not indiscriminately violent. The difference between northern and southern homicide rates is accounted for almost entirely by the violent responses of southerners to personal offenses: arguments, insults to women, lovers’ quarrels, and disputes within the family. The researchers Richard E. Nisbet and Dov Cohen discovered that, at the same university, white southern students were more likely to respond aggressively than white northern students to the same set of insults and provocations. The same researchers have pointed out the similarities between the culture of honor of white southerners and that of inner-city black Americans, most of whom are descendants of southern migrants. > > In addition to different attitudes toward violence, both collective and personal, Greater New Englanders and southerners have inherited different conceptions of the character of the United States. The idea of American messianism or exceptionalism, of a special American destiny in the world, is a northern idea. It is a secularized version of the Calvinist utopia of the perfect Puritan commonwealth, safe in the New World from the corrupting influences of the Old. The power of this utopian tradition, both in Protestant and secular forms, explains why almost every wave of social and moral reform in American history has emanated from New England or areas settled by New Englanders such as California: abolitionism, prohibition, animal rights, pacifism, suffragism, and, most recently, the antismoking campaign. By contrast, the Tidewater southern gentry and the Highland southern yeomen have viewed North America in terms of cheap land and quick wealth. For southerners, British North America is a “new England,” different in scale but not in kind from the old England; for the Puritans and their cultural descendants, North America is, or should be, a New Jerusalem. > > The fundamental incompatibility of the mentalities of the rival American regions was captured by Henry Adams: “The Pilgrims of Plymouth, the Puritans of Boston, the Quakers of Pennsylvania, all avowed a moral purpose, and began by making institutions that consciously reflected a moral idea. No such character belonged to the colonization of 1800. From Lake Erie to Florida, in long, unbroken line, pioneers were at work, cutting into the forest with the energy of so mean beavers, and with no more moral purpose than the beavers they drove away. The civilization they carried with them was rarely illumined by an idea.” Of the mostly southern Jeffersonian Republicans this quintessential Yankee intellectual, the descendant of two scholarly Massachusetts presidents, wrote: “I am at times almost sorry that I undertook to write their history, for they appear like mere grasshoppers kicking and gesticulating on the middle of the Mississippi River. There is no possibility of reconciling their theories with their acts.” To southerners, even intellectual and progressive southerners, the notion that a government or an entire society should be organized according to a theory or idea, rather than on the basis of tradition and custom, is the ultimate in New England folly. ---
**Author:** ![cellardoor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/8e7dd6/32.png) [@cellardoor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cellardoor)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2003, 12:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-south-so-conservative/181972/48 "2003-06-19T00:35:18Z")
Being a libertarian, and you could say conservative, i would like you to try to classify just being a conservative with being a radical racist because i know alot of people in texas most being conservative and mexican so all these generilizations get kind of annoying. Racism is not conservativism. ---
**Author:** ![cellardoor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/8e7dd6/32.png) [@cellardoor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cellardoor)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2003, 12:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-south-so-conservative/181972/49 "2003-06-19T00:37:15Z")
Sorry the last post should be try not to, not try to lol why is it that you always make typos in thw worst possible locations. ---
**Author:** ![Zoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/a4c791/32.png) [@Zoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zoe)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2003, 5:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-south-so-conservative/181972/50 "2003-06-19T05:19:47Z")
Eleventh generation Southerner here – and a liberal. Some of you paint Southerners with the same broad brush that _some_ Southerners, and others, have used to paint African-Americans. (Wouldn’t I be foolish to assume that all people from Boston were opposed to integration because of the race riots there? How about the African-Americans who were roasted alive on the streets of New York?) I doubt that most Southerners had slaves prior to the Civil War, but I am willing to be corrected by someone with a reliable cite. And certainly many white Southerners have actively supported Civil Rights legislation and integration. There were many Confederate soldiers who did not support slavery but fought in the Civil War because of states’ rights issues. My grandfather (the 7th generation) was one of them. During most of my voting years, I have seen my state send many liberals to the Senate and the House of Representatives. My understanding is that Al Gore never lost an election in Tennessee over a twenty-five year period – until the Presidential election of 2000. Our current governor is a Democrat. I live in a multi-cultural neighborhood of Latinos, Kurds, African-Americans, Cambodians, Laotians and whites. If we know what has caused the increase in membership in those churches which can be described as "the relgious right, " we will have a big piece of the puzzle filled in on why the South is voting more conservatively. I wish I knew their techniques for getting the vote out. **Himmler,** I don’t believe in any form of censorship but I really hope that you choose not to continue to post here. You are certainly not representative of the Southerners I know. ---
**Author:** ![Spoke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a88e57/32.png) [@Spoke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoke)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2003, 2:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-south-so-conservative/181972/51 "2003-06-19T14:51:44Z")
Here’s an interesting essay dating from 1917 on the differences between the North and the South: [Sir Walter Scott and the South](http://www.boondocksnet.com/twaintexts/scott_south.html) In it, the author advances the notion (which I have heard elsewhere) that the South derives its romanticized notions of chivalry and honorable warfare from its 19th-century infatuation with Sir Walter Scott. (Ivanhoe, in particular.) ---
**Author:** ![Homebrew](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/c89c15/32.png) [@Homebrew](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Homebrew)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2003, 3:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-south-so-conservative/181972/52 "2003-06-19T15:08:46Z")
I’ve lived in the South my whole life (expect for a 3 month stint in Allendale, Ill. when I was in 3rd Grade). Those fellow southerners who deny the prevalence of racism here are walking around with blinders. I can’t testify to the level of racism in Northern States; but I can for here. In the course of my life I’ve heard newspaper editors, preachers, school system administrators, elected officials and the average Joe on the street making racist comments as if just because I’m white I’d naturally agree. The casualness of racism here is indicative of its pervasiveness. **Bruce\_Daddy** and others can point to incidents in other places as if it absolves the South of it’s racist past. But it doesn’t. “You did it too” is no excuse. My best guess to why the South is the way it is goes to religion. The dominance of religion here, particularly the SBC and other fundamentalist churches, is the problem. Karen Armstrong’s _Battle for God_ takes good look at the motivations of fundamentalists and their sense of being under attack by a secular culture. Contrary to their paranoia, most of us just want to be left alone. But they see not conforming to their beliefs as an attack on them. Since they see change as an attack, they resist it; even when resisting is contrary to their own self interest. SOCAS is seen as a denial of God, so they distrust a secular government. Fundamentalists were largely politically inactive until the late 70s when Pat Robinson and Jerry Falwell decided that politics is a way to take over the secular culture. Now we have the President sending a video-tape to the SBC congratulating them on being ‘‘faithful servants’’ of God. They pay lip service to religious freedom, but then they belie that with comments like > [@](#): > > _(from the Southern Baptist Convention’s website story on the Annual Meeting in Phoenix)_ > In its resolution on religious liberty, the convention urged the federal government to advocate religious liberty **overseas** and to **consider countries’ policies on persecution and religious discrimination in making decisions on foreign aid**. It also cited recent criticism of Southern Baptists and other evangelicals as intolerant because of their belief in Jesus as the only Savior. > > [emphasis mine] Meaning they want to make sure we don’t give foreign aid to countries that resist letting them evangelize. > [@](#): > > “While we believe that Jesus Christ is the only way and the only truth and the only life, and we have an obligation to share that, we at the same time are absolutely committed to soul freedom and freedom of conscience for every human being whatever their faith.” Now explain to me how they believe in the freedom of conscience when they turn around and pass resolutions such as these: [ul][li] Reiterated the SBC’s opposition to the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion 30 years ago and expressed regret that previous actions had supported abortion.[/li] [li]Renewed Southern Baptists’ commitment to the biblical model of the family and the permanence of marriage.[/li] [li] Restated opposition to the legalization of same-sex marriage.[/li][/ul] ---
**Author:** ![Bruce\_Daddy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/85f322/32.png) [@Bruce\_Daddy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bruce_Daddy)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2003, 4:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-south-so-conservative/181972/53 "2003-06-19T16:01:47Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Homebrew \ ***Bruce\_Daddy** and others can point to incidents in other places as if it absolves the South of it’s racist past. But it doesn’t. “You did it too” is no excuse. What in the world are you talking about? Oh, and what **Zoe** said. ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2003, 4:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-south-so-conservative/181972/54 "2003-06-19T16:18:14Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Homebrew \* > \*\*Now explain to me how they believe in the freedom of conscience when they turn around and pass resolutions such as these: > > [ul][li] Reiterated the SBC’s opposition to the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion 30 years ago and expressed regret that previous actions had supported abortion.[/li] > [li]Renewed Southern Baptists’ commitment to the biblical model of the family and the permanence of marriage.[/li] > [li] Restated opposition to the legalization of same-sex marriage.[/li][/ul] \*\* Well, none of those things limit freedom of conscience. ---
**Author:** ![Sofa\_King](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/58956e/32.png) [@Sofa\_King](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sofa_King)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2003, 4:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-south-so-conservative/181972/55 "2003-06-19T16:25:06Z")
All right then, should we agree upon a definition of conservatism? I submit the following from [www.conservatism.com](http://www.conservatism.com) : > [@](#): > > 1.1 What is distinctive about conservatism as a political view? > > Its emphasis on tradition as a source of wisdom that goes beyond what can be demonstrated or even explicitly stated. > > 1.2 Why is tradition a source of greater wisdom? > > It is a network of commonly accepted attitudes, beliefs and practices that evolves through strengthening of things that work and rejection of things that lead to conflict and failure. It therefore comprises a collection of habits that have proved useful in a huge variety of practical affairs, and a comprehensive and generally coherent point of view that reflects very extensive experience and thought. Through it we know subtle and fundamental features of the world that would otherwise escape us, and our understanding of those things takes on concrete and usable form. > > The usual alternative to reliance on tradition is reliance on theory. Taking theory literally can be costly because it achieves clarity by ignoring things that are difficult to articulate. Such things can be important; the reason politics and morals are learned mostly by experience and imitation is that most of what we need to know about them consists in habits, attitudes and implicit presumptions that we couldn’t begin to put into words. There is no means other than tradition to accumulate, conserve and hand on such things. > > Other considerations also support the wisdom of relying on tradition, if not specifically of tradition itself. For example, tradition typically exists as the common property of a community whose members are raised in it. Accordingly, it normally unites more than divides, and is far more likely than theory to facilitate life in common. And there is a lot more, so I may well be guilty of taking these cornerstone definitions out of context. Following up on my comments on the previous page, I was quite aware of what seemed to be a _tradition_ of racism, oppression, financial and geographical isolation, and historical amnesia in my own southern town. It just doesn’t seem fair for me to sit here and say “mainstream southern conservatives therefore endorse all those awful things.” It’s just not true. But I think it might be fair to say that some of those awful things are defended by some very misguided people _under the guise of mainstream conservatism_. Anyhow, I leave that site and the above for your consideration. ---
**Author:** ![Bruce\_Daddy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/85f322/32.png) [@Bruce\_Daddy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bruce_Daddy)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2003, 5:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-south-so-conservative/181972/56 "2003-06-19T17:10:30Z")
I particularly liked: > [@](#): > > 1.3 What’s the difference between following tradition and refusing to think? > > One might as well ask what the difference is between following one’s own opinion and indifference to truth. The goal of thought is truth, after all, and truth has no special connection with one’s private views! > > Accepting tradition is not abandonment of thought but only recognition that thought is not self-contained. The goal of thought is something outside itself, and it must be based on something. Conservatives are therefore skeptical of its autonomy. They believe that tradition can guide and correct it and so bring it closer to truth. > > While truth is not wholly out of reach, our access to it is largely indirect and necessarily incomplete. Since it can not be reduced wholly to our possession, conservatives are willing to accept it in whatever form it is available to us, and to recognize the need to rely on the unarticulated truth implicit in inherited attitudes and practices. Today tradition is undervalued; conservatives hope to think better and know more truly by re-emphasizing it. and > [@](#): > > 2.3 Wouldn’t we still have slavery if conservatives had always been running the show? > > Experience suggests otherwise. Slavery disappeared in Western and Central Europe long ago without need for self-conscious attempts at social reconstruction. It lasted much longer in the new and less conservative societies Europeans founded in America. > > While conservatism as such doesn’t guarantee there will be no oppression, neither do attempts at autonomous rational thought. It has been under radical and not conservative regimes that brutal forced labor and other gross forms of oppression have made a comeback in recent times. That is no paradox. Radicalism is far more compatible than conservatism with tyrannical institutions because by overemphasizing the role of theory in politics it destroys reciprocity and mutual accommodation between rulers and ruled. > > Conservatism would be useless as a guide to action if it were a rejection of all change. It is not self-contained; its recognition of existing practice as a standard does not mean denial of standards other than existing practice. It recognizes that moral habits evolve with experience and changing circumstances, and that social arrangements that come to be too much at odds with the moral feelings of a people change or disappear. It also recognizes that there can be corruptions as well as improvements. Conservatism arose not from a desire to freeze everything exactly as it is, but from recognition of the necessity of continuity, the difficulty of forcing society into a preconceived pattern, and the importance of things, such as mutual personal obligation, for which ideologies of the Left have trouble finding a place. Those recognitions make conservatives more reliable opponents of tyranny than progressives. And one more time, just because a town has a poor side with mostly black people doesn’t mean that “The Man” keeps them there because of racism. Who’s keeping the “white trash” down? ---
**Author:** ![Scott\_Dickerson](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f04885/32.png) [@Scott\_Dickerson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scott_Dickerson)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2003, 6:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-south-so-conservative/181972/57 "2003-06-19T18:37:40Z")
This is a great, educational thread, and I think a number of very plausible answers to the OP have been advanced. The “real” answer is, probably, that there is no one real answer. We’re dealing with a complex combination of factors producing a certain result. (Think of the way the staggering complexities of the human genome result in that nebula of improbabilities called “the human body.”) To contribute something to the discussion: 1. I would guess that most of the non-South has a traditional of internal migration that contrasts with the Southern attitude. My own family background consists of a sluggish flood of persons moving from Scandinavia, England, and Scotland through the great lakes states to the midwest, and thence to California, all in three or four generations. In a certain unstated sense, wherever we are is just a stopping-place along the road. I have the impression that Southerners have a stronger commitment to living where their families have always lived; and it seems easy to deduce many of the cited attitudes from the kind of society likely to arise under such circumstances. 2. On conservatism: There are various high-flown definitions of Conservatism and Liberalism, but these amount to saying what they “ought” to be, if they are to be self-consistent. In fact (ie, IMHO!), the deeper truth is that we live in a kind of society that facilitates polarization on almost any issue. We (even “conservatives”) tend to admire upstarts and “the little guy fighting city hall”–not bland conformists. The result is an automatic tendency toward bifurcation. Parts of today’s Right once belonged to yesterday’s Left, and vice versa. The point is that whenever some issue or approach “crosses the line” for pragmatic reasons, the change is one ideology produces a corresponding change in the other–because the hidden drive is always to define oneself in opposition to “the other,” however “the other” might be defined at a given moment in time. There follows a good deal of marvellously ingenious backpedalling to make is SEEM that the newly-grafted element logically belonged in its new home from the start. Many of us will live long enough to delight in, say, the abortion issue switching sides. ---
**Author:** ![Sofa\_King](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/58956e/32.png) [@Sofa\_King](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sofa_King)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2003, 6:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-south-so-conservative/181972/58 "2003-06-19T18:54:36Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Bruce\_Daddy \* > \*\*And one more time, just because a town has a poor side with mostly black people doesn’t mean that “The Man” keeps them there because of racism. Who’s keeping the “white trash” down? \*\* Well, in the case of my own town, “The Man” is quite active. I recommend you do a search on Christian Bible Ministries, which is based in Christiansburg, VA. When I was in college in neighboring Blacksburg, VA in 1991, the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan [held a march](http://spec.lib.vt.edu/archives/blackhistory/timeline/protest.htm) straight through the middle of the town. My father was in line to become president of the local Lion’s Club, then suddenly resigned from the club altogether for reasons he still won’t disclose today. He’s had a life-long antipathy for the area’s “Tri-Kaps,” as he likes to call them, and has hinted that he won’t participate in any organization that has members who are also part of the Klan. I don’t know for sure if that’s why he dropped out of the Club, which was composed of many of the town’s prominent (white) citizens, but I have my suspicions. (My father, by the way, is no model of tolerance by any stretch of the imagination, but his stance against the Klan is something I very much admire.) ---
**Author:** ![Sofa\_King](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/58956e/32.png) [@Sofa\_King](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sofa_King)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2003, 7:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-south-so-conservative/181972/59 "2003-06-19T19:02:06Z")
Regarding the “hoods” outside of the south. My experience in those areas supports the idea that there is an “enclave”-ish makeup of many non-southern towns, but I would also remind everyone that just because the North generally opposed slavery didn’t mean the residents of non-southern towns particularly supported integration or equal treatment for black people. I would suggest that a lot of black neighborhoods in non-southern towns were created along the exact same lines, and to a lesser degree still have some of the same problems. There does, however, seem to be a modern difference in attitude which is fundamentally different from my southern experiences. I will try to further illustrate those differences at another time. ---
**Author:** ![Bruce\_Daddy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/85f322/32.png) [@Bruce\_Daddy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bruce_Daddy)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2003, 7:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-south-so-conservative/181972/60 "2003-06-19T19:14:17Z")
The Klan has enough power to keep down a race of people? The last klan rally I saw had about 20 people. The current “Klan” is a bunch of goobers that need something to do on Saturday afternoons, not quite a social powerhouse. It’s so obvious it shouldn’t even be stated, but people hating other people is universal. This has nothing to do with the South being conservative. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-south-so-conservative/181972.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-south-so-conservative/181972.md?page=4)