Deficits? Balanced budgets? HAH! Tell me about it. :rolleyes: Clinton balanced the budget down from Reagan’s monster deficit and Bush promptly blew the balanced budget all to hell. On purpose. Captain Amazing, I’m not sure what world you’re living in, but I have news for you: Wendell Willkie is dead.
According to this conservative report the worst ten educational systems are:
Florida
Alabama
Arkansas
Georgia
South Carolina
Tennessee
New Mexico
Louisiana
District of Columbia, and
Mississippi
Since when do Presidents get to pass legislation (such as budgets), Jomo?
Conservative report? Three of its main factors are money spent per student, an APTITUDE test, and teacher ratio. There’s not much on how much a school adds value to the student.
From the parent site:
"Background about ALEC
More than a quarter century ago, a small group of state legislators and conservative policy advocates met in Chicago to implement a vision: A bipartisan membership association for conservative state lawmakers who shared a common belief in limited government, free markets, federalism, and individual liberty…
Our Mission Statement
The mission of the American Legislative Exchange Council is to advance the Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism and individual liberty among America’s state legislators…"
Except that these weren’t always conservative platforms. In the first half of the century, most conservatives were isolationist and opposed military spending and the sending of American troops overseas. And much of the early calls for criminalizing gambling, alcohol, and drugs came from liberal reformers who felt the poor were victims of these things. I’ll grant you opposition to government welfare programs has generally been a conservative idea.
daniel801, were you unaware that presidents have legislative agendas that they push through Congress?
Wasn’t Clinton from the South?
Is he a conservative now?
I’ve forgotten a lot after we started always having been at war with Eurasia instead of always having been at war with Eastasia.
Most Southern whites are conservative, not every last one. And African Americans make up between 20% and 40% of the Southern electorate (depending on the state), and they are not particularly conservative. A Democrat who cultivates a reputation as a moderate, as Clinton did prior to impeachment, can carry Southern states by combining near-unanimous African-American support with a large enough minority of white votes.
I’m sorry that I got pissed earlier.
That’s true. Support for alcohol and drug prohibition has generally been considered “conservative” since about 1920, but was often described as “progressive” before that. Support for a strong and active military has been consistently associated with conservatism only since 1945.
But by whatever name, these attitudes–anti-social-legislation, pro-moral-legislation, and pro-military–were always stronger in the white South than the rest of the country. So what I should say is that, because of its history, the white South has for at least a century shared the cluster of attitudes which are today described as conservatism.
It’s…so…hot. Can’t…breathe…
As Jomo Mojo pointed out, the South in colonial times was arguably the more liberal region (at least if you were white).
Also, you might take note of the People’s Party (a/k/a the Populist movement), which was born in the farming areas of the South and Midwest in the late 19th century. That movement came into being in response to heavy debt load of the farmers (which led to a resentment of banks and “moneyed interests”) and the railroads, which charged exorbitant fees to farmers to get their goods to market.
The People’s Party produced a number of US Representatives and Senators, and became such a threat on the national stage that the Democratic Party (under William Jennings Bryan) and later the Progressive Republicans (under Teddy Roosevelt) coopted several of its positions. It also led to the creation of Farmer’s Co-Ops, cooperative ventures organized to get good prices on farm equipment and supplies, and to negotiate better shipping rates.
Some exerpts from the People’s Party Platform of 1896:
Populists tried very hard to win the votes of poor blacks in the South, their thinking being that poor blacks and poor whites had a common economic interest, but were being cynically divided against each other by the wealthy elite. However, the Populists never had much luck with the black population (which may have led to the violent resentment of blacks seen among some prominent Populists in their declining years – Tom Watson of Georgia being Exhibit “A”).
For more info, try reading Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel.
So to answer the OP, while the South has been largely conservative for much of its history, there are some liberal threads running through that history as well.
Its because there is no such thing as an “American” culture, there has never been such a thing. In the colonial days, two separate cultures originated in America, one centered around Virginia, the other around Massachusetts. They then began to spread west in parallel directions. The union was a compromise between these two very distinct and very real cultures. Later immigrants assimilated on a regional basis, not a national one, into these two established cultures. The South did not receive much immigration at all due to slavery. These cultures originated in the British Isles. The South was settled primarily by the minority populations from Great Britain - Scot-Irish, Welsh, Cornish. There was also a substantial French element in Louisiana and the low country. The great waves of American immigration largely passed the South by. To this day, the vast majority of Southerners, black and white, are overwhelmingly descended from the colonial population. New England was settled primarily by the English and reinforced by Irish and German immigration. Needless to say, the antagonism between these two groups goes back centuries prior to the creation of America. Having implanted themselves in the two great American sections it was only a matter of time before they came into conflict.
The vastly different climates gave rise to different socio-economic systems as well. The Southern colonies, in a more temperate climate, could rely on large scale cash crop agriculture. The New England colonies, living in a harsher environment, had to rely on a more diverse economy. Originally, it was shipping that was predominant. In 1807, President Jefferson embargoed American commerce sending New England into an uproar. There was talk of secession. The unintended consequence of course of the embargo was that New England’s primitive manafactures got an incredible boost, so much of a boost that the manafacturing interest in New England began to overcome shipping. These manafactures then began to demand a protective tariff, and eventually they got one, which was opposed by the South with its export based economy. These tariffs systematically began to redistribute wealth within the United States, from the Southern states to the Northern states. This wealth went into internal improvements and helped build the Northern capital market. The wealth redistribution, the difference in climate making the North uncongenial to slavery, the more diverse economy was simply self reinforcing. The population of the North began to explode and its sectional dominance within the Union grew. The great waves of immigration settled overwhelmingly in the North.
The South, rapidly becoming a permanent minority within the United States and rapidly losing its dominance within the Union, left and set up itself as the Confederate States of America. The North of course invaded, destroying the South, in the largest scale war in the history of Western Civilization up until that point. This was followed by the infamous 12 years of despotism during the Reconstruction Era. The War Between the States and Reconstruction left a searing and permanent memory in the Southern Culture.
After the South left the Union, the Northern Congress, free of the resistance of the South, initiated what can only be called a Constitutional revolution. Tariffs were increased 10 times alone during the Lincoln administration. The Radical Republicans forced the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments onto the South at the point of a gun, this of course only went to reinforce the Southern instinct to distrust big government. For roughly the next 80 years, the South was systematically fleeced of its wealth by discriminatory tariffs. Its economy destroyed by the War Between the States, and plundered by the infamous carpetbaggers of billions of dollars, Southern credit was destroyed when several states repudiated their debt in the 1880s.
Then of course there was the invasion of several Southern states by the U.S. military in the 1950s and 1960s, the Civil Rights Bill, and the anti-Southern hostility of that era. All of these things went to reinforce the distrust of the federal government by Southerners.
What you call “Southern Conservatism” is due to the fact that Southerners have been a mistreated and abused minority within the United States just as their ancestors were within Great Britain. Its purely contextual. Southerners attempt to limit the power of the central authority because they are a cultural minority. It also has alot to do with the alien, antagonistic, and hostile black minority within the South. When the South finally left the United States in the 1860s it virtually abandoned the limited government philosophy. Southern railroads were nationalized, salt was socialized, welfare was given to the poor. The Confederate Congress was merely a rubber stamp of the executive.
Hey Himmler, your swastika is showing.
Get a fig leaf or something.
But Himmler, today, the South dominates the federal government quite legally. Just look how many prominent politicians, including presidents, in the past 30 years have been Southerners. The Southern economic revolution followed hard on the Civil Rights revolution – the region’s economy and population have been steadily booming since the 1960s. And this has translated into influence in Washington.
If the South’s conservatism is based in resentment of inferior status within the Union – then why does the South remain conservative, now that it’s status is no longer inferior?
Oh, and you speak of an “alien” black minority within the South – really, Himmler, white people are just as “alien” on this continent as blacks, and you know it. Why does the modern South belong any less to its blacks than its whites?
Yeah, Himmler, that was a very informative post, but much too biased. You ignore Jim Crow racism and instead imply that civil rights is all about “anti-Southern hostility”. There is also no mention of religion in your post, even though the South is still referred to as the “Bible Belt”. Why so much hostility toward gays–to name just one issue-- in the South? They’re not exactly agents of the Big Government.
Here’s my favorite asinine quote from this thread so far:
I agree. You have been here to many years. Go home.