Taking Jackson Down

Years ago, back when I was writing Pan's Garden, I looked at the national political landscape and realized that the old, misty-eyed maxim "The South will rise again" had actually come to fruition. With the rise and triumphalism of crazy Christian (well, Southern Baptist) conservatism blaring from every media outlet, with the ascendence of Tom Delay, Trent Lott, W, and the rest of the lot, it occurred to me that the southerners had indeed won their long-sought-after victory over the North.

It was particularly galling to see the glee with which main players like the execrable Delay rubbed the rest of the country's nose in their political wins. 

Southern politics is and has for most of this country's history been dominated by the Jacksonian mindset. This jingoistic, violence-prone, anti-intellectual worldview has been to my mind poison to our polity. 

It's been pointed out that the mindset conspicuously coincides with large populations of Scots-Irish immigrants (which isn't to suggest causality)—so much so that the terms are used virtually interchangeably. Examples of this mindset are listed above: W., Delay, Lott, etc., etc. John McCain, like Reagan before him, is the apotheosis of this ideology, sharing both the mindset as well as the ethnic and cultural background. 

Well, fortunately and finally, most metrics show that their wave has crested and the pendulum is swinging back away from this ideology—and not fast enough if you ask me. But Hillary's recent wins in the Appalachian regions of the country have re-inflamed my frustration both with this way of thinking and my lack of understanding of why/how people with such proud, thoughtful ancestry should have devolved into their current nativistic, xenophobic, and culturally retarded state. I'm just not Marxist enough to put it all down to poverty, though that must play a large role.

Which is all just a long-winded and not particularly well-written way of saying, "What the fuck is it with these people?"

Well, as if to answer my angst-ridden question, Michael Hirsh explores the issue in his latest Newsweek article.

Choice cut:

How the South Won (This) Civil War
The coarsened sensibility that this now-dominant Southernism and frontierism has brought to our national dialogue is unmistakable. We must endure "lapel-pin politics" that elevates the shallowest sort of faux jingoism over who's got a better plan for Iraq and Afghanistan. We have re-imported creationism into our political dialogue (in the form of "intelligent design"). Hillary Clinton panders shamelessly to Roman Catholics, who have allied with Southern Protestant evangelicals on questions of morality, with anti-abortionism serving as the main bridge. Barack Obama seems to be so leery of being identified as an urban Northern liberal that he's running away from the most obvious explanation of his association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and former Weatherman Bill Ayers: after Obama graduated from college he became an inner-city organizer in Chicago, and they were natural allies for someone in a situation like that. We routinely demonize organizations like the United Nations that we desperately need and which are critical to missions like nation-building in Afghanistan. On foreign policy, the realism and internationalism of the Eastern elitist tradition once kept the Southern-frontier warrior culture and Wilsonian messianism in check. Now the latter two, in toxic combination, have taken over our national dialogue, and the Easterners are running for the hills.

In Texas in particular, Lieven writes, we can see "the mingling of the Southern and Western traditions" that made its first appearance during Jackson's presidency, and which today so defines our current politics, culture, and foreign policy. Indeed, George W. Bush himself may embody this national trend best. In Bush there seems little trace left of the Eastern WASP sensibility into which he was born and educated, and which explains so much of his father's far more moderate presidency. The younger Bush went to Andover, Yale and Harvard, but he rebelled against the ethos he learned there. The transformation is complete, right down to the Texas accent that no one else in his family seems to have. Bush is a Jacksonian pod person.

Which reminds me of yet another reason I support Obama so strongly. When he wins (yes, when, not if, dammit), he'll be the first president with a non-southern, non-Jacksonian worldview in nearly a generation. (Sure, Hillary hails from the midwest and resides in NY, but she's so mentally attuned to Jacksonian politics that she may as well be from Alabama.) It really can't happen soon enough for me. 

I'll be ecstatic not just because we'll have the first liberal president since Carter (another Southerner by the way), and this time with an ascendant progressive movement holding his feet to the fire. And not just because we'll have moved a small step beyond the insipid and toxic Boomer culture wars. And not just because we'll have taken another step in racial healing. And not just because of his positions, his rhetoric, his charisma, and all of the other reasons great and small. 

But also because we'll have scored the first victory against the retrograde Jacksonian/Scots-Irish/Southern Baptist mindset in well over 30 years. (If you don't count 2006, which I think of as more of an opening salvo.) And when that day comes I'll be out in the streets, with a double-tall latte in hand, a very-French beret on my head, and dancing all over a Confederate flag.