On their way to blaming the South for the whole country’s shift to the right, liberal pundits have overlooked the fact that when the Republicans swept the South in the 1980s, they swept the nation as well. What may have begun as their “southern strategy” turned out to be a pretty nifty national strategy as well. In my perhaps-not-humble-enough- opinion, the “Republicanus Interruptus” of the Clinton era was no more the result of Clinton’s ability to convince some southern whites that he was more conservative than his Yankee colleagues than of his success in persuading some northern white voters of the same thing. Needless to say, I certainly agree with Ralph that the Republicans can continue to win in national elections without the South until the cows come home. They won’t have to, of course, so long as the Demos continue to impose a comprehensive ideological litmus test on prospective supporters. Remember the eruption of blue-state outrage when Howard Dean suggested that his party actually needed the support of folks who sport Confederate flag decals on their pickups? More recently, as Ralph points out,
Kevin Drum agonizes over this issue as well:

“Most of the time I think that of course we need to contest the South: it's just too big to cede without a fight. But then I begin to think about abortion. And gay rights. And separation of church and state. And racial equality. And labor rights.
And I just give up. Given the way the majority of southerners think about this stuff, how can we win regularly in the South without completely selling our souls?”

There’s a formula for political victory if I’ve ever heard it: “Let’s focus on where we disagree.” My recipe for the Democrats in the South may not be any better, but I believe there is real traction on the issue of the working poor, who abound in all colors throughout the South. Continued Republican opposition to raising the minimum wage is both unconscionable and impossible to dodge. This is not about welfare or even unemployment assistance. It’s about people who are clearly doing their best to provide for themselves and their families and simply can’t do it on wages that are totally out of line with their productivity and the profits it generates. The race issue has been manipulated throughout southern history to thwart the politics of economic interest, and the Republicans may well trot out that tactic again, and it may work again. Even so, focusing on the plight of the working poor would at least give the Democrats a chance to be Democrats again while appealing to a constituency they clearly need and one that just as clearly needs them.

His senior year he made all A’s and B’s. It nearly killed him, but he did it. The Briarcrest academic marathon, in which Michael started out a distant last and had instantly fallen farther behind, came to a surprising end: in a class of 157 students, he finished 154th. He had caught up to and passed three of his classmates. When[former Ole Miss basketballer] Sean [Tuohy] saw the final report card, he turned to Michael with a straight face and said, “You didn’t lose; you just ran out of time.”

He had had a truly bizarre academic career: nothing but D’s and F’s until the end of his junior year, when all of a sudden he became a reliable member of Briarcrest’s honor roll. He was going to finish with a grade-point average of 2.05. Amazing as that was, however, it wasn’t enough to get him past the N.C.A.A. He needed a 2.65. And with no more classes to take, he obviously would not get it.

Now it was Sean’s turn to intervene.

From a friend, Sean learned about the Internet courses offered by Brigham Young University. The B.Y.U. courses had magical properties: a grade took a mere 10 days to obtain and could be used to replace a grade from an entire semester on a high-school transcript. Pick the courses shrewdly and work quickly, and the most tawdry academic record could be renovated in a single summer. Sean scanned the B.Y.U. catalog and found a promising series. It was called “Character Education.” All you had to do in such a “character course” was to read a few brief passages from famous works — a speech by Lou Gehrig here, a letter by Abraham Lincoln there — and then answer five questions about it. How hard could it be? The A’s earned from character courses could be used to replace F’s earned in high-school English classes. And Michael never needed to leave the house!

Thus began the great Mormon grade-grab. Mainly it involved [advisor]Sue Mitchell grinding through the character courses with Michael. Every week or so, they replaced a Memphis public school F with an A from B.Y.U. Every assignment needed to be read aloud and decoded. Here he was, late in his senior year in high school, and he had never heard of a right angle or the Civil War or “I Love Lucy.” But getting the grades was far easier than generating in Michael any sort of pleasure in learning. When Briarcrest gave him a list of choices of books to write a report on, Mitchell, thinking it might spark Michael’s interest, picked “Great Expectations.” “Because of the character of Pip,” she says. “He was poor and an orphan. And someone sort of found him. I just thought Michael might be able to relate.” He couldn’t. She tried “Pygmalion.” Again, he hadn’t the faintest interest in the thing. They got through it by performing the work aloud, with Michael assigned to the role of Freddie. “He does wonderful memory work,” Mitchell says. “It’s a survival technique. You can give him anything, and he’ll memorize it.” But that’s all he did. Engaging with the material in any deeper way seemed impossible. He was as isolated from the great works of Western literature as he was from other people. “If you asked him why we’re doing all this,” she says, “he’d say, ‘I got to do it to get to the [National Football] league.”’

As the article indicates, with a tremendous amount of love and support, Michael accomplished a great deal. However, although he and those who helped him deserve tremendous credit, when he faced the final obstacle to his admission to the University of Mississippi, instead of overcoming it, he was not only allowed to but encouraged to go around it. One might well argue that the final verdict in the case lies in Michael's classroom performance at Ole Miss. However, continuing evidence of widespread willingness to help college athletes beat the academic system surely justify concerns that Michael may get through college the same way he got in.

Consider this anecdote from a former Israeli cabinet memberconcerning the construction of “Jewish only” roads in Palestine:

Wonderful roads, wide roads, well-paved roads, brightly lit at night — all that on stolen land. When a Palestinian drives on such a road, his vehicle is confiscated, and he is sent on his way.
On one occasion I witnessed such an encounter between a driver and a soldier who was taking down the details before confiscating the vehicle and sending its owner away.
"Why?" I asked the soldier.
"It's an order. This is a Jews-only road," he replied. I inquired as to where was the sign indicating this fact and instructing [other] drivers not to use it.
His answer was nothing short of amazing."It is his responsibility to know it, and besides, what do you want us to do, put up a sign here, and let some anti-Semitic reporter or journalist take a photo, so he then can show the world that apartheid exists here?”

Few scholars would dispute the distinguished historian Neil McMillen’s observation that Mississippi was once ”the heartland of American apartheid.” It may seem a bit of a stretch to suggest a connection between Mississippi under Jim Crow and Palestine under Israeli control, but as McMillen notes, ”early in the automobile age… some communities arbitrarily denied black motorist access to public streets. Many towns informally restricted parking to whites on principal thoroughfares. For a time following World War I, Jackson’s Capitol Street, portions of Greenwood, the entire city of Laurel and doubtless all or parts of many other communities were known to be open only to white motor traffic. None of these proscriptions were matters of law and they varied considerably from one place to another." As a black educator put it, ”every town had its own mores, its own unwritten restrictions… The trick was to find out from local [black] people what the ‘rules’ were.” In other words, for a black traveler in Mississippi just as for a Palestinian traveler in Palestine, it was “his responsibility to know it.”
It would be foolish, of course, to argue that life for Palestinians in contemporary Palestine is generally comparable to life for black Mississippians in the Jim Crow era. However, if apartheid is defined to include “using different legal instruments to rule over different racial groups,” there is more than ample evidence of it in both contexts. More accurately, perhaps, we might conclude that both situations suggest, as many historians of segregation in the American South have shown, the law itself is often of little import, either as an expression of the will of the powerful or as a protection against it, in a society where the dominant group is so dominant that it can demand adherence to its preferences and whims merely as a matter of custom and practice.

These Confederate subversives have not confined their nefarious activities to the Keystone State or to politics, however. Upon reading that an American Idol contestant was bumped after singing the provocative title song from “Jesus Christ Superstar,” Hirsh saw immediately that southern nativism and yahooism have clearly overwhelmed northern eagerness for the new and openness to innovation--art, or at least high craft; In a warp-speed history lesson, Hirsh explains that the radical nationalism; that has so dominated the nation's discourse since 9/11 traces its origins to the demographic makeup and mores of the South and much of the West and Southern Midwest--in other words, what we know today as Red State America. According to Hirsh, RSA was settled by fiercely combative Scots-Irish immigrants who, after whipping up on the Celtic Catholics in Northern Ireland, came over here and fought off the Indians, rallied behind frontier ruffian Andrew Jackson, and clung thereafter to a rather savage, unsophisticated set of mores that was traditionally balanced by a more diplomatic, communitarian Yankee sensibility from the Northeast and upper Midwest. Alas, as of late that latter sensibility has been losing ground in population numbers--and cultural weight. Hirsh eschews the argument that the final groundwork for the South’s ruinous political and cultural takeover was laid by self-exiled Crackers who flocked to job-rich northern industrial cities during and after World War II, and despite being the nation’s most reviled and ridiculed non-immigrant whites of their era, managed somehow to imbue more rational, better educated northern whites with their peculiarly depraved racial and religious sensibilities. However, he does quote yet another in a seemingly inexhaustible stream of books bemoaning the so-called Southernization of America to the effect that the nation's population center has been 'moving south and west at a rate of three feet an hour, five miles a year.' I must confess that, until reading Hirsh, I couldn’t quite comprehend how our country’s supposedly recent turn to the right could be attributed to the South’s population growth when so much of that growth came courtesy of whites who were abandoning the ostensibly liberal and enlightened North. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why these folks turned so suddenly and rabidly conservative once they got here. Is there something in the water, I wondered, in anti-gay, pro-gun, pro-creationist Cobb County, Georgia, where nearly 40 percent of the population comes from outside the state? Thanks to Hirsh, I now understand that these relocating right-wing Yankees had obviously already been “southernized” before they got here. Why else would they have come in the first place, right?

To Hirsh, the extent and severe consequences of South over North are readily apparent and beyond question: 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. Note to Hirsh: Take a close look before jumping to conclusions about which flag is more popular in lapels down this way. We have re-imported creationism into our political dialogue in the form of intelligent design OK. I see. It’s actually an outbreak of “Southernism” that’s the matter with Kansas. 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. I can’t believe this was happening right under my nose. I clearly missed the strong spiritual bond between the RC’s and their natural allies, the Southern Baptists. Hirsh doesn’t mention it, but I‘ll bet this affinity for Roman Catholics is particularly strong among black southern Protestants, who consistently show the strongest opposition to abortion, gay marriage, etc. 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. And here I’d thought all along that the Ivy League JFK retreads like Bobby McNamara and McGeorge Bundy were generally encouraging LBJ to jump right in on Vietnam while his southern buddy Dick Russell was trying to convince him to stay out.
If one is not thoroughly convinced by the depth of Hirsh’s analysis and the strength of his logic at this point, there is our man, “W,” the absolute embodiment of nationally ascendant Southernism. In Bush, Hirsh finds 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. (Drat! ol’ W. was probably on his way to becoming John Kerry until that scurrilous bunch of southernizers who so frequently prey on unsuspecting graduates of Harvard and Yale pulled the Confederate flag over his eyes.) 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. Insofar as a “pod person” is either an “impostor” or “someone who mindlessly goes along with the official dogma or party line,” Hirsh has flat-out nailed our current prez, but even the most adamant Jacksonophobe would cringe at this monumental injustice to “Ol’ Hickory.”
All seriousness aside, the biggest problem I have with Hirsh’s piece is not his condescending, stereotypical treatment of the South, but the facile, arrogantly ignorant outrages against history that he commits in the course of concocting a version of both past and present that absolves him and his crowd of any responsibility for the current state of national affairs. To be perfectly honest, when I first read the thing, I actually thought it was a spoof of a northeastern elitist’s view of America. The second time through, however, I realized that, instead of having his tongue placed firmly against one side of his mouth, the writer apparently had his entire head wedged between two more remotely situated cheeks.