This chart, gratuitously stolen from Steve Benen at The Washington Monthly, suggests strongly that political discourse in the United States is going to get worse rather than better:
We have the perfect storm: an African-American President and an opposition party whose concerns, language, and obsessions is driven largely by the concerns, language, and obsessions of the American South. Those ideas–racial, cultural, martial–are what is going to drive the GOP until they escape their regional status. Jimmy Carter well knows this, and it is no coincidence that the current poster child for Republican obstructionism is South Carolina. We may date the finish of the Civil War to 1865, but the conflict has never really ended.
38 comments
September 18, 2009 at 1:37 pm
vanderleun
Ah, ye olde “South Will Rise Again” slobber patched onto the “O no, raaaaacism” argument. Oh, get a grip Silbey. The fact of the matter is that in this political climate of right now today, a raaaaacist is anybody who is winning an argument with a liberal.
September 18, 2009 at 1:39 pm
Gabriel
It’s all fun and games until somebody blows up a federal building.
September 18, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Malaclypse
The fact of the matter is that in this political climate of right now today, a raaaaacist is anybody who is winning an argument with a liberal.
An internet tradition of which vanderloon has long been aware.
September 18, 2009 at 2:27 pm
rea
I’ll never forget following and commenting on a thread over at Lawyers Guns & Money, when suddenly, Mr. Vanderleun showed up, announced, “I am aware of all internet tradtions,” and thereby acquired his bit of global fame. Keep following this thread; maybe he’ll come back and say something equally memorable (I don’t think, “Get a grip, Silbey,” quite qualifies).
September 18, 2009 at 2:30 pm
AaLD
The fact of the matter is that in this political climate of right now today, a raaaaacist is anybody who is winning an argument with a liberal.
I didn’t realize it had become so rare.
September 18, 2009 at 3:28 pm
silbey
I’d take you more seriously, vanderleun, if you showed any ability to tell what “heavy tanks” are and what they aren’t:
http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/enemies_foreign_domestic/communist_chinas_60th_bir.php
[/geek snark]
September 18, 2009 at 6:51 pm
Terence Dodge
If those are Chinese “heavy tanks”, in that image, well someone has seriously down size the PLA tank divisions. I think those are stand ins from central casting. It is not a type 96 heavy.
September 18, 2009 at 7:25 pm
ekogan
Is it just a coincidence that the chart resembles a bunch of middle finger salutes?
September 18, 2009 at 8:31 pm
Colin
Here’s the part I don’t get in the underlying data
(http://www.dailykos.com/weeklypoll/2009/9/17)
– the age cohorts. Look at Democratic party favorables by age and you get 18-29 56%, 30-44 27%, 45-59 48%, 60+ 38%. Same pattern with several other questions.
I also note that 22% of identified Democrats have an unfavorable view of their own party.
September 19, 2009 at 2:41 am
Walt
Try winning an election instead of an argument.
September 19, 2009 at 5:18 am
ekogan
Hmm… the post at Washington Monthly has barely any trolling comments. This post, which links to it, has more trolling proportionally to the number of comments. I’m confused – how do trolls find the posts they want to comment on? Do some of them regularly read the Edge of the American West?
September 19, 2009 at 8:13 am
mrearl
Re the age cohorts: Generational pendulum swings? If so, unusual, or not, historians?
September 19, 2009 at 8:45 am
drip
I don’t know if the graphs prove your point, silbey. I know my anecdote doesn’t prove a thing, but I agree about where things are headed. My parents live in SC, in Joe Wilson’s district. My brother maried a woman from Port Royal and he lives in the area as well. I was visiting folks in early July about 5 years ago and they had a parade with lots of marines from nearby Parris Island and the MCAS nearby. Some of these folks were part of the famed Marine Corps Band and they received polite applause as did Miss Beaufort, Miss Watermelon, the local pols, including Wilson, the firemen and all who walked or rode by waving. It was, in short like most parades in small town America, but with better music and much better marching. As the parade petered out, a roar went up for 4 raggedy assed marchers in tattered jeans. It was by far the loudest cheer of the day and it was for the Sons of the Confederacy. Shameless, unconscious fools cheering for the return of humans owning (or better yet, renting) humans. Yeah, things are going to get worse in some places, for sure.
September 19, 2009 at 10:08 am
TF Smith
I understand Silbey’s point, but isn’t it worth noting that even in the land of cotton, the national party currently identified as most representative of the Dixiecrat position comes in at roughly ~50 percent approval?
And that the party representative of mainstream Americanism (“all men are created equal, etc…”) comes it at ~40 percent?
These are actually good things, are they not?
More and more, the GOP reminds me of the Ulster Unionists/Orange Order…an afterthought trading on ancient prejudices.
I look at my classes (granted, liberal hotbed state u., but otherwise undistinguished) and remark on the fact that the malanin quotients are all over the map, and the current generation doesn’t really seem to care…stupidity seems the great divide, more so than skin color.
September 19, 2009 at 11:22 am
David
If we factor race into the equation the graph’s argument would be even sharper. African-Americans make up 19% of the southern population and 93% (nationwide) hold an unfavorable opinion of the Rep Party. Including Hispanics would further polarize the numbers. So the GOP base isn’t just confined geographically, it’s also tightly bound by ethnicity within its stronghold.
September 19, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Doug M.
There’s some truth to this — but at the same time, it’s a gross oversimplification. If you look at the most Republican counties in the US, the majority of them aren’t in the South; they’re in the Great Plains, the Mountain West, and Alaska. Recall that John McCain swept these regions; in the Mountain West he beat Obama by 25 EVs to 19, and in the Great Plains by 23 EVs to 1 (that renegade vote in Omaha, NE).
Oklahoma, Wyoming and South Dakota are far more Republican than Texas or Georgia. True, Texas and Georgia are much bigger — but the plains and mountain wings of the party are crucially important both electorally and ideologically. And if you think of a list of “loudest, craziest Republicans”, many of the figures who come to mind — Michelle Bachman, Don Young, Tom Tancredo, Curt Weldon, Steve King — aren’t Southerners. Nor are most of the prominent media figures — Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, O’Reilly — who have been helping push the GOP right. (A notable exception, of course, is Stephen Colbert of South Carolina.)
I guess I just hate the “regional party” thing because it’s almost right — close enough to encourage lazy generalizations. Yes, the GOP can now be described a southern-based party with two western wings. But that misses a lot of important details, from Orange County to Staten Island. Most of all, it misses that the GOP is still a national party — a wounded one, but still.
Doug M.
September 19, 2009 at 2:37 pm
silbey
There’s some truth to this — but at the same time, it’s a gross oversimplification
Eh. It’s certainly a simplification, but I don’t think it’s overly so, or gross. If the Republicans are not a regional party in the sense of being wholly confined to the South, they are certainly a party being driven by southern concerns, to their detriment and the nation’s.
September 19, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Ahistoricality
If you look at the most Republican counties in the US, the majority of them aren’t in the South; they’re in the Great Plains, the Mountain West, and Alaska. Recall that John McCain swept these regions;
My recollection of the post-election analysis is that McCain’s vote strength was more or less in inverse proportion to population density: McCain did well in rural, underdeveloped communities. And in the South. So the Republicans are the party of the South, and the Old South-like Midwest and Mountain states. What a triumph!
September 19, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Doug M.
What specifically “southern” concerns are those, then?
I’ll spot you race, although I’m tempted not to. (Yes, slavery and Jim Crow. But every region of the country had sundown towns and race riots. And the national consensus on race makes even 1980s-style Thurmond-and-Helms wink-nod racism increasingly hard to maintain.)
Religion? Good luck sorting out the specifically Southern aspects from the Catholic, Mormon, and non-Southern evangelical threads. There was a woo-crazy Pentacostalist in the last national election whowas a Republican, sure, but she wasn’t from Dixie — and neither are the two hard-right Catholic authoritarians on the Supreme Court.
And after that, it drops off fast. There are plenty of specifically Southern cultural and social trends, but it’s weirdly difficult to link them to the GOP. And when you can, you’re likely to find that they’re not unique or even specific to Dixie. (Gun control, for instance, is a real concern in the South — but it’s an even bigger concern in the mountain West.) And there’s nothing particularly Southern about angry populism, homophobia, or tax cuts for rich folks.
FWIW, I worked on Capitol Hill in the 1980s, and got to watch the takeover of the GOP’s internal apparatus by Southerners at first hand. That was a real phenomenon, and an important one. In the Carter administration, there were still plenty of (for instance) GOP congressional committee staff from the northeast. By the second Clinton administration, seemingly all those guys were Confederate memorabilia collectors.
But the interesting thing is, they imported very little in terms of policy. What they brought were ideology and — above all — tactics.
In other words, it’s not so much that the GOP is a party being “driven by Southern concerns”. It’s more a party being /run in a Southern way/. Different thing.
Doug M.
September 19, 2009 at 6:48 pm
TF Smith
Doug –
I worked in the state capitol of the Edge in the 1990s and I saw something similar, when the party of what amounted to technocrats like George Deukmejian and (the early) Pete Wilson was turned into the party of Inland Empire/YAF/Reagan-was-god types like Jim Brulte and Tom McClintock. It was entertaining as all get out (especially the Brown-Brulte chess game), but it was not Earl Warren’s GOP, or even Ronald Reagan’s…
I think the GOP today is a party being funded by corporate con men and driven by white southern holy rollers, racists, cranks, and crackpots and those in the mountain west who would seek to emulate that…the party of Dwight David Eisenhower or even Richard Nixon it is not. I don’t think an Eisenhower or even a Nixon could get the party’s nomination today…
At this point in my life, I can’t take Republicans seriously at any level above county supervisor/DA, and even then I’m starting to wonder.
When they consort with yokels like these, all you can do is laugh at them…and organize.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124753078523935615.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
September 20, 2009 at 9:41 am
Doug M.
TF, it’s certainly true the GOP isn’t the party of Eisenhower. Part of that is just normal political evolution — the Democrats aren’t the party of JFK and LBJ, either. But yes, in the last 15 years the GOP seems to have become a sinkhole of bad ideas and dubious practices.
That said, it’s still a rather lazy and misleading simplification to say it’s become a “southern” party. As noted upthread, it’s oddly difficult to say just how it’s now being “driven by” concerns that are particularly Southern.
Doug M.
September 20, 2009 at 10:46 am
Doug M.
Steve, “rural” isn’t really a good shorthand for “underdeveloped” — Vermont is a delightful place to live while Detroit, by and large, isn’t. And in any event, the correlation between McCain voting and underdevelopment is very loose indeed; see, e.g., Orange County in CA, or Forsyth in GA.
Also, I’m not sure what’s “Old South-like” about South Dakota, Kansas, or Wyoming.
– It’s not really “Old South”. (That’s an almost uselessly vague term anyway.) Electorally, at least, it’s Deep South plus Appalachia. Think of it that way, and you’ll see why NC, VA and FL went for Obama, while WV and KY didn’t.
Doug M.
September 20, 2009 at 11:24 am
silbey
That said, it’s still a rather lazy and misleading simplification to say it’s become a “southern” party. As noted upthread, it’s oddly difficult to say just how it’s now being “driven by” concerns that are particularly Southern.
It remains neither lazy nor misleading to say that; that Southern concerns are echoed elsewhere does not make them _not_ Southern concerns. As a side note, this conversation would go better if you stopped using insulting language while having it.
And, to answer your other question, the concerns driving the GOP that are particularly (though not exclusively Southern) I would identify as: a strong tendency to see things in an explicitly racialized way; a deep suspicion about the legitimacy of the central government; and a tendency to conflate military service and martial aggressiveness with patriotism and national-self-worth.
September 20, 2009 at 1:19 pm
TF Smith
Doug –
The thing that truly leaves me cold with regard to the GOP is the outright flight from reason, rationality, and science to the embrace of faith at its most irrational (religious and otherwise); the evolution of the Edge’s GOP since the days of Deukmejian and Wilson is the example I know best, but I expect it holds true in other states where one would expect technocratic efficiency among Republicans, if only because of the military-industrial-technical complex, if nothing else – Florida, Colorado and Arizona all come to mind; even Texas…yet their GOPs seem to be as anti-rationality in their public stances as any of the Deep South.
I can understand Stanford Republicans, USC Republicans, even (somewhat) Whittier College Republicans; Biola and Liberty and Bob Jones Republicans leave me dumbfounded.
September 20, 2009 at 6:06 pm
Ahistoricality
More evidence of regional differences: the South is the only region where the majority disapproves of Obama’s performance as President so far.
September 20, 2009 at 11:13 pm
Sir Gnome
Silbey-
…I would identify as: a strong tendency to see things in an explicitly racialized way; a deep suspicion about the legitimacy of the central government; and a tendency to conflate military service and martial aggressiveness with patriotism and national-self-worth.
These things can be true of the “Old South” while being equally applicable to the Mountain West, but rooted in starkly different motives. I agree with Doug’s assertions, especially about the Mountain West, and I think it deserves its own category on graphs such as this—there’s some lump-summing going on. Generalizing the South to all of the country doesn’t jive with the whole five nations hypothesis, nor with the Jeffersonian rhetoric of individualism that is so persistent in Western politics, nor with Western concepts of spatial identity, nor… The brief explanation is that, as any Northwesterner knows, when you cross the Cascades, you’ve truly “crossed over.” One glance at the opinion section of the local Silvertown Gazette, and one’s stomach absolutely drops at the venom (and alienation) exchanged on a daily basis. Separatists, survivalists, cults, Birthers, and Birchers—you name it, we have it. And business is booming. For that reason, if you could point me to any developed analyses of the Mountain West, or even its Southern comparisons, in all appreciation, please do.
September 20, 2009 at 11:51 pm
URK
“a strong tendency to see things in an explicitly racialized way; a deep suspicion about the legitimacy of the central government; and a tendency to conflate military service and martial aggressiveness with patriotism and national-self-worth.”
Certainly those are “southern concerns” but it’s also true that the south isn’t the singular hotbed of them.
There’s also a sense that it isn’t just that the Republican party is being driven by these concerns. the Republican party is also driving these concerns, keeping them mainstream in the south (and Mtn. west) . Their continued presence in the culture in these regions isn’t a static or essential fact. I’m not saying that they exist only because of the Republican Party, but that the party as its configured now spends time and money stoking them and their success affects the perception that those concerns are essentially (as opposed to historically) southern.
And no, I don’t think you meant that they were “essentially” southern, but it seems like that’s where the language (“driven by southern concerns” goes, and where the split in the poll goes, if not attended to.
September 21, 2009 at 12:45 am
Doug M.
Silbey,
I think it’ll go better if you stop being so thin-skinned. I’m critiquing your arguments, not you.
Particularly (though not exclusively) Southern: now I’m a little confused. Are you saying that other regions share these issues, but the South has them /more/? Because that seems rather shaky ground to me. You say that “to say that Southern concerns are echoed elsewhere does not make them /not/ Southern concerns”. Well, perhaps not, but it does make it very hard to say that the GOP is being driven by the Southern version of these concerns rather than, say, the Mountain West one.
Taking your points specifically, race — I would certainly agree that the South has its own uniquely pathological historical baggage. But spend some time in, say, South Texas or Idaho and you’ll quickly discover that other regions have just as marked a tendency to “see things in an explicitly racialized way”.
Martial aggressiveness as patriotism: this seems intuitively true; we all have a well-internalized stereotype of Southerners as truculent and aggressive. But is it well supported by facts? Here’s a list of the five states with the highest per-capita military enlistments:
Montana
Alaska
Maine
Florida
Idaho
Montanans enlist at nearly double the national average rate — go figure. Meanwhile, the Deep South — the belt of states from Louisiana to South Carolina — has enlistment rates right around the national average, from a low of 0.92 in Mississippi to a rather modest high of 1.21 in Alabama. Contrary to popular belief, Southerners are not overrepresented in the military. (Interestingly, the one ethnic group that /is/ overrepresented is African-Americans; they’re about 12% of the population, but 16.5% of the Army and 15% of the total military.)
Polls did show that Southerners consistently supported the Iraq adventure with more enthusiasm than the rest of the country. But back in 1999, the South did not show an equivalent surge of enthusiasm for the Kosovo War. So, does this suggest that Southerners are more generally truculent — or is it just that a conservative, Republican region tends to support the policies of a conservative, Republican administration? Googling the old polls, we see that the South also supported Bush’s plan for social security privatization at a higher rate than the rest of the country. Hmm.
As to “a deep suspicion of the legitimacy of the central government”, that’s just plain wrong. That is a western trait, not a Southern one. The South has always been perfectly happy with a strong central government, as long as that central government served Southern interests. That was true in the 1850s — go, Fugitive Slave Law! — and it’s still true today. America’s worst act of anti-government terrorism took place in Oklahoma, not Mississippi; Timothy McVeigh was from upstate New York and had spent years drifting around the West.
The Deep South is ardently pro-government when it perceives the incumbent administration as friendly. You’d be hard pressed to find widespread “deep suspicion of the legitimacy of the central government” in the South between 2001 and 2005. In the Great Plains and (especially) Mountain West states, on the other hand, it’s a constant background noise at all times.
One last thought: if we are going to continue with this, perhaps we should define our terms. “The South” is a notoriously slippery entity; is Missouri part of it? Maryland? Florida? Personally, I’m working with “the Confederate States, minus the southern half of Florida and south and west Texas”, but it would probably be useful to clarify this. Also, when you say “Southern”, context suggests you mean “White Southern” — which is fine, but let’s get it on the table.
Doug M.
September 21, 2009 at 5:31 am
silbey
I think it’ll go better if you stop being so thin-skinned. I’m critiquing your arguments, not you.
Doug, I think it’ll go better if you recognize what you’re doing. Calling something “lazy and misleading” can’t be waved away with a “I’m critiquing your argument.” Well, no, you’re not; you’re being insulting.
September 21, 2009 at 11:50 am
Chris
What connects the South and certain mainly rural parts of the West? ISTR reading somewhere that some parts of the West were settled largely by disgruntled ex-Confederates who drifted west to avoid the imposition of the rule of law in ex-Confederate states by… the federal government. That certainly seems consistent with what Doug M. is describing as the “Mountain West”.
Also, if you survey “the West”, your results will be dominated by the heavily populated urbanized coast, right? (A conservative friend of mine used to call it the Left Coast, not without reason.) It stands to reason that a survey of the population of a region will mainly reflect the majority of that population, and sparsely populated areas won’t show up in it much, for the same reason they don’t have much influence on election results or the House of Representatives – we don’t follow the rule of “one acre, one vote”. Is there some reasonably agreed-on way of dividing the two Wests and looking at them separately? And how closely does the Mountain West resemble the South if you do that?
September 21, 2009 at 3:12 pm
David
If we’re quoting state rankings I’d include federal aid to state or local government per capita. Top five: Wyoming, Alaska, Louisiana, New Mexico, and Mississippi. Whatever the distrust of the central government to be found in the West and the South it certainly doesn’t preclude accepting federal dollars (or serving in the military, as Doug showed).
September 22, 2009 at 1:20 am
Doug M.
Chris, yes, there are connections between the South and some parts of the West. To simplify a complicated story, Americans tended to move more or less straight west across the continent. So the Upper Midwest and the Northwest were disproportionately settled by New Englanders, while the Southwest got a lot of Southerners. This goes a long way to explain why, for instance, Seattle is sort of like a much bigger Burlington, Vermont, while Orange County, CA is… the way it is.
But you don’t want to take this too far. A lot of mixing took place — most obviously, southern CA and AZ got filled up with northern snowbirds. And the geographical shift led to differences in economics, society, and thus politics. (You couldn’t run a classic Deep South plantation-and-poor-whites system in West Texas even if you wanted to.)
Also, the most Republican areas of the Great Plains and the Mountain West mostly weren’t settled from the old Confederacy. Most Utahans, for instance, are descended from New Englanders and New Yorkers, with a sprinkling of Irish, Germans and Hispanics.
Your point about surveying “The West” is dead on — looking at the original kos survey, it’s clear they were mixing the two.
David, yes, both the Mountain West and the Deep South have long and glorious traditions of sponging off the federal government. Partly it’s because both these regions are poor. In the case of Wyoming and Alaska, it’s also that they’re empty, and a lot of federal money gets spent doing stuff there.
Silbey, I’m not sure how to respond. Would it be better if I called these statements “sloppy” or “sophomoric”? Or am I just not supposed to make use critical adjectives?
Look: I honestly think this whole “Republicans = party of Southern White Guys” is a sloppy and dangerous generalization. I’ve given some of the reasons I think it’s sloppy. I think it’s dangerous because it causes thoughtful liberals to misunderstand — and underestimate — what and how the opposition is thinking. If you have a fundamentally flawed or incomplete vision of the GOP’s motives, driving imperatives, and long-term goals, then you’re not going to analyze or respond to them effectively.
Upon consideration, I’ll withdraw “lazy”. Who knows? Perhaps you’ve given this a great deal of rigorous thought.
But as to the rest, well, what would you have me do? If I truly think the statement is misleading and incomplete, what should I say? Is there some more tender phrasing that would not insult you? I’m asking seriously here.
Doug M.
September 22, 2009 at 6:18 am
Mountainaires
Stereotypes of southerners, or political parties as “southern” are usually ill-advised. What is often overlooked is that “the south” is also black. So, when stereotyping “the American South,” please be sure to remember this:
“Of all the people who reported as Black in Census 2000, 54 percent lived in the South, 19 percent lived in the Midwest, 18 percent lived in the Northeast and 10 percent lived in the West.
The region with the highest proportion of people reporting Black as a percentage of its total population was the South (20 percent), followed by the Northeast (12 percent), the Midwest (11 percent), and the West (6 percent).
States
In each of 10 southern states Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Maryland, Louisiana, Virginia, South Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi more than 1 million people reported as Black.
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/population/000437.html
Why Black voters love Mike Huckabee
http://thevaluesvoter.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!F3D4C1BC1D8B0D91!821.entry
September 22, 2009 at 11:57 am
Doug M.
Mountainaires, I said a bit upthread that silbey seems to be talking about white Southerners in particular. He can clarify the point if he wants to.
(I note in passing that when you combine the high enlistment rates for African Americans with the so-so overall rates for Southern states… well, the Census guys don’t chop the data this way, alas, but the reasonable conclusion is that white Southerners may be enlisting at a rate slightly /below/ the national average. Martial aggressiveness, forsooth.)
Huckabee won his first election for Governor against a very weak Democratic opponent, and his second was in the very Republican year of 2002. So I’d hesitate to draw conclusions. I’d also note that he was the only prominent Arkansas Republican to reject contributions from, and refuse to associate with, the state’s Concerned Citizens Councils. Which speaks very well for him, but doesn’t say much about Southern Republicans generally — in most of the Deep South, the CCCs are still disgustingly respectable.
BTW, there are 22 Republican governors right now, but only seven of them are in the South. Any “party of Southern White Guys” theory needs to explain the GOP’s continuing ability not only to elect but to re-elect governors not only in Kansas and Idaho, but in places like Vermont, Minnesota, Connecticut and Hawaii.
Doug M.
September 22, 2009 at 12:03 pm
dana
All I think you’d need there is the distinction between the national party and its state and local variations, which iirc is a relatively established phenomenon (e.g., Kansas with Sebelius as a governor.)
September 24, 2009 at 3:25 am
Doug M.
To a great extent, the national party is the sum of state and local variations. There /are/ differences in how the party presents itself at the national level, sure. But if you’re saying that the successful non-Southern local parties are exceptions… well, 15 out of 22 is a lot of exceptions.
Also, even at the national level, the Chairman of the RNC isn’t a Southerner, neither are most of the RNC’s members, and neither are three of the GOP’s four leaders in Congress. It’s Ohio and Virginia in the House, Kentucky and Kansas in the Senate. You can argue that Kentucky is southern, but… well, as noted, Silbey never bothered defining his terms. And since my intolerable bad manners seem to have driven him away, I doubt he’s going to.
Last word, then: the “GOP = party of Southern White Guys” is a trap that liberals are walking themselves into. It’s like saying that the Democrats are the party of effete bicoastal elites. There’s some truth in it, but just enough to be dangerous, and basing analysis or political strategy on it is just asking for trouble.
Doug M.
September 24, 2009 at 8:07 am
Josh
And since my intolerable bad manners seem to have driven him away, I doubt he’s going to.
If someone’s complained about your presentation, mocking them (particularly on their own blog) seems unlikely to smooth over the issue.
September 24, 2009 at 9:19 am
silbey
If someone’s complained about your presentation, mocking them (particularly on their own blog) seems unlikely to smooth over the issue.
Got it in one. Doug M. seem to be under the impression that I’m required to participate, no matter how often he throws around words like “lazy” and “misleading.” That’s a mistaken impression, and it’s too bad, as there was an interesting conversation to be had that’s been lost.
For future reference, Doug M., a eminently critical response is possible without being insulting. For example, one might write “I think that your conception of the South is perhaps a bit limited. Aren’t a number of the things you point to as Southern actually common to the Mountain West as well? We should also be careful not to make the assumption that ‘South’ equals ‘Southern white men.’” See? Easy.
With that, I think this thread has run its course.