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And Now
the South Rules the North
The
2004 Presidential Election
Democrats
Should Move More to the Political Center?
Critique
of the Liberals: Supporting the War in Iraq
By Patrick L. Cooney, Ph.D.
November 3, 2004
George Bush has won the 2004 Election and I
find myself disappointed and depressed. I was sure Bush was
going to win the election, but it still hurt when he did. The
election campaign from the Republican side was especially dirty.
The Republicans pushed the fear factor of terrorism, even though
it has been over three years since a terrorist attack has been
committed against the United States homeland. And they pushed
the fear gays marrying. In other words, they pushed their
favorite issues: demagogic ones.
As if the election campaign was not bad
enough, it seems to me the media political analysis by the
supposed political experts is just adding insult to injury.
"Moral"
Issues?
The pundits have concluded that according to
their surveys, the top issue of the election was
"moral" issues. I find the use of the word
"moral" insulting. If the right wing is moral, then I
guess the implication is that the left wing is immoral. If it is
moral to be homophobic, then it is immoral to want to grant full
civil rights to homosexuals. If it is moral to forbid abortion,
then it is immoral to support freedom of choice. And on and on
it goes.
The issues the pundits brand as
"moral" ones, are really "social" issues,
not "moral" ones. (Or they are civil rights issues,
which the conservatives want to limit for gays, women and
minorities.) And these "social" issues are
directly related to demographic divides in the United States,
especially over race.
"Isn’t it about culture?" asks
Chris Matthews of MSNBC’s "Hard Ball." Well, no
Chris, it isn’t. That kind of statement is like saying the
Civil War was not about slavery but the greater evangelical
streak in the South, or to be even more ridiculous, over the
Southerners’ love of grits over home fries.
In the great debate in sociology between Marx
pushing the primary importance of economic forces on social life
and Max Weber pushing the primary importance of ideas and values
as the primary force, Weber basically lost. In other words,
those people wanting to break with the Catholic Church in order
to prosper economically willingly grasped at the Protestant
rationale that the greed and self-advancement associated with
capitalism were superior values, not inferior ones. The
self-interest came first, the justifications and rationalisms
came second.
It is this type of self-interest that always
drives human beings. The realm of voting is no different. People
vote because of their self-interests. And their self-interests
are to promote themselves, their families and friends and other
people who are like-minded (and all too often
like-skin-colored). Now most people do not like or want to
describe their politics this way. They want to say that they are
motivated by the highest and purest of moral ambitions. They
want to believe that it is not their own interests they are
voting for in elections, but rather the interests of the entire
nation.
Americans are afraid to talk seriously about
race. And it is in their self-interest to say that we are
primarily divided by "moral" and "cultural"
issues. Yes, it is true we are divided by these issues, but this
division is the result of demographic divisions within the
United States and those are primarily over race and secondarily
over ethnicism.
The South has been a bastion of racism for
almost 400 years of American history and it still is. Since most
people now admit it is not really acceptable to be racist, the
Southerners and their allies in other regions are not going to
admit that they are motivated by racial concerns or racial
fears. No, instead, they are going to say they are motivated not
by racism, but by a real concern for states rights, not
motivated by hate, but opposed to big government programs that
aim to ease the terrible economic conditions under which blacks
and Hispanics live.
Vernon Johns once wrote that that region of
the country (the South) that is most in need of forgiveness by
religious values, claim itself to be the most religious.
Similarly, the evangelicals claim that they are the moral
majority. But there was a wonderful bumper sticker during the
Nixon years when this characterization was popular: "The
Moral Majority is Neither."
The claims of the South and their
mid-western/western allies that they are motivated by the
highest of moral values is ridiculous. The South is still
motivated by what it has always been motivated by: a fear of the
racial advancement of black people. No matter how moral the
people of the region claim to be, and how immoral the liberals
are, this kind of talk has to be taken with a grain of salt.
They, like all voters, are motivated by self-interest and they
see their self-interests in opposition to blacks and those
liberals willing to support them.
It is even ridiculous to claim that the
evangelicals are more religious than those who are not
evangelical. It is an insult to religion and spirituality to say
that those associated with racism, chauvinism, ethnicism and
homophobia are the most moral and the most religious. On the
contrary, these people are more in need of God’s forgiveness
than those of us who are concerned with overcoming the negative
isms that so drive the religious right.
And now the pundits are congratulating Bush
and Karl Rove for the brilliance of their campaign strategy. To
call demagoguery brilliance is to turn logic on its head. In the
"old" South, the campaigner who was the most
anti-black was the one who usually won. But would we call the
more strident racist of the campaign the most brilliant? I would
hope not.
George Bush is supposed to be more in touch
with the people in his base. That is probably true because he
shares the same narrow, parochial and racism-influenced values
that pervade the South and rural areas of the United. States.
Yes, he is a "good-old-boy" (never mind that this type
of person is motivated by racism, homophobia, religious bigotry,
etc.)
The plain simple fact is that the South would
have voted Republican even if the Republicans had run a
chimpanzee instead of George Bush. Bush performed miserably. He
was the first president to actually lose jobs in the last 75 or
so years; he lied to the American public (and to himself) about
the existence of weapons of mass destruction in order to use the
revenge fever in America to start a war in Iraq; he made the
United States class system even more grossly unequal than even
his equally negative Republican predecessors; he managed to take
a budget surplus and run it down to the largest budget deficit
in American history; and his spend-thrift ways has made it
impossible to fund substantial social progress in health,
education and welfare. But the South did not care about Bush’s
record. For no matter how poorly Bush performed, at least he did
not help further progress in civil rights.
The
Loss of Northern Power
As a result of the Great Depression the
Northern Democrats could count on the support of the
conservative Southern Democrats because the South was interested
in gaining greater economic advantages. But following the
signing of the Civil Rights Legislation of 1964, the South
started its switch to the more conservative Republican Party.
As a result, the Northern Democrats had to
nominate Southern Democrats for the office of the president if
they wanted to win. But now, in 2004, it is becoming quite clear
that the majority of the Southern Democrats have virtually all
become Southern Republicans and that the entire Democratic Party
cannot count on any electoral help from the South. And to make
matters almost unbearable, the South with their rural allies in
the mid-West now have greater political power than the North and
that the North will be forced to take a secondary role on
political and cultural issues.
I have written about the Southernization of
the United States in which the whites of the North and South
have reached a somewhat shared negative view of any future
progress in the civil rights field, a negative view that is
primarily directed at blacks. But one think I did not see was
that as the South got more powerful they would start to go too
far; they became emboldened and have tried to thrust their
general negative/rural culture on the North. They talk about
getting rid of abortion, maintaining the right of every American
to own an assault rifle and bringing prayer back to the schools.
I also did not envision that the North and
South would change roles and that now the North would start to
feel alienated from the larger culture and start to fight to
retain their more liberal, more forward-looking culture. They
are not willing to accept the racist culture of the South.
So where do liberals go from here?
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Democrats
Should Move More to the Political Center?
Now all the pundits are saying that the
Democrats have to rethink their positions. And, more
specifically, they need to come more to the political center. Of
course, coming to the center these days is to become like the
Republicans, anti-gay, anti-civil rights progress, pro-war as a
means of handling foreign disputes, etc. And on, and on goes the
crazy logic created by using the term "moral."
The division of the United States into two
different camps is really nothing new. The United States was
barely able to come together in the first place and had to grant
so much authority to the individual states that it almost
assured the Civil War that followed only four score and seven
years later. The North’s pulling out its troops from the South
led to racial apartheid and then a second Civil War, the
American Civil Rights Movement. Ever since LBJ signed the civil
rights legislation, the South had been consolidating its
political position around the Republican Party, a party they see
as having the right attitude towards blacks – ignore their
issues and let them fall farther behind whites.
No, the fact of two nations in one is nothing
new, it has just become more consolidated along racial divisions
and their associated cultural justifications. No, it is nothing
new. It is just that the South and their allies have now come to
dominate the nation.
And we liberals don’t like it!!!!!
I grew up in the South and hated it. There
was racial bigotry everywhere I looked. I thought Southerners
were crazy and at times even dangerous. As a liberal in the
South in the Jim Crow days, one had to be very careful of what
one said to others. I chafed under the system of racism in the
South and I find myself in somewhat familiar territory now as
the South exerts its power politically and morally.
No, I won’t move to the political center. I
won’t compromise with racism and bigotry. To hell with the
South and its political allies and its supposed moral
superiority. Give them enough rope and they will hang
themselves.
Under racism, the South was economically and
culturally backward. If they are able to continue to exert their
negative influences on the entire nation, the United States will
find itself like the old South, left behind economically and
politically and culturally impoverished.
Source: http://www.vernonjohns.org/vernjohns/southulesnorth.html
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Critique of the Liberals: Supporting the War in Iraq
Every once in a while I
need to vent my frustration with the American political process.
And one of the things that keeps irritating me is the excuse
liberals give for having supported the War in Iraq – namely
that they were hoodwinked by the Bush administration's evidence
of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Well, I'm sorry but that
just can't be true. I assume that they all viewed that
ridiculous presentation before the United Nations by then
Secretary of State Colin Powell. As I watched it, I just
kept saying to myself "they've got nothing" and
"this is not proof of anything." I thought if
this were a court of law they would throw the case out for lack
of evidence. Frankly, I thought the whole presentation was
farcical.
But imagine my surprise
when suddenly the liberals aboard the war wagon agreeing that
Saddam Hussein had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
Now we know that there were
no weapons of mass destruction. And so, of course, George
Bush had to come up with some lame excuse, but so did the
liberals. And the liberal excuse was that Bush had fooled
them with his false accusations and evidence about weapons of
mass destruction.
The political leaders of
the liberals are not ignorant people, so how or why did they
fall for the Powell dog and pony show?
The truth is that the
liberals were afraid of losing even more political power if they
did not go along with the war fever that the Republicans whipped
up following the 9/11 tragedy. The U.S. following the
passage of Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s has become so
conservative that they are a danger to themselves: their super
nationalism led them into a long and protracted war in Iraq and
their failure to spend a few bucks to hold back the waters of
Lake Pontchartrain has cost the nation further billions of
dollars.
The truth is that the
conservatives had the political clout to roll over the liberals
and the liberals did roll over.
I don't really blame the
liberals for rolling over, but I do believe it does a disservice
to liberalism and further blinds them to the truth to let them
keep excusing their support for the war in Iraq by their having
been duped by the Bush administration's evidence of the
existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. --Patrick
L. Cooney, 9/15/2005
photo left: Vernon Johns
posted 7
January 2005
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost |
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Incognegro: A Memoir of
Exile and Apartheid
By Frank B. Wilderson, III
Wilderson, a professor,
writer and filmmaker from
the Midwest,
presents a gripping account
of his role in the downfall
of South African apartheid
as one of only two black
Americans in the African
National Congress (ANC).
After marrying a South
African law student, Wilderson reluctantly
returns with her to South
Africa in the early 1990s,
where he teaches
Johannesburg and Soweto
students, and soon joins the
military wing of the ANC.
Wilderson's stinging
portrait of Nelson Mandela
as a petulant elder eager to
accommodate his white
countrymen will jolt readers
who've accepted the
reverential treatment
usually accorded him. After
the assassination of
Mandela's rival, South
African Communist Party
leader Chris Hani, Mandela's
regime deems Wilderson's
public questions a threat to
national security; soon,
having lost his stomach for
the cause, he returns to
America.
Wilderson has a
distinct, powerful voice and
a strong story that shuffles
between the indignities of
Johannesburg life and his
early years in Minneapolis,
the precocious child of
academics who barely
tolerate his emerging
political consciousness.
Wilderson's observations
about love within and across
the color line and cultural
divides are as provocative
as his politics; despite
some distracting
digressions, this is a
riveting memoir of
apartheid's last days.—Publishers
Weekly
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
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George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
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Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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