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Why We Can’t Whistle Dixie Past the Graveyard of American Unity

27 Thursday Dec 2018

Posted by Jim Langcuster in Devolution, Federalism, Patriotism, Southern History, Uncategorized

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American Breakup, American Restorationism, American Unity, Jim Langcuster, Liberalism, Southern nationalism

Grant-Christian-MuralSome 37 years ago, the eminent Southern writer John Shelton Reed posed an intriguing question: Why No Southern nationalism?

I have thought a lot within the last 25 years about the prospect of a renascent Southern nationalism in the face of American decline. And, yes, the South, for several reasons, simply must represent a vital and essential facet of discussion about the future of American constitutional liberty in the midst of this decline.

Here is the problem as I see it: There currently is no coherent Southern nationalist identity to speak of, at least presently. What we currently have in the South is a sense of Southern distinctiveness and identity amid a deep well of hyper-American patriotism, one that is particularly evident in the Deep South, where I live. To put it another way, we have nationalism IN the South but not nationalism OF the South.

Southern Historical Roots

Much of this is deeply rooted in Southern history.

In the last decade of the 19th century, as the South dug its way out of defeat, economic dispossession and grinding poverty, the United States not only was regarded the world over as the most successful post-colonial nation but also the one most likely to overtake and to supplant Britain as the dominant global power.  Reed rightfully noted that this prospect appealed especially to the defeated and economically prostrate South, which retained a strong martial tradition and an enduring affinity for cultural rootedness and identity.

Also, as he stressed, the South’s enduring racial legacy certainly has played a significant role in detracting Southerners, black and white, from forging a strong regionalism comparable to Welsh or even Scottish identity. Indeed, the fact that the South’s legacy remains the focal point of the so-called Culture War has only reinforced the Southern penchant for embracing a wider American identity rather than a distinctly Southern one.

One could argue that the Culture Wars, far from driving Southerners away from American identity, has intensified this sense of hyper-American patriotism.  The left’s unrelenting assault on Confederate symbolism and the Confederate legacy in general has only worked to drive many Southerners, particularly younger ones, away from anything that smacks of a distinctly regional identity.

The South’s Evangelical Christian Legacy

The present-day cultural struggles within Evangelical Christianity have also reinforced this disposition. This brand of Protestant Christianity has historically served as the de facto state religion of the South and still comprises its moral and ethical cultural ballast. Yet, the largest and most culturally influential Evangelical faith, the Southern Baptist Convention, not only officially decries the display of Confederate symbolism but even has considered whether to retain Southern in its name.

It’s worth pointing out that Evangelical Protestantism has never served the South in terms of supplying a nucleus of cultural identity, certainly not in the way that the Catholic Church has historically sustained the cultural and national identities of Ireland and Poland.   And considering the frontier roots of Evangelicalism, that’s not surprising. Evangelicalism, a product of Back Country settlement, was incubated in an environment of strong cultural deracination, just as Southern pioneers were settling the region.  Southern identity is not fused with Evangelical Christianity in the way Irish nationalist identity is Catholicism or Russian identity is with Eastern Orthodoxy.  And the faith’s strong emphasis on soul competency at the expense of tradition and church authority only reinforces this tendency.

The View among Rank-and-File Southerners

A survey of Southerners randomly chosen from the various socio-economic levels would support these arguments.  Most native-born Southerners — whites and, no doubt, a respective number of blacks — are proud of being Southern.  They feel a sense of rootedness with Southern culture, with its faith, its cuisine and particularly with its sports traditions.  Undoubtedly, the minority of those who have followed closely the growing levels of political and cultural acrimony in this country and who have  considered their long-term implications would acknowledge the South as the region of the country best suited to restoring the founding principles of American constitution liberty in the aftermath of some of federal breakup.

But the vast majority of these Southerners, especially the middle-class, college-educated ones among them, would express these views within a decidedly post-racial, post-Confederate context.

This is the great paradox facing the 21st century South.  The region, because of historical and cultural cultural distinctiveness, represents the best prospect for restoring a viable counterweight to the culturally corrosive liberalism now represents this country’s regnant culture and political ideology.  Yet for such a restorationist movement to survive and grow, it must remain explicitly American and not take on so much as a tincture of Confederate restorationism or symbolism.  In time, Southerners could and undoubtedly would conceive a national identity with a more distinctly Southern hue, though one explicitly post-Confederate in nature.

What emerges over time likely would resemble a kind of symbiotic nationalism, one in which an over-arching American identity provides a safe harbor for a uniquely Southern national identity to emerge, one deeply rooted in the region’s culture and faith.

Lessons from Ireland and Taiwan

We can draw lessons from other countries around the world.

Historians have observed that the late Edward Carson, the father of Northern Ireland was arguably as much an Irish nationalist as Eamon de Valera or Michael Collins, only he perceived the British Union as the most congenial context for preserving Protestant Irish identity.  Protestant identity on the island has been sustained through affiliation with a wider sense of British identity.  But the case also could be made  that Catholic and Protestant Irish identities have co-existed in Northern Ireland only because of the adhesive effect British identity has provided.

There is an added lesson here for Southerners:  If the American Union ultimately splits into smaller federations, maintaining a kind of  residual American identity in the South very well could provide the basis on which black and white Southerners can forge a new distinctly Southern identity.

There are also lessons to draw from the besieged Nationalist Chinese redoubt on Taiwan.  Some 70 years ago, the forces of the Republic of China vacated the mainland and established the government on the Island of Taiwan. Initially, this island remained officially Mainland Chinese.  Over the course of time, though, as this exiled republic became more democratic and materially prosperous, it provided a harbor for the formation of a strong, home-grown Taiwanese identity.

Today, Taiwanese identity exists in two forms: a soft nationalism, combining elements of both Chinese Mainlander and Taiwanese identities and that emphasizes separateness of the Taiwanese people, though without necessarily eliminating the official name (The Republic of China), versus a much more explicit nationalism calling for replacing the current official name with “The Republic of Taiwan” and seeking United Nations recognition as a fully sovereign nation separate from Mainland China.

Preparing for the Possibility an American Breakup

Granted, we can’t predict what the future will bring for the South and for the United States in general. Even so, we all should be fully cognizant of the growing number of columnists and other public intellectuals on both ends of the American political spectrum who are taking note of the perilous state of American unity.  We must begin preparing for the possibly of an American breakup.

For us Southerners, the prospect of an American breakup forces us to consider this remarkable paradox:  that the South, because of its very uniqueness, represents the best prospect for restoring a constitutional republic in the aftermath of an American federal crackup.  But we can’t assume that this will initially take any form other than one largely American in substance.

The days of saving Confederate dollars and pining for the Confederate restoration are long gone. In time, we will build a distinctly Southern edifice, though one that closely comports with the realities of the 21st century.

To put it another way, we can’t afford to whistle past the graveyard of American unity, and we sure can’t be whistling Dixie.

 

What An Irish Phenotype and an Ivy League Education Will Buy You in 21st Century America

09 Friday Nov 2018

Posted by Jim Langcuster in The Passing Scene, Uncategorized

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2018 Mid-Term Elections, Beta O'Roarke, Camelot, JFK, Liberalism, RFK

BetoMan

Beto O’Roarke (Photo: Courtesy of Wikipedia.)

I am not a frequent listener of talk radio, though I readily concede that conservative talk show commentator Rush Limbaugh frequently offers pungent and even prescient criticism of the American ruling class.

I was especially struck by a recent observation.

Speaking at the Trump rally in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Limbaugh observed that the hatred associated with the 45th president stems from boundless jealousy among our political class, haunted by the knowledge that not one of them — not Biden, not even the sainted Barack — can approximate the Trump’s star appeal.

Limbaugh’s observation was spot on, though I would argue that this observation, insightful as it is, doesn’t go deep enough.

The jealousy and enmity for Donald Trump run much deeper. And I’m convinced that this liberal disdain stems from a deep well of narcissism, which is reflected in the way that liberals — elite liberals, at least — both view themselves and their place within the American cultural and political context.

At the risk of oversimplifying the issue, I would even go as far to say that liberalism has always been less about ideals, more about perpetuating an image:  one in which the bold and elite-educated beautiful — the heirs of FDR, JFK and RFK —  are entitled by birth and intellect to be held in breathless veneration by the masses.

American liberalism has been bound up in this narrative for most of the past century.  It started with FDR, a handsome, polished scion of the American ruling class who, despite his physical infirmity, selflessly marshaled the slumbering masses toward a greater vision of themselves and the country.  But the young, telegenic Irish-American hero, John F. Kennedy, brought this narrative to the peak of refinement.  In fact, an aspiring professional historian could write a dissertation about how Kennedy’s assassination and subsequent martyrdom has driven this liberal narrative.

There has been a deep hunger among liberals ever since to find someone, some charismatic, Kennedyesque figure to modernize and carry forth this lofty narrative. A new movie scheduled for release on Nov. 21 explores the stellar rise and ignominious fall of the presumptive heir of JFK’s mantle, Gary Hart. But a string of other successful and unsuccessful Democratic contenders have also competed to fill this void: Bill Clinton, John Kerry, and John Edwards.  Once upon a time, a few people even compared Jimmy Carter to JFK.

That is why the recent political phenomenon of Betomania is very instructive.  Indeed, it’s not all that surprising that Beto O’Roarke, notwithstanding this week’s defeat, already is being touted as a hot Democratic presidential prospect in 2020. He underscores how far a tall, lean frame, an Irish phenotype, an Ivy League diploma, and a reasonably aristocratic pedigree will take you in modern America, of course, providing that you’re willing to subject yourself all the outrageous indignities and misfortunes of modern America politics.

O’Roarke, in fact, seems right out of central casting: a fourth-generation Irish American possessing an almost an uncanny physical resemblance to the late Robert F. Kennedy — a dynast from an old El Paso political family that can even point to modest links to the Kennedy clan.  Even better, he hails from the deepest reaches of red America in a region of the country likely on the verge of being flipped purple, if not  blue. And to top it off, he’s nicknamed Beto, which affords something akin to an ersatz Hispanic identity at a time when ethnic ties to rising demographic groups are at a premium.

Indeed, we’re likely to see many different permutations of Betomania in an era when liberalism, beset with disillusionment and division, seems more bereft of ideological substance than ever its history.  In such a context, form will always trump substance.

The changes in American elite education that have occurred over the last few decades will only contribute to this. Earlier American elites such as FDR and JFK arguably felt a sense of noblesse oblige, partly stemming from a sense of guilt that their status was largely unearned.  Way back then, elite universities on both sides of the Atlantic functioned as extensions of Eton, Harrow and Groton.  FDR, described as a man of “third class intellect but first-class temperament,” was typical of his class.

Yet, elite education has undergone a sea change in recently years, becoming far more meritocratic, far more SAT-driven.  And the people who pass through these elite institutions now fit a wholly different set of criteria, conforming very closely to the products described by William Dereciewicz in Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite.

Having clawed their way up to these to these stratospheric heights, they expect a payoff.  Even more than the old guilt-ridden WASP elites, they regard themselves as people worthy of deep respect, if not a healthy degree of adulation.  Many regard themselves as anointed by genetics to rule and to think on every else’s behalf.  And, oddly enough, this has only worked to reinforce the old elite liberal narrative.  Granted, many of them are not as poised and physically attractive as Roosevelts or Kennedys, but the old liberal elite narrative nonetheless resounds among them.

If you doubt this:  Consider what is unfolding even now in Silicon Valley as tech moguls arrogate to themselves the task of reengineering of a basic tenet of American liberty, free speech, simply on the basis that they have conceived something better.  Never mind the corpus of judicial rulings on free speech that have been handed down over the past quarter of a  millennium; they know better.

Simply put, the liberal narrative is undergoing significant revision, becoming even more virulently narcissistic as a new generation of meritocrats rise to assume the place of older elites.

Back to Trump.  He’s not one of them.  He openly mocks their pretensions to power.  Even worse, he even has inspired millions of ordinary Americans to turn their backs on them, the anointed, the heirs of this lofty narrative.

Small wonder why they hate him.

 

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