Why They Fight

I love a great, thoughtful, wrong answer. Robert Graves' "The White Goddess" is one great, long, brilliant wrong answer and it is one of the most insightful books a person can own. It's only dangerous if you don't know enough to pick out the seeds of genius from the death apple.

Here is another great wrong answer. I wish it was right; it would so appeal to me on one level as a right answer:

The Democratic Party was the party of slavery and civil war in the 19th century. It was the party of Jim Crow in the early 20th century. The New Deal set it on the path to renouncing that legacy through the mid-part of the last century, and it was a brutal passage. Instead of reimagining the South and what it could become, the Northeast elite who had taken over the leadership simply renounced it – you will be like us or you can get out. When desegregation came to the Northeast and the Midwest, the contempt for “The South” was transferred easily to the working class ethnic whites who resisted this change. Archie Bunker became an eternal truth rather than a thought exercise, a denunciation of the unchangeable cretin in front of the TV instead of a call to reflect on how we become what we are and how, despite ourselves, we can find our common humanity. Most of all, the determined demonization of working class whites, especially those with Southern connections, allows the upper class elites to turn a blind eye to the way in which they are the biggest beneficiaries of the centuries of racism in the nation. There is a growing group within the liberal elite who wishes to jettison “The South” entirely, leaving the working class immiserated and isolated, rather than face up to the obligation of the party to complete the task before it. That task is to create the conditions under which racism is no longer something that can be exploited for electoral gain or needed as a survival tactic in deteriorating and demeaning socio-economic conditions.

The violent rejection of the Clintons on the Left is a rejection of “The South” and the working class by the Stevensonian elite, who see the success of Bill the “Bubba” as both a threat to their power and a repudiation of their policies and actions since 1968. They want to see themselves as simultaneously co-victims with AAs of white supremacy and also as the moral(istic) saviors of the oppressed, redeeming their part of the white population from the sin of racism.

I don't know what the right answer is; I can't explain the Democratic Civil War, but I don't think it is an expression of the historical Civil War. For one, this would imply an awareness of history on the part of the North that properly belongs only to the South. One of the thing the North mocks is history's hold on the South.

Archie wasn't a Georgia cracker; he was a Northern blue-collar loading-dock worker. In most places, he would have been a registered Democrat.

From where I can see it, the haters of the South among my co-workers and in online circles identify George W. Bush and only George W. Bush with the hideous South that pulses like a cancer in their minds. Their attraction to Hillary (most of them seem to be backing her) is based on her being the more ruthless foe of that enemy; the one who can wrap it up without mercy. If this is the Civil War over again, Obama is McClellan; Hillary is Sherman.

But do read it anyhow. It's great stuff. And there's much truth leavened into it. For instance:

Most of all, the determined demonization of working class whites, especially those with Southern connections, allows the upper class elites to turn a blind eye to the way in which they are the biggest beneficiaries of the centuries of racism in the nation.

If you're seeing it all in terms of victims and privileges (and if that "they" refers, as I think it does, to "upper class elites"), then yes, that's so. It boldly walks into the fire that burned Howard Dean when he ran for president four years ago.