The South Reconciled Tradition With Progress

Editor’s Note: This is going to be another long, fun and thought provoking day on this website.

William Henry Whitlow writes:

“The recent back and forth between my colleague Fulwar Skipwith and Hunter Wallace over at Occidental Dissent has been enjoyable reading on both ends. It was nice to see someone attempt to make an actual argument for why Yang should be supported, rather than the standard “THOUSAND BUCKS GET THIS MF’N BAG” which has been circling the toilet bowl that is the Alt-Right.”

It’s true that I had a very different reaction to Andrew Yang.

My honest reaction to Andrew Yang was that this is another smart, thoughtful person like me who has thought a great deal about the problem of work in 21st century America. As a historicist, I’ve thought a lot about many of the same issues for years now and so I was intrigued by what he had to say and didn’t simply automatically dismiss him because I am White and he is Taiwanese.

Believe it or not, there is no contradiction here. As a race realist, I don’t hate Andrew Yang because he is Asian. I have no doubt that he is vastly superior to Donald Trump in both his intelligence and education. Unlike Identity Dixie, I’ve grown extremely weary of living under the moron in the White House and was already searching for an alternative to Blompf before Yang came to my attention.

Last November, I was happy to post Dixie Anon’s Keeping The Faith article here though in the spirit of stimulating the discourse. At the time, I had no faith at all in Donald Trump or the Republican Party, which is why I skipped voting for my Republican congressman in the last election. In light of everything that has happened since then, I would say I have been vindicated on that front too.

“I do not agree with his premises nor his conclusions, but I respect the fact that an effort was made, when so few Yang Gangers have bothered to do so (our own Ms. Scarlett was also in this minority of seriously minded UBI defenders). In the course of Hunter’s argument, however, a rather curious contention was made: Namely, that Dixie was historically a progressive region of the country and that for this reason we ought to support Yang. Wot in Tarnation?”

This is a straw man.

It is a mischaracterization of my argument. I was simply noting the obvious fact that the South had overwhelmingly voted for nearly all of the most progressive presidents in American history. In the early 20th century, the United States was governed for decades by a populist-progressive coalition that eventually cracked apart and gave rise to modern mainstream conservatism.

I honestly have no idea how this is a controversial point. I was kind of surprised by the notion that the argument was being made that the South had always somehow been conservative or lolbertarian on economic policy. We’ve had many populist and progressive leaders throughout our history at both the state, local and the federal level. Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt are only the two most glaring examples of progressives that were overwhelmingly backed by Southerners.

As I have repeatedly explained now, I am a populist-identitarian. I’m not and never have been a conservative-identitarian or lolbertarian-identitarian. I’m someone who values social cohesion and economic fairness. In other words, I am a Left-Authoritarian voter. This is why I have responded so positively to Andrew Yang because I have always admired countries like China, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. He strikes me as a progressive that I can work with.

Andrew Yang is far closer to my economic values than Blompf and the GOP:

“To further his case, Mr. Wallace utilized political maps showing how the South voted for noted progressives Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Adlai Stevenson, and JFK. This is, however, bad historiography and ignores several crucial facts.”

How exactly is this “bad historiography”?

The South voted in federal elections for Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, LBJ and Jimmy Carter. In other words, there was a populist-progressive New Freedom and New Deal coalition that carried the South in much of the 20th century. Is there a political scientist or historian in the United States who disputes this?

“There is perhaps no more invidious facet of Imperial political discourse than the idea that the Progressive/Conservative distinction hinges entirely on economics. To the contemporary American, one is either a laissez-faire capitalist (Right) or some variant of Marxist (Left) and persons or regions cannot have a different set of valuations that lead them to support political positions which do not strictly fall along these lines. The almighty dollar, first, last, and always. Ben Shapiro Nationalism. *barf*”

I don’t believe anyone has said otherwise.

We’ve been discussed at great length these divisions: conservatives are Right-Authoritarians who value social cohesion and economic liberty, lolbertarians are Right-Libertarians who value social liberty and economic liberty, Progressives are Left-Libertarians who value social liberty and economic fairness and Populists are Left-Authoritarians who value social cohesion and economic fairness. Obviously, the American political spectrum hinges on both economics and social issues.

As of the 2016 election, the actual center of the American electorate is now Left-Authoritarian. It is populist, nationalist or moderate. It has shifted from the Right-Libertarian days of the Reagan era. Today, there are very few Americans who are “Center Right” in the Reaganite sense. There will be even fewer in the 2020 election because so many Boomers are dying off and so many Millennials are registering to vote which is why Blompf is currently underwater in Georgia and Arizona.

“Dixie has always been the home of the True Right, which is centered on God, the family, and the nation. We have variously supported or rejected the economic right, which centers on laissez-faire capitalism. Our states are, by default, on the economic right at present.”

If you are saying the South is socially conservative, then I agree. As a populist-identitarian, I am also a social conservative, but I agree with Tucker Carlson that the policies of the economic right have devastated the family and have undermined social cohesion by concentrating wealth in a tiny oligarchy. That’s one of the reason why I am supporting Andrew Yang because putting a financial floor underneath debt strapped Millennials, the White working class and the White middle class seems like a great idea.

“The Democrats are the party of moral turpitude, miscegenation, homosexuality, egalitarianism, and infanticide while, at least on paper, the Republicans are not.”

If this is a distinction without a difference, then does it really matter? The Republican Party also supports moral turpitude, miscegenation, homosexuality, egalitarianism and infanticide. The Trump administration is currently promoting both feminism and homosexuality as part of its foreign policy. It has lost the culture war on those issues.

What does the GOP have to offer me on social issues? Is voting for the GOP’s Christian Zionism going to make me a better Lutheran? Is Hannity going to make me a more virtuous person? Is it going to, say, end the tyranny of political correctness in this country? I don’t think so.

“Thus do we vote for the economic right, even though pro-business neo-liberal globalism, the only issue the Republicans truly care about, does nothing but injure the South.”

Well, I am not going to vote for cuckservatism and the economic right anymore. As a populist-identitarian voter, I think Andrew Yang has lots of better ideas.

” Trump has somewhat reversed these trends with his threats of tariffs and his economic populism, but I am skeptical that the sycophantic devotees of the Chamber of Commerce will keep those policies around after 2024. They would rather lose in service of their corporate masters than win in service of their Christian constituents. Another reason we must be free of the North and of the Republican Party.”

Let’s look at the facts:

– Illegal immigration is now at the highest point it has been in a decade.
– The opioid and suicide epidemic in White America is worse than ever.
– Blompf has succeeded in mainstreaming homosexuality in the GOP.
– The trade deficit with China is now at all time high.
– Political correctness is worse than ever under Blompf.
– Blompf and Kushner want to expand legal immigration for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Is there anything that is “populist” at all about the Trump administration? In terms of substantial public policy victories, there is nothing “populist” about it at all.

“The post-Civil Rights Era is not the only period in American history in which the South supported the economic right. The Antebellum South found itself on that side of the ledger, as well, because the planter class which financed the early growth of the United States did not benefit from the tariffs that built roads, waterways, and railroads in the North and West.”

As we saw this morning, this is also the fundamental reason why the Confederacy lost the War Between the States. The planter class could have supported these things, but most planters supported Wigfall’s lolbertarian attitude that the South was better off without commercial and industrial classes, investment in public education and infrastructure, dynamic urban centers, etc.

“We (or rather, our elites) paid, the Yankees (all of them) got; so it was until our failed War for Independence. The fact that the South supported the Conservative Democrats after Reconstruction is hardly worth mentioning in terms of discussing Dixie’s ideological bent. Voting had just been restored to the South after 12 years of occupation. The South would not cotton to voting for a Republican at that point in time, no matter what the Democrat stood for.”

As I explained in Identity Pellagra, the disastrous economic conditions of the New South during which the Great Depression effectively lasted from 1865 until 1940 and how that level of crushing poverty and underdevelopment finally came to an end under Franklin Roosevelt has played a major role in shaping my views of economics. It is one of the major reasons why I am supporting Andrew Yang.

“After the War of Northern Aggression and the subsequent decade of Yankee rapacity known as Reconstruction, no Southern State again voted for a Republican until 1920, when Tennessee voted for Harding. Four Southern States (VA, TN, NC, and FL) voted for Hoover in 1928, but I suspect this had more to do with rejecting the Catholicism of Al Smith than endorsing Hoover’s overt economic conservatism. Count this as neither progressive nor conservative.”

The Protestant South was strongly supportive of Prohibition and revolted against the candidacy of Al Smith in 1928 because he was perceived as a “wet” Northern Catholic.

“The solid South returned in 1932 and would remain during FDR’s three subsequent campaigns. 1948 is when the fracturing began in earnest. The Democrats under Truman had shifted toward a more progressive stance on Civil rights, signified by his desegregation of the military in the run-up to the election. As a result of the Democrat shift on this issue, third party candidates would carry multiple Southern states in 1948 and 1968. 1960 also represented a divided Dixie, when voters in Alabama and Mississippi picked electors individually and 14 of those electors (all of the MS delegation and 6 of the 11 AL) refused to back Kennedy.”

It goes without saying that the New Deal coalition cracked up over the Civil Rights Movement. This is universally acknowledged by historians and political scientists.”Conservatism” which had been discredited by the Great Depression was given a new lease on life from Barry Goldwater forward.

“So yes, it is true that the South voted almost exclusively for Democrats from 1880-1964, regardless of what the party and its candidate stood for. But does voting for the Democrats, even when the Democratic candidate was progressive, really indicate that the South is a historical bastion of progressivism? No. No. A thousand times no. Because it is imperative that we take into account what the Republicans were doing at the same time as a frame of reference.”

It’s going to take me some time to explain why you are wrong. Stay tuned.