Spite the Vote
Digby pointed me to this piece by Mark Ames in which he argues that those who vote Republican in spite of their own interests do so out of…well, spite.
It's a thoughtful column. There’s an awful lot of truth here. Spite taps into why some southerners – and I am a lifelong southerner – vote Republican. Nixon’s southern strategy capitalized on the division many in this region feel about the North and history itself. It’s a way of fulfilling the “South Will Rise Again” false-populist prophecies.
It’s also a reason why racism and bigotry exists to the degree that it does in the South. I don’t believe there are many white southerners who feel visceral hatred toward all African-Americans (and I doubt they’d vote much, anyway). The majority of southerner voters – i.e., Republicans – are, after all, Christian and they do tend to judge individuals by long-standing benchmarks of character. At the same time, many of these southerners practice a more covert form of racism against African-Americans as a group by voting Republican which – for them – is to spit in the face of northern defeat.
There’s a long, long history in the South of a wealthy aristocracy dividing and conquering the black and white working classes. It happened to disastrous effect when southern tenant farmers tried to organize. Landowners colluded to play race against race. Lost was perhaps a monumental movement that may have gone a long way toward prematurely eradicating the conditions the Civil Rights movement would struggle 30 years later to end.
The Republicans picked up the Dixiecrat banner the Democrats threw off in self disgust. It is obvious the Republicans play Dixiecrats by embracing the Confederate battle flag. The largest voting element of the southern population does not necessarily associate the flag with racism; rather, they feel that blacks have appropriated the flag for their own ideological cause. To them, blacks have brought shame to a symbol of the region that they believe should be celebrated because their ancestors fought and died for it.
But the viler ways of human nature require some other group, a different group – to become the oppressor. Even though it defies logic, many southerners will blame African-Americans for many of their own and America’s ills. To them, African-Americans have become a power significantly disproportional to their minority status.
This is why such a large demographic of the white male population will not see their wealthy landlords and employers as oppressors. They see them as fellow Republicans, united for a singular cause. Economics is not a consideration.
The Republicans certainly know the emotions to exploit. They are rooted in the stubbornness unique to a population that refuses to let go a lost cause. And they knew to legitimize them through the tacit endorsement of the fundamentalist Christian church, which by necessity must always seek a bigger pulpit.
The majority of southerners vote Republican to spite history and the North. And in spite of their own economic interests and values.
