Even as the movement’s grip tightens on the GOP, its influence is melting away across vast swaths of America, thanks to centuries-old regional traditions that few of us understand.
The Deep South
Established by English slave lords from Barbados as a West Indies-style slave society, this region has been a bastion of white supremacy, aristocratic privilege, and a version of classical Republicanism modeled on the slave states of the ancient world, where democracy was the privilege of the few and enslavement the natural lot of the many. It spread apartheid and authoritarianism across the southern lowlands, ultimately encompassing most of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana, plus western Tennessee and southeastern Arkansas, Texas, and North Carolina. Its slave and caste systems smashed by outside intervention, it continues to fight for rollbacks of federal power, taxes on capital and the wealthy, and environmental, labor, and consumer safety protections.
The goal of the Deep Southern oligarchy has been consistent for four centuries: to control and maintain a oneparty state with a colonial-style economy based on largescale agriculture and the extraction of primary resources by a compliant, low-wage workforce with as few labor, workplace safety, health care, and environmental regulations as possible. Not until the 1960s was it compelled by African American uprisings and external intervention to abandon caste, sharecropper, and poll tax systems designed to keep the disadvantaged majority of their region’s population out of the political process. Since then, they have relied on fearmongering— over racial mixing, gun control, illegal immigrants, and the alleged evils of secularization—to maintain support. In office they’ve instead focused on cutting taxes for the rich, funneling massive subsidies to agribusiness and oil companies, rolling back labor and environmental programs, and creating “guest worker” programs and “right to work” laws to ensure a cheap, compliant labor supply. Tidewater, weakened to satellite status over the past 150 years, has fallen in line. But keeping Greater Appalachia and, now, the Far West in the coalition has been trickier, as both have strong populist and libertarian streaks that run counter to the interests of the modern-day southern aristocracy.
Which brings us to the Tea Party movement and the recent debt ceiling debacle.
Well, it would, wouldn't it? Heh.
By contrast, the Tea Party has encountered little resistance to its agenda in the four nations of the Dixie bloc, as it is a carbon copy of the Deep Southern program of the last two centuries: reduce taxes for the wealthy and services for everyone else, crush the labor unions, public education, and the regulatory system, and suppress voter turnout. The four nations account for fifty-one of the sixty members of the House Tea Party caucus—or 85 percent of them—with the Deep South alone accounting for twenty-two. Of the sixtysix House Republicans who refused to support the final compromise on the debt ceiling—roughly half of whom were not members of the Tea Party caucus—fifty-three hailed from the same cultural regions. Debt ceiling lunacy was a regional phenomenon. The Dixie-led bloc has produced many of the Tea Party’s most influential politicians, including Senators Jim DeMint (Deep South), Mike Lee (Far West), and Rand Paul (Appalachia), former Governor Sarah Palin (Far West), secessionist-minded Governor Rick Perry (Greater Appalachia), and FreedomWorks boss (and former house majority leader) Dick Armey (Deep South). Tea Party activists can be found most anywhere in the country, but only within this four-nation bloc have they had significant and sustained political success.
Last ¶:
In short, the Tea Party and the Deep South may do the country serious harm, but they will not take it over. They may hobble the workings of Congress, inject flat-earth thinking into Senate debates, or even capture the presidency next year. But their policy program will never win the hearts and minds of a clear majority of Americans, and it carries the seeds of its own destruction. The political pendulum will indeed swing back. How far it goes—and how long it stays there—will depend on how many of America’s cultural regions the Deep South’s opponents can attract to their cause.
Another way to say that might be "how many of America's cultural regions can be coaxed out of going back to the 'good old days', a time that never was good except for a few at the expense of the many?".
Gee, sounds like right now, doesn't it?
