Two pieces expressing somewhat the same line of thought from Garry Wills in the New York Review of Books and George Packer in the New Yorker. In these conversations, voices talking at each other in a darkened room, one hears either the emergence of a new historical transformation, a new lib-intellectual consensus, or a faddish argument. Sometimes you just can’t tell with the people who make their livings writing opinions.
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Tradition dies hard, hardest among those who cannot admit to the toll it has taken on them. That is why the worst aspects of the South are resurfacing under Obama’s presidency. It is the dignity. That a black should have not merely rights but prominence, authority, and even awe—that is what many Southerners cannot stomach. They would let him ride on the bus, or get into Ivy League schools. But he must be kept from the altar; he cannot perform the secular equivalent of taking the Lord in his hands. It is the dignity.
via Dumb America by Garry Wills | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books.
Now the South is becoming isolated again. Every demographic and political trend that helped to reëlect Barack Obama runs counter to the region’s self-definition: the emergence of a younger, more diverse, more secular electorate, with a libertarian bias on social issues and immigration; the decline of the exurban life style, following the housing bust; the class politics, anathema to pro-business Southerners, that rose with the recession; the end of America’s protracted wars, with cuts in military spending bound to come. The Solid South speaks less and less for America and more and more for itself alone.
via George Packer: The Political Isolation of the American South : The New Yorker.