Right, so the popular image of the American South in the fifties and sixties had been of rednecks, klansmen and big white cops beating up and shooting at peaceful Black civil rights activists. If you came from the south and were white, you were ignorant at best, stone cold racist at worst. Politically you had that old rotten to the core southern Democratic Party as the flag bearer of that image of the old south, corrupt, segregationist and resist to all change while the country was changed around it. In short, not a nice time to be white, from the south and not a stick in the mud bigot.
And then the seventies came and things changed. The south got less racist, you got a new generation less redneck, more hippie, less racist but not ashamed of being southern either. The south seemed to move away from its past, experience somewhat of a boom as cities like Atlanta attracted new businesses and inhabitants alike as the region got richer and less yokel. Meanwhile Nixon’s great southern strategy –as thought up by Lee Atwater[1]– by which he appealed to that core of racist old Democratic voters by well, stoking their racism, has started to work, which means that the Democratic party in turn can be cleansed of its racist past, become more like it is in the rest of the country.
And so you have this vision of a New South in the mid seventies: young, optimistic, integrated, liberal, proud of its heritage but no longer mired in its past. With the culmination of that vision being Jimmy Carter’s election as president in 1976. Here you have the first true southern president since the Civil War, somebody both a liberal and from what rightwingers like to believe is their heartland, a Southern Baptist even, but liberal, who had southern rock bands like the Allman Brothers Band campaigning for him.
Is it any wonder that Republicans hate Carter, even now hate him even more than they hate Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, two other Democrats who “stole” their presidency from them? He represented a vision of the south, of their American heartland in direct opposition to what they wanted it to be, a south in which racist dogwhistles would no longer get their core voters worked up. He was a direct threath to their power and they would go to any length to make him lose the election, even going so far as to make deals with what they themselves would call an evil country, Iran, to make sure that the release of American hostages would not take place before the election so that Carter couldn’t profit from it.
The problems facing America today — educational, social, environmental, economic — are problems that should have been tackled the the Seventies, but were instead allowed to compound and fester over thirty-five years of neglect, denial, and bullshit short-term fixes with grotty long-term consequences. Even worse, the few areas in which meaningful progress had been made have become the preferred whipping boys of dimwitted ideologues seeking to restore a status quo that never fucking existed in the first place.
that’s Andrew Weiss’ judgement of the seventies and while he may be bitter, he is sadly more right than wrong. The seventies is when the Republicans got their pretty hate machine really going, first used it to kill off Carter and the New South, then just kept dragging the whole of America ever more rightward into the mire, in the process replacing the real south with their Disneyfied, Nashvilled simulacrum of what they wanted the south to be.
[1] Lee Atwater in 1981: You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*gger, n*gger, n*gger.” By 1968 you can’t say “n*gger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
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