I usually take Alternet with a grain of salt, but this article really stood out for me….
Alternet is has an admittedly Progressive editorial view. Their articles can lack focus, run on too long and be very wordy. They truly need some editorial help to tighten things ups, but they make some very valid points. If you can find them….
But this one really stood out for its quality and point of view. It is really worth clicking the link and reading it in its entirety….
And, given the GOP’s “Southern Strategy” that they have employed since Nixon, it has a real resonance. As the GOP becomes a regional, Southern party, this is something to really keep in mind….
It’s looking more and more like the South may be winning the Second Civil War and we have to think of how to stop this…
This is something I’ve been saying in cocktail conversations for years…
Arguably, the true Conservative position would be to return to the New England view of wealth and the world….
That’s the Traditional way….
For most of our history, American economics, culture and politics have been dominated by a New England-based Yankee aristocracy that was rooted in Puritan communitarian values, educated at the Ivies and marinated in an ethic of noblesse oblige (the conviction that those who possess wealth and power are morally bound to use it for the betterment of society). While they’ve done their share of damage to the notion of democracy in the name of profit (as all financial elites inevitably do), this group has, for the most part, tempered its predatory instincts with a code that valued mass education and human rights; held up public service as both a duty and an honor; and imbued them with the belief that once you made your nut, you had a moral duty to do something positive with it for the betterment of mankind. Your own legacy depended on this.
Among the presidents, this strain gave us both Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy, and Poppy Bush — nerdy, wonky intellectuals who, for all their faults, at least took the business of good government seriously. Among financial elites, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet still both partake strongly of this traditional view of wealth as power to be used for good. Even if we don’t like their specific choices, the core impulse to improve the world is a good one — and one that’s been conspicuously absent in other aristocratic cultures.
Which brings us to that other great historical American nobility — the plantation aristocracy of the lowland South, which has been notable throughout its 400-year history for its utter lack of civic interest, its hostility to the very ideas of democracy and human rights, its love of hierarchy, its fear of technology and progress, its reliance on brutality and violence to maintain “order,” and its outright celebration of inequality as an order divinely ordained by God.
Lost in the 21st Century 