Uppity Yankee gets up in my redneck grill!

Newsweek's Michael Hirsh is sick and tired of the South and "Southernism":

In the summer of 1863, Robert E. Lee led an ill-advised incursion into Pennsylvania. His army was defeated at Gettysburg, and thence afterward Lee beat a fighting retreat until the South lost the Civil War. One hundred and forty-five years later, the South--or what has become the South-Southwest--has won another kind of Civil War. It has transformed the sensibility of the country. It is setting the agenda for our political, social and religious mores--in Pennsylvania and everywhere else.

More:

This region was heavily settled by Scots-Irish immigrants--the same ethnic mix King James I sent to Northern Ireland to clear out the native Celtic Catholics. After succeeding at that, they then settled the American Frontier, suffering Indian raids and fighting for their lives every step of the way. And the Southern frontiersmen never got over their hatred of the East Coast elites and a belief in the morality and nobility of defying them.

Oh, just wait, it gets better:

On foreign policy, the realism and internationalism of the Eastern elitist tradition once kept the Southern-frontier warrior culture and Wilsonian messianism in check. Now the latter two, in toxic combination, have taken over our national dialogue, and the Easterners are running for the hills.

Uh-huh. Might I remind the author that John F. Kennedy and his Best and Brightest Eastern elites -- including Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, born in San Francisco and educated at Harvard -- who got us mired in Vietnam? Hell, Woodrow Wilson himself may have been born in Virginia, but before he became US president he was president of Princeton and governor of New Jersey. How much more Eastern elite can you get? Unfortunately, Wilsonian messianism is an American tradition that predates Wilson.

Besides, as Robert Kaplan has pointed out, it's Southerners and those Americans whose moral values are more akin to Southerners' values -- not Eastern elites -- who are disproportionately defending Michael Hirsh's sorry Yankee a**:

The Army Reserve is desperate for officers, yet there is little urge among American elites to volunteer. Thus our military takes on more of a regional caste. The British Army may have been drawn from the dregs of society, but its officers were the country’s political elite. Not so ours, which has little to do with the business of soldiering and is socially disconnected from what guards us in our sleep. According to Marine Maj. General Michael Lehnert, nine Princeton graduates in the class of 2006 entered the military, compared to 400 in 1956, when there was a draft. Some Ivy League schools had no one enter the military last year. Only one member of the Stanford graduating class had a parent in the military.

Nor do our top schools encourage recruitment. In fact, they often actively discourage it, as may be reckoned by the number of elite campuses from which ROTC is banned. Many people, especially academics and intellectuals, have a visceral distrust of units like Army Special Forces. They are more comfortable with regular citizen armies that seem to better represent democracy. But other than a professional warrior class or a reinstituted draft, what is available to a democracy whose upper stratum has a constantly diminishing commitment to military values?

[snip]

Without a draft or a revitalized Reserve and National Guard that ties the military closer to civilian society, in the decades ahead American troops may become less soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen, and more purple warriors—in essence a guild in which the profession of combat-arms is passed down from father to son. It is striking how many troops I know whose parents and other relatives had also been in the service, especially among the units whose members face the highest level of personal risk. Contrast this with the fact that, at the 2006 Stanford commencement ceremony, Maj. General Lehnert, whose son was the lone graduating student from a military family, was struck by how many of the other parents had never even met a member of the military before he introduced himself.

A citizen army is composed of conscripts from all classes and parts of the country in roughly equal proportion. But a volunteer military is necessarily dominated by those regions with an old-fashioned fighting ethos: the South and the adjacent Bible Belts of the southern Midwest and Great Plains. Marine and Army infantry units, and in particular Army Special Forces A-teams, manifest a proclivity for volunteers from the states of the former Confederacy, as well as Irish and Hispanics from poorer, more culturally conservative sections of coastal cities. In sum, the American military has become in some respects a higher-quality version of what it was on the eve of World War II. The Greatest Generation may have come from all walks of life and all regions of the country, but when it got to boot camp its trainers were professional soldiers, often with Southern accents, intent on doing their thirty years.

The Southern soldier of today is different, even if they have strikingly similar names. Take Army Special Forces Major Robert E. Lee, Jr., of Mobile, Alabama, whom I met in the Philippines in 2003. Major Lee named his son “Stonewall”, but he also worked as a church-based volunteer in a poor, African-American section of Wichita, Kansas. “It was my first real exposure to blacks, I mean not from afar”, he told me. “It was a year of learning, day after day, that folks are just folks.” He is not unusual. It is a commonplace among observers of the American military that race relations in the barracks are better than in American society at large.

What it all comes down to, ultimately, is religion. Hirsh can't stand religious conservatives, and he blames the South for the fact that he has to share a country and a culture with them. He writes:

What does seem foreign to us today is the dedication to free thought and, even more, free moral choice that so dominated the correspondence between those two great minds. When Jefferson, in his letter of May 5, 1817, condemned the "den of the priesthood" and "protestant popedom" represented by Massachusetts' state-supported church, he was speaking for both of them--the North and South poles of the revolution. Yet John McCain, even with the GOP nomination in hand, would never dare repeat his brave but politically foolhardy condemnation of the religious right in 2000 as "agents of intolerance." Why? Because we have become an intolerant nation, and that's what gets you elected.

Ah, because as we all know, folks like Michael Hirsh are paragons of tolerance and open-mindedness -- as long as they don't have to tolerate Southern Baptists and orthodox Catholics and other God-besotted troglodytes. This would be offensive if it weren't so self-parodying.

Hirsh cites Michael Lind's point that we now live in a mass culture, not a patrician culture, and that neither Old South aristocrats or their Northern counterparts would recognize what we've become. Therefore, says Hirsh, the South has won because rednecks allegedly dominate our political debates. Excuse me, but what? Where does the contemptible dreck thoroughly dominating and setting the agenda for our popular culture come from? Little Rock? Tupelo? Tusca-freakin'-loosa? Give me a break.

Look, we are all living in a culture where regional identities are becoming less distinct, and thanks in part to migratory patterns and the influence of mass media monoculture, a world in which the South is becoming far less distinctly Southern than it was in my parents' day. Even so, people like Michael Hirsh are all in favor of diversity, except when it comes to having to accomodate those who don't share their cultural views. In which case it's the Southerners and the religious conservatives who are intolerant, not the nice Yankee liberals, who are the soul of rationality and charity.

Right. I hope Michael Hirsh will remember...

UPDATE: Larison thinks Hirsh has written one of the stupidest essays ever. Excerpt:

No one can look at American politics today, seeing the main presidential candidates who are now running for the White House, and conclude that the South has triumphed in any meaningful way: we have two out-and-out Northerners and a transplant whose ancestors may be Scots-Irish but whose loyalties are to the central state and the status quo and who has immersed himself fully in the culture of the capital. The South has become the most populous region, and yet it still wields vastly less cultural power than the major urban centers of the East Coast and California. Hirsh is free to prefer the urban, Eastern liberals, but he should give up on the idea that the power and influence of Easterners are meaningfully in decline.

After all, who still has the real power? Overwhelmingly, they and urban elites around the country do, while Middle Americans will express their displeasure only if these people openly mock or belittle their beliefs. So long as the pandering and the charade of phony populism continue, Scots-Irish folks and Southerners seem mostly content to accept and even to support a system that consistently works against them, their history and their interests.