The 'sovereign nations' of the American south are slouching toward totalitarianism

[Nevilledog]

https://www.editorialboard.com/the-sovereign-nations-of-the-american-south-are-slouching-toward-totalitarianism/


The US isn’t one country. The more we believe it is, the less sense our politics makes. By insisting on “the truth” when the truth is diametric from “the truth,” we end up doing a helluva lot more work. We end up doing all kinds of mental acrobatics to make sure “the truth” is true.

Once we drop the idea of America being one country, things make more sense. We do less work, too, because on seeing the US isn’t one country, the source of our problems – our national problems – becomes clearer. That source is the politics of the American south.

There we find the reason the US isn’t one country. The states making up that region don’t want it to be. They have instead committed themselves to a wholly imagined confederacy of the mind and spirit, a fictional subnation inside a factual nation in which “real Americans” fight to restore God’s country to its rightful “constitutional” origins.

While the rest of America is animated by the principles of democracy and union, the south (and its interested and ideological allies spread around 50 states) is animated by the goals of division and control. If the south can’t control the machinery of the federal government, as it has since the beginning, the south declares itself a victim of tyranny.

*snip*

[2naSalit]

1. K&R

[BComplex]

2. No shit! I live in the south, and the Baptist church preaches right wing politics from

the pulpit, and even spreads crap when they say the blessing before a pot luck dinner. They want to go back to the dark ages, where people (slaves, women, children) were all subject to being the "property" of some dude, and women understood that they were there to bear children and nobody was to have an education except those in "control".

It's just getting worse since the authoritarian kool-aid was put in the water wells...or however it's getting spread.
Fux nooz is totally responsible for the non-church related part of this equation.

[jobendorfer]

3. I see this same dynamic in my home state of Oregon

Step outside of the Portland/Salem/Eugene axis (the Willamette River Valley), and you're in Deep Red territory. Southern Oregon, all of Oregon east of the Cascades are uber-conservative, but sparsely populated. In the end, we have two liberal Senators and 6 of our 7 House members are Democrats, because the Willamette Valley population swamps the rest of the state. But there's no doubt in my mind, that if the eastern half of Oregon could secede and join some other political entity, it would. In fact, there is a proposal floating to carve off a chunk of Oregon and join it to Idaho. I don't think that will go anywhere, but the desire is there.

Are there others states with a similar urban-rural split? I am guessing that the answer is yes. So this is a bigger problem than "the former Confederacy against the rest of the Union". It's a problem, I think, at every scale of government. I don't know what the answer is.

[Hekate]

4. KnR