Tweet
(photo: Flickmor/flickr)
So why do they do it? Why do the majority of these people vote for Republicans? And why do a lot of suburban and exurban megachurch folks outside of those states vote for Republicans?
Here’s a big hint — when conservatives claim to be “values voters”, their values usually include bigotry:
– The well-funded conservative issues group “Minnesota Majority”, currently known for a strange bit of performance art involving a truck plastered with graphics that seemingly imply that being made to pay their share of taxes will cause Minnesota’s rich to frequent soup kitchens, also is involved in lobbying for insurance companies against any sort of meaningful health care reform — and its most notable representative in that effort, Dave Racer, has a career apparently predicated on making political hay out of inflaming people’s racist impulses. Check this out:
Minnesota Majority’s Web site features an issue paper on health care, which backs consumer-driven health care and claims that racial diversity and single-parent households negatively affect health in the United States.
“Black women, for a variety of reasons, are more prone to underweight babies than are Caucasian and Asian women. It is not surprising that Sweden has a lower infant mortality rate, or that Japan has a longer life expectancy than the United States does. They are nearly racially pure; we are not,” says the Web page, written by public speaker and former radio talk show host David Racer.
Remember, the whole point of the Southern Strategy is that rich people and businesses use racism as a means to get whites, especially working-class whites, to vote against their own best interests. Bigotry is used to get voters to back cutting social programs that are seen as mainly helping people who aren’t white, male, Christian, or heterosexual — and the way to cut these programs is by cutting taxes, especially on the rich. This is why bigotry and Republicanism have been intertwined for decades, and will stay that way until the Republican Party collapses of its own foul weight.
Res ipsa loquitor.
48 Comments
The conservatism to which I was exposed 60 years ago was a fact-based ideology practised by some democrats and republicans who were people of integrity. The perversion of the term conservative to include the likes of todays extreme right wing apparatchiks has become a great, and perhaps, mortal loss to the civic square and civil debate so necessary to a democratic society.
It seems the measure of success for the perverts of the extreme right is making certain that our democracy cannot function, that problems cannot be solved, that we, as a democratic society, will fail, plain and simple.
These perverts must not be allowed to destroy our civil society, but make no mistake about it, that is their goal. They are perverts in every sense of the word and are filled with a most poisonous hate.
Keep fighting, phoenix woman!
The extreme right doesn’t so much want to destroy the country as they want to control every part of it – our beliefs, our words and our religions, every tiny thing about our lives. Most southerners like things just the way they are – “we’ve always lived this way” – and don’t realize that time has moved on without them. If I had to use one word to describe southerners it would be “content.” Change scares them even though it’s happening all around them. They would be startled if you pointed out that they are benefiting from the advances in medicine, for instance. The south is going to be a hard nut to crack for progressives but the work needs to be done.
You’ve got it backwards. The GOP pandered to the South and Megachurch land from the beginnings of the movement conservative march to power.
Remember the Southern strategy from the Nixon campaign? It was a Southern and urban ethnic Catholic strategy, and it was rooted in the opposition to school desegregation and busing. When Roe v. Wade came along, the Catholic opposition to it was tailor-made for the GOP to exploit in the alliance between Southern Baptists (Jerry Falwell and the 1978 Southern Baptist Convention coup), Church of Christ (Ronald Reagan’s denominattion), and Pentecostals to elect Ronald Reagan.
So who are these megachurches? A base group are the descendants of Southern Baptists, other fundamentalists, and Pentecostals who migrated to other parts of the country. The ministers or these churches are entrepeneurial guys chasing the big bucks, which fits completely with the GOP mindset. And to a greater extent than is realized, the GOP power in these areas is held in being by radically politicized preachers who have been turned out of politicized seminaries since the 1970s. Not just places like Regent U. (Pat Robertson), Liberty U. (Jerry Falwell), or Bob Jones U., but the Southern Baptist seminaries that did not rebel and become independent seminaries after the 1978 coup. And the poor economy means that more guys and gals are seeing religious missions as a way to gain an income.
It is not just the South and megachurches now. You have large swaths of Pennsylvania, parts of California, southern Ohio, Appalachia, the rural Midwest and High Plains, and of course the Mormon states that respond to the same appeals.
Thanks PW.
As you say Christians vote R because they are told to at church. And the frequency and volunm are climbimg I’m told.
Why is there a megachurch land? Before I got rid on my TV, I paused, ever so briefly on mega church preachers, and wondered wtf anyone saw in them.
If someone could ‘splain to me why there is a megachurchland to begin with, I might be able to comment intelligently.
Yup, and I remember how Lee Atwater described it in 1981:
That’s the thing — the reason for the appeal to racism is to cut taxes, especially those on businesses.
Two key things the white-flighters who vote Republican in the North have in common with the white voters who vote Republican in the South is a) fear of the dark-skinned people and b) using a “values” platform to conceal that fear. Hence my reference to Dave Racer of Minnesota Majority.
In Minnesota, at least, it’s essentially an exurb phenomenon: Many truly rural spots don’t have the population to sustain them, and their own churches fill whatever needs they have.
And what are the exurbs all about? White flight.
Only slightly odd topic: Looks like the Limbaugh blowback has the potential of affecting all right wing hate radio! I swear I’m seeing more and more tiny little signs that this society is about to switch back to the left. It was inevitable and I feel overdue! They always go too far and I think the whole conservative movement has collectively finally jumped the shark.
Off topic, of course!
Yet for a long time the South has undergone an “invasion” by hordes of Northerners. One would expect that would have long since altered the antebellum mood, but it seems not to have done so?
Maybe the North to South migration is not just the quest for a shorter, milder winter. Moving down there could benefit a retiree on a fixed but reliable income, since the cost of living is less. The quality of, say, K – 12 education might not be on their mind at that point.
There are plenty of like-minded bigots still up North though, they haven’t all moved South. Lots of variations of intolerance abound, plenty to choose from wherever one lives.
Actually Texas was reliably Democratic until the enormous influx of rust belt refugees beginning in the late 1970s. Since then the racism and conservatism have exploded. I am from here. I watched it happen.
You are asking about what is the attraction to the audience. There is a difference between the audience for televangelists and megachurch preahcers.
Televangelists built million-dollar empires on elderly churchgoers with lots of time on their hands during the week; the TV evangelist was their friendly neighbor reassuring them of their place in heaven. And shocking them with the sins of the world.
Megachurch preacher build million-dollar empires on families searching for roots, for community in anonymous suburbs, and for moral training for their children. The more lavish megachurches have their own entertainment, gymnasium, and restaurant businesses in the building; one never need go out in the evil world. It becomes a cocoon. And the message is both moralistic and the evangelical message of the gospel of success (God’s people get rich because they help each other…and because they are Godfearing.)
Not all televangelists or megachurch preachers are politicized by the GOP, but those that are preach the GOP as God’s army in politics.
THe Federal Government is the source of all things evil. The Federal Government freed the slaves, so for a hundred or so years the Solid South voted Democratic, because Republicans commanded the Federal Government that freed the slaves. The Democratic overlords would say to the poor whites, “you don’t have much, lord knows. So you stay in line, vote how we tell you to vote, hate who we tell you to hate, or we’ll take that little you have and give it to the black folks.” Then in the 60′s the Democrats took over the Federal Government and passed the civils rights laws. As Southern Democrats turned Dixiecrat then Republican it became the Republican overlords saying “you don’t have much, lord knows, and you know why? Because the Democrat Federal Government is taking it, and giving it to the black folks. So you know to stay in line, and who to vote for, and who to hate. All we got to is say words like ‘affirmative action’, and food stamps, and your blood just boils, don’t it!” Pile on top of that the middle-class newly-prosperous “I’ve done this all myself, that government didn’t contribute a bit, they just want to take it away” know-nothingism that profilerates around the suburbs – well, it’s just like that.
There are a lot of folks from outside the South who have been transferred in by their companies or a short-term job. They tend to be steered by real estate agents to certain “exclusive” areas if they are professionals. Working folks who migrate in on their own tend to find places to live near other working folks like them. In both cases, because there is one of them coming into a community of many, there are the subtle pressures to conform to the opinions of the existing community. In addition, a not insignficant number bring their prejudices with them.
The schools issue has spawned resegregation of the schools in major cities across the South. The latest to fall was Raleigh-Wake County, aided by financing by Art Pope (Koch brothers’ gofer). There has been growth in private and church academies (and not only the segregation academies of the 1970s), homeschooling is growing (with materials from Bob Jones University).
Those are some of the things that have kept the suburban rings in the Republican column.
You missed the period from FDR to LBJ in which the South loved the money that came from the federal government and used it to finance their economic development into the Sunbelt. Military bases, highway money, money for the expansion of universities, and so on. The Democratic governors of Southern states were first at the trough for over a generation. And being “progressive” was seen as a good thing until 1964.
There are a lot of complicated threads in Southern history, politics, and culture. Some of them are potentially helpful to progressives.
So values voters are usually bigots. That would be most of them, right? Usually? So now you’re stereotyping a negative connotation to conservatives. That’s a good sign of bigotry and prejudice.
Res ipsa loquitor.
Show the contrary examples. Values voters who are not bigots.
The Corey Robin book salon from last week was excellent, and I think his premise that conservatism is based on hierarchy is very important. I’ve lived in a Red State for 5 years, and I keep noticing they always look down and criticize their ‘inferiors,’ but never those ‘above’ them. Buy a non-essential food item with food stamps = eternal damnation, while banksters stealing $7.7 trillion barely raise an eyebrow.
In part, it’s “There but for the grace of god go I,” i.e. fear, but it’s also, “See, we can look down on the same people, so I am just like you.”
It’s all about control, and to me it puts the whole GOP war on women in perspective. They can lose a few men,and not feel too threatened, but if they lose control of women, they lose everyone. Women can spurn men, and also make them lose control in that crazy little thing called love.
In their ‘traditional’ family, you have the patriarch, the serving wench, and the serfs. We might say wife and children.
It’s why the Occupy movement confuses them. Read the late Penny Lernoux’s two books, “Cry of the People,” and especially “People of God.” It’s the bottom up church of John XXIII and Vatican II (the people of God) vs. the top down model of John Paul and Benedict.
Conservatives want to go back to a past that wasn’t there; Genesis is the ultimate nostalgia story (There was a golden age, if only Eve hadn’t…..)
If I remember correctly, Matt Taibbi described the tea-baggers as not so much racists as narcissists, “I’ve got mine, and I might as well take yours, as I don’t think you deserve it.”
We all sit in the back of their bus. Some just stick out more.
People who define what’s moral and what’s not based on a set of unquestioned and arbitrary ‘val-yews’ are nearly always conservative. That’s because very few conservatives arrive at their political belief system via any sort of intellectual journey; by contrast many if not most liberals or progressives do just that.
Telling someone that you vote on your “val-yews” are just another way of saying “I’m voting with my gut instead of my head”.
-stewartm
My answer is a mixture of Frederick Jackson and Edmund Morgan. Morgan’s thesis that the English re-created their old social system (or tried to) by substituting African slaves for European serfs did elevate the status of poor whites in the US, but translated socioeconomically into a contempt for the black and the poor (with the psychological effect that some of the most vociferous racism was exhibited by those just a notch above the lowest ladder, the poor white, as what little status he had depended on blacks continuing to be beneath him).
Jackson’s thesis on the influence of the frontier on US cultures I buy but only in that the period of “free” land and yeoman farmers obscured the pre-existing European class divisions (for a while) and fostered myths of self-reliance and individualism.
It’s not really a surprise that the places in the country which are the poorest educated are also the places where there is the most buy-in to this mythology. Without these, if America had no non-white underclass and had a less obscured history of class, then we would have stronger traditions of social democracy, as in Western Europe.
-stewartm
I’m not sure that’s true if you’re talking about megachurches. Folks there tend to be upwardly mobile, regardless of which class they started out in, and having more education (if narrower education) than what would be called an underclass.
And it is striking that in the South, the lowest income whites vote Democratic. At the top and the bottom, the civil rights movement had its impact in a positive fashion. It is the middle classes that preserve the bigotry.
One–true but your “narrowly educated” is key. One of my gripes with education in the US is that we graduate the most high-degreed uneducated people imaginable. If I had my druthers, I’d push for a greater background in the liberal arts and humanities–teach people to *think* and make them aware of the basic facts of history and economics, dang it!!–and leave specialized vocational training to the job. I know that corporations don’t like this but I think it’s a good thing for employers to have to invest money into their employees to bring them up to speed, and not have (what they falsely perceive as) ready plug-ins out there just waiting in the streets.
(In fact, it is my experience that a new PhD hire takes just as long to get up to speed as a MS or BS hire, because getting the PhD really involves is achieving a high degree of specialization in a very limited skillset that usually isn’t what is being asked for in the actual job. What I’m seeing in my job are PhDs doing jobs that BS/MS folks used to do, and quite competently, for no reason except they’re out there. BS/MS folks are now doing things that used to require only an associate’s degree, and associate degree people are doing jobs that used to require only high school. And there’s not any valid *technical* reason for this happening; the jobs really aren’t any harder or more complicated. It is a neoliberal myth that America’s economic woes are because we suffer from a lack of education, science- or math-based or otherwise).
Two, the actual underclass is more liberal. It’s the folks just above the underclass who often tend to be the most reactionary.
-stewartm
The extremist right we used to call reactionary. Reactionaries don’t self-identify as reactionaries. Reactionary Barry Goldwater and his reactionary followers called themselves conservatives, usually defensively. Yet “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” expressed their political viewpoint.
The public, semiliterate discourse turned binary for the most part, and adversarial: conservative or liberal.
PW, yes, it speaks for itself but there are other factors, such as religion. There are still places where co-mingling of sexes is verbotten based on interpretation of the bible as a ‘for instance’.
Certainly, the federal government has invested plenty in the South – military, TVA, lots more. So the southern attitude, that the Federal government is an evil enemy, is irrational. Bigotry and rationality don’t necessarily coexist; quite the opposite. Before LBJ, didn’t progressivism and racism get along pretty well? The civil rights legislation broke up that alliance, and reinforced among southernres what they really didn’t like about the Federal Government. Georgia managed to get to 2000 with Democratic control of governor, senate , house of reps – a holding action, surely, but still there. Then they removed that rancid Confederate batttle flag from the state flag. The Republican candidate for governor promised everyone a vote, so they could have their flag back if they wanted. He won that race. Before the legislature convened enough senate Democrats flipped to Republican so the Republicans controlled the Senate; two years later republicans took the house. I’d say a flag is pretty much symbolic compared to civil rights legislation; but it had the same effect – catalyzed in a big way all of a sudden what was coming. So why does the South support the GOP so? Maybe not the visceral racism of times past, but the white identity of it’s ours as long as we don’t let them take it away. Sonny Perdue didn’t say he wanted that rancid battle flag back. Oh no, you can’t call him racist. He just wanted to let people vote on it. How can you criticize him for giving people the opportunity to vote? Can you criticize him for manipulating symbols effectively?
The South supports the GOP because the GOP supports a certain view of the South. And there is a sizeable white minority that disagrees with that point of view.
What changed is that first Nixon, then Reagan, then George W. Bush legitimized Southern bigotry on a national level. It wasn’t Sonny Perdue as much as it was the national GOP presidential candidates who would not call the flag issue bullshit.
From the very beginning, national tolerance of slavery, segregation, bigotry has enabled the worst instincts in the South. The rare periods in which bigotry is delegitimized has shown progress. The last time that occurred was in the 1970s–essentially from Jimmy Carter’s inauguration speech as Governor of Georgia to Ronald Reagan’s speech in Charlotte legitimizing opposition to busing and to school desegregation.
As someone who lived most of his life in the Deep South, I can tell you that the explanation offered is absolutely true. I’ve made the same point for years.
Who gets more pork than the South? Call them on that.
So the South is not so different from the rest of the nation? Sonny saw the new, more sphisticated racism as the way to win, and so did Nixon. The South and the nation did for a time progress together. Now they have, sadly, severely regressed together. With the new properity and influence of the South helping to push the nation one way or the other.
Although I don’t agree, someone said, the worst thing to happen to the United States of America was winning the Civil War.
There are too many platitudes residing in flags, no? Memory is selective.
I was in Moscow in 1997 when the 80th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution clicked by. For a few days there were more hammer and sickle flags downtown than the Russian tricolor. The PTB decided to let the delusions slide by that way, including a demonstration in Red Square. A lot of history and consequences were conveniently forgotten for a short time.
Still, it’s what people do that counts, not the piece of cloth in itself.
Res ipsa loquitur. Not “loquitor”.
The orthography doesn’t speak for itself, unless your word processor spell-checks in Latin, thus necessitating the intervention of classic language nerds.
I’m not sure the US did win that war for the long term. Methods of exploitation evolve, are still with us, and allowed sway often enough.
It’s hardly a surprise that once the melting pot lost its upward mobility, racial (and other identity) conflicts would be brought into focus. Moreover, the country’s offensively negligent address of racism reveals how willingly it would be exploited after the crest of the golden age.
However, I must remark on anti-Southern snobbery, a repetition of the empire’s never ending moral imperialism, by which Southern racism can be simultaneously exploited and demonised. The framing – they don’t even know what’s in their own interest – is unethical. Rather, what we have here is a time-worn American trick to make misleadership appear to be a democratic failing.
Yes, the Republicans inherited and exploited white working class southerners from the civil rights era on, but what they understand that liberals don’t is that the Klan started in Indiana, the militias are in Michigan, the two most segregated places in the US are Milwaukee and Phildelphia, large swaths of Southern California are as redneck as North Carolina, Florida has more registered Dems than Republicans, and that you can sell the hate to EVERYONE, including Black people, who can also be taught from the hymnal to hate gay people, etc., complain about people on welfare, etcetera.
This skin-deep analysis takes us nowhere. The churches are in decade-long decline and the Tea Party that has captured the ressentiment of the right is class-based, but our discussions are stuck in the 1980s. I have so many dumb liberal leftover college friends in the north who talk such shite about racism in the south but know one or zero black people that I just laugh when I hear it these days. Meanwhile, Obama bombs people of color exclusively, and that’s okay–according to Glenn Greenwald–for 80% of Dems.
It’s mercantilism and capitalism that created racism, not the other way round. You cannot fix our problems with idealistic conversation; it has to be about creating a material culture that addresses people’s real needs, uniting poor people to overthrow the miniscule number who control us and distributing what we’ve got wisely.
Solidarity, comrade Detroit.
Or there’s the pithier question: Why does PW keep pushing the idea that there’s any difference between one biznetician and the next?
There isn’t.
It’s not bigotry when you are discussing IDEAS and the ideas are TRUE. Being a conservative is a CHOICE, just like choosing to be a racist.
No one here is saying all conservatives are racists, but racists tend to be political conservatives, especially of the “social conservative/values voter” variety. That’s not just conjecture. A recent study found a high correlation between social conservatism, racism and low IQ.
A few random points.
The people you describe would be called petite bourgeoisie. This class has taken on the belief systems of the rulers and have historically been politically conservative to reactionary. But sometimes they can be aligned against monopolistic practices. Saw this in the early teabagger movement, which at first seemed to be against the banksters, but morphed quickly away from any economic populism.
But an interesting note about the petite bourgeosie is that racially they are turning on each other. As the black leftist Glen Ford noted, the gop masters began using on white people images and themes that were typically reserved for black people. The unemployed were described as lazy, shiftless, archetypical welfare queens. How much hate was generated at home owners who like black welfare queens before them, demanded the governemnt support them.
The whole attack on contraception is an example of using those themes also. Attacks on fundamentally white women, could be taken from a white supremist meeting on how black women with no fathers were a scrouge on society.
And why religious affliations–well, religion is fundamentlly a reactionary force in a society. The Catholic and Russian orthodox churches were tied closely to the rulers in France and Russia and helped prop the ancien regimes in those countries.
Same thing happened in Florida. In my lifetime, I have watched the state move from Bob Sikes, Lawton Chiles and Bob Graham to Jeb Bush, Rick Scott and Marco Rubio.
The reason that Florida has more registered Democrats is because of the large Jewish population in South Florida plus African-Americans all over the state and non-Cuban Hispanics. Most of the rest of the population is Republican.
This is a classic. Self-serving circular logic. I can call anyone I want a moron, because I can find someone else to agree with me and that makes it true.
Hmmmm. Unquestioned and arbitrary ‘val-yews’. You mean like:
Global warming?
Rich people are evil?
Green energy can replace fossil fuels?
Southerners are stupid?
On the other hand, every religion is an arbitrary and (mostly) unquestioned set of values. Are you anti-religious too?
Recommend your comment.
Regarding the comments pertaining to Georgia and “the flag controversy.” The flag controversy was a fabricated distraction – the focus should have been that 2002 was the year Georgia enabled e-voting only. Rather than allowing the flip from Democratic to Republican to be analyzed legitimately, they fabricated the flag controversy early on as the explanation as to how incredibly popular Democratic politicians like Roy Barnes and Max Cleland could lose to unknown Republican challengers.
Global warming is real. Even conservatives admit it’s happening now. The only semi-valid dispute is how much the change is anthropogenic.
Here’s one fer ya:
A massively thorough study – funded in part by a pair of US oil billionaires who are opponents of climate-disruption remediation – has come to the conclusion that the earth is, indeed, warming.
0-1.
One, the default setting in this culture is set to “worship rich people and hang on their every word of advice” in this culture, so any non-acceptance of that default setting indicates questioning of the culture, not acceptance.
But as to your point, there’s this.
Psychologist and social scientist Dacher Keltner says the rich really are different, and not in a good way: Their life experience makes them less empathetic, less altruistic, and generally more selfish.
And yes, lack of empathy, lack of altruism, and selfishness is a pretty good starting point for any definition of “evil”.
That’s the category of a “has-to”. If you knew something about economic-cultural development of humankind, you’d know that each step of the intensification of resource extraction requires a shift to a new energy source. Oil isn’t forever, and even most conservatives don’t think it just seeps in from the aether.
Besides, people who have studied the problem say “yes, it’s possible“.
According to new research from US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), green energy can affordably replace fossil fuel as the world’s primary source of electricity within 20 years.
And this is not a pipe dream. I have been tangentially involved in biofuel research, conservatives’ joking about “algae” notwithstanding. Biofuel research is real.
Another thing: this culture pees out a huge amount of energy via waste. We could save enormous amounts (c. 50 %) by a more efficient power grid, by high-speed rails, by energy-efficient homes, by more comprehensive recycling. None of this can happen however, via small-government capitalism, which is why *your* side is agin’ it.
Who said that? More of a few of us on FDL are Southerners, myself included.
Only when religion pretends that observable reality isn’t real, when dogma trumps empirical observation. Which is just about the state of modern conservatism nowadays.
-stewartm
White suburban consumerism is the only identity these people have. Without that, they are just the descendents of refuges.
When you get right down to it, all America has ever been is one big f***** refuge camp with better facilities.
Sounds a lot like my relatives in GA.. I have railed against their voting allegiances for years but they just don’t listen.
according to lore;