The New South

February 25, 2016 8:06 AM

Southern correspondent Matthew Teague and photographer David Levene profile six US states – Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia – in the run-up to the vital Super Tuesday primary elections. A series of long-ish reads and photos from The Guardian.
posted by Kitteh (12 comments total)

Yeah, Texas is pretty diverse. As I pointed out to someone the other day, there are more Muslims living peacefully in Texas than there are fighting for ISIS/ISIL/Daesh/whatever...
posted by jim in austin at 8:35 AM on February 25, 2016 [4 favorites]

Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia

Or am I missing a link... help a Virginian out?
posted by headnsouth at 8:43 AM on February 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

I think they're making their way there. I would guess those two states are next on the list.
posted by Kitteh at 8:49 AM on February 25, 2016

After spending some time in those places, it becomes easier to remember that before it was the biggest Republican state, Texas was the biggest Democratic state. During decades when even California reliably voted conservative, Texas went progressive. Lyndon B Johnson, a Democrat, won re-election here in 1964. But the night he signed the Civil Rights Act into law, he told his press secretary: “I think we just delivered the south to the Republican party for a long time to come.” And they did – but a half century has passed since then.

I think we'll start getting a much better sense of the true political ideology of the South as the people who remember feeling betrayed on July 2, 1964 continue to die off.
posted by 256 at 9:15 AM on February 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

I suspect residents may have just forgotten to hate while they were waiting for the traffic light to change at the intersection of Peachtree and Piedmont.

Some very Atlanta comments:
a) Which Peachtree / which Piedmont? Way up in Buckhead? Why are you spending so much time in Buckhead?
b) Regardless of location, there is a whole lot of hate at that intersection but it's all directed at whatever cars happen to be in theway.
posted by quadrilaterals at 9:16 AM on February 25, 2016 [8 favorites]

I suspect residents may have just forgotten to hate while they were waiting for the traffic light to change at the intersection of Peachtree and Piedmont.

I used to run the Atlanta Marathon on Thanksgiving Day from 1998 on, give or take a few missed years. I watched that Piedmont/Peachtree intersection go from devoid of cars early Thanksgiving morning, to a constipated mass of honking rage directed at the runners who had the street closed. Last time I ran it I thought there's no way this is going to continue, and sure enough the race is no more. (There is a marathon, but not on Thanksgiving and not on that course.) Not sure what happened except that all the stores are now open on Thanksgiving morning. It's a shame, because it was a challenging race, and one of the few places you could run on a real Olympic course.
posted by lagomorphius at 9:40 AM on February 25, 2016 [2 favorites]

I think we'll start getting a much better sense of the true political ideology of the South as the people who remember feeling betrayed on July 2, 1964 continue to die off.

That's assuming that they don't pass the hate on to the next generation. Passing the hate on down is very easy to see happening right in front of my own eyes here, in my neck of the woods, where young white people (well, white men, basically) are seriously arguing that it's a good idea (because he was a "great commander") to keep the name Nathan Bedford Forrest on a building on a college campus with 20%+ African-American enrollment.
posted by blucevalo at 9:54 AM on February 25, 2016 [3 favorites]

Parry’s current project, she said, is to try to quantify the shift in Arkansas power from blue to red. She thinks it’s the fastest in the country’s history. It happened suddenly, starting with the rise of President Barack Obama to the White House.

Man, that's depressing. I remember the old yellow-dog Democrat Arkansas (where half my family's from).
posted by languagehat at 10:20 AM on February 25, 2016

Kinda disappointed with the photographs of Arkansas. Not only because there appeared to be a clear intent to show a somewhat impoverished or run down state, but they managed to take photographs at an angle to make downtown Fayetteville appear anything other than it is: a clean mix of old buildings and shiny new ones. It just carried with it a real intent to avoid presenting Arkansas as anything but old and worn out. And, well, I guess they get points for capturing the Razorbacks.

Rose Dow’s disaffection for political parties – when she said “I don’t know what those mean” – isn’t trivial. It is born of isolation that began a century ago, when railroads and telegraph lines bypassed the rocky Arkansas highlands.

This is just nonsense. It's not as if the Arkansas Ozarks didn't get indoor plumbing and electricity in the 1990s. If anything, a century ago is when the lumber industries started piercing into that region, opening them up and laying down aforementioned connectors.

“That isolation was real, and it meant Arkansas stayed Democratic for decades longer than the rest of the south,” Parry said. “And the ‘southern strategy’ wasn’t as effective because there was such a lower African American population here.” The state’s black population today is 15%, compared with more than 30% in neighboring Louisiana and almost 40% in Mississippi.

The isolation wasn't real in the context of the Southern Strategy, the answer to that is in the second part of the quote.

The reporters missed out completely on the massive growth in Northwest Arkansas courtesy of Wal-Mart. Also missing, a lot of the Blue Dogs got voted out as part of the giant wave of anger against incumbents (this took down Republicans elsewhere, too), which didn't necessarily have anything to do with Barack Obama. If I had to guess, the social values element of modern politics in the United States caught up to the political situation in Arkansas, and the Republican Party successfully parlayed that against the Blue Dogs (who were conservative Dems) to great effect. There's also an element of Tea Partyism in the state legislature, even now.
posted by Atreides at 11:00 AM on February 25, 2016 [7 favorites]

Which Peachtree / which Piedmont? Way up in Buckhead? Why are you spending so much time in Buckhead?

Since when are there multiple Piedmonts? Just when I thought I had this city figured out...
posted by madcaptenor at 11:48 AM on February 25, 2016

Just when I thought I had this city figured out...

So naive. I’m convinced the streets come and go magically.
posted by bongo_x at 12:46 PM on February 25, 2016

That's assuming that they don't pass the hate on to the next generation.

Oh, they will pass on the hate, but I suspect they will have less success passing on the idea that the Civil Rights Act should be the touchstone for deciding which party gets your vote.

I mean, for all the racism inherent in the Republican Party today, no candidate would ever say out loud that they would like to repeal the Civil Rights Act. So, while 80-year-old racist Southerners might vote Republican every time regardless of their political ideology simply because "The Democrats supported the Civil Rights Act," the 20-year-old racist Southerner knows that both parties support the Civil Rights Act. And some of those 20-year-old racist Southerners, believe it or not, may vote Dem.

That said, I also think that there are going to be a lot fewer out-and-out racists among 20-year-old Southerners than among 80-year-olds. Not zero, unfortunately, but fewer.
posted by 256 at 7:50 AM on February 26, 2016