US POLITICS: Not new, not the South
And not necessarily Bill Frist’s, either
My South — my mysterious, misunderstood South! What is it about the place? For while, as ERO’s readers will instantly grasp, the American South has been around for a while now, still there must be something about it — its pandemic good manners spiked with pointless belligerence, perhaps, or is it instead the faint tinge of self-parody that colours its every incidental effect? — that compels not only those doomed by birth or blood to care just that little bit too much about it, but indeed, compels plenty of other people to commentate, with varying degrees of goodwill, on its most mundane features, again and again, for all the world as if to explain the South was somehow to normalise it. Which of course it isn’t and could not be, for the simple reason that a normal, rational, explicable South would hardly be the South, my South at all.
Why am I troubling you with this truism? Once again, a Yankee is to blame — well, not a real Yankee, in fact, but the moral equivalent in this diminished age. Bear with me for a moment. For some of my Southern friends this may come as a not entirely wholesome surprise, but there are people in the United States who follow politics not by chatting with their friends and kinfolk, reading the local paper (especially the pages dealing with weddings, funerals and high school sporting events) or looking around them, but instead, by purchasing specialist publications. The relevant example in this case is Rupert Murdoch’s own Weekly Standard, a journal much admired by that intellectually demanding bunch, the more politically engagé of the neo-conservatives. And one of the most consistently amusing, sharp-witted and troublesome writers retained by the Weekly Standard is David Brooks.
Mr Brooks is a sometime Wall Street Journal employee now best known for his cultural critiques, invariably conservative in orientation, of the Land of the Free. A graduate of the University of Chicago, Brooks made a name for himself with Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. In it, Mr Brooks details the rise of a new, assertive upper middle class. It's a class that — according to Mr Brooks, anyway — is both attached to the capitalism that put it where it is, but at the same time equally enamoured of what Brooks sees as the equivocal legacies of the 1960s. But the laws of popular sociology dictate that if one class rises, another has to fall — well, usually the same one, as it happens. So for decades now, if not longer, writers like Brooks have been announcing to anyone willing to listen that America’s old WASP social elite, inbred and ineffectual and increasingly lacking in purpose, have been supplanted (pick your own Freudian or Darwinian metaphors here) by a class that is marked out, not by the old language of ancestral achievement, the right sort of protestantism and a mysterious code of pointless social mores, but rather by being vigorous, meritocratic and terribly clever. Mr Brooks has reported, for instance, on evidence culled from the social pages New York Times, which shows that the reports of WASP weddings that filled those pages in the 1950s have now been replaced by reports of weddings based mostly on the economic and educations achievements of the bride and groom. Some might argue, obviously, that this simply shows how regrettably the New York Times has gone downmarket. For Mr Brooks, on the other hand, it provides encouraging evidence of a new, improved ascendency ready to take charge of a waiting America.
True or false? Well, a little bit of both, really. Because like all the best popular sociology, Mr Brooks' narrative benefits from being concurrently obviously right, in some ways, while also obviously nonsensical in others. Not least, America — a large country, for those of you who don’t follow these things closely — is still, despite everything, very much a place of disparate and wildly divergent regions. Or to put it another way, is there really any generalisation about social and political culture that holds true in the bigs cities of the eastern seaboard and also the one-street hamlets of the rural midwest, the silicon boom-towns of California as well as — well, I had to get around to it someday — the South, that legendary exception to every known social, political or cultural rule?
Obviously not. And yet there is something about the South that makes non-Southerners want to explain it, to normalise it by roping it into national narratives — perhaps even to make excuses about why Southern politicians, with their curious Christianity and good manners and weird blend of wholesale corruption and unhelpful levels of integrity, ever end up dominating a national stage. Hence Mr Brooks' need to take his theory, as it were, onto enemy territory.
But of course there's plenty worth thinking about in the political relationship of the South to its enforced companion, those other United States. In the last forty years a phenomenon broadly been known as the ‘Southern strategy’ has seen the Democratic party displaced from its ancient Southern bastion, and, at the same time, the national (and ‘conservative’) leadership of the Republican party fall into the hands of a new, Southern recruits. Mr Brooks, however, is too vivid and vivacious a writer to subject a good story to that level of academic dryness, feeling — rightly — that his theory, taken South onto, as it were, enemy territory, will succeed or fail on its case studies. Step forward, then, Bill Frist, America’s new Senate majority leader and an example, for Mr Brooks, a paradoxical, and hence typically Southern, example of WASP ascendency in action.
In a long and in some ways rather admirable Weekly Standard article, the thesis Mr Brooks enjambs onto the success of Mr Frist can more or less be summed up as follows:
A few years ago, the Republican party was dominated by middle-class suburban and rural southerners like Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, and Trent Lott. Now the Republican party is dominated by southerners of a different sort — a scion of the Bush family who went to Andover, Yale, and Harvard, and a scion of the Frist family who went to Montgomery Bell Academy, Princeton, and Harvard ... In most northern cities, the WASP aristocracy, if it exists, is basically irrelevant. New York and Philadelphia are no longer dominated by Episcopalian blue bloods with honking accents. But in Nashville the old Belle Meade elite is diminished but still cohesive and important ... What Bill Frist would have gotten from Belle Meade and MBA is an unspoken sense that he was born to the leadership class. He would have been taught gentlemanly behavior and gracious manners.
It is perhaps worth underlining that, for an American Republican of Mr Brooks’ stripe, Mr Frist — in private life, a distinguished heart transplant surgeon, and now a US senator from Tennessee — embodies a pragmatic, establishmentarian and strangely soothing sort of conservatism. And what has made the man so? Why, of course, that exceptional and peculiar place, the South, with its strangely-named schools, good manners, and inexplicable if self-willed obliviousness to things that happen in the world beyond. Mr Brooks' problem, though, is that there is a lot he doesn't understand about the South, including its geography, its construction of social class, and its politics. Hence his failure to take on board the fact that Nashville is not exactly the real South, or that Mr Frist, for all his undisputed qualities, is not exactly an aristocrat. Yet this incomprehension, in itself, coming from a man of Mr Brooks' perceptiveness, probably says more about the South than any number of intelligent articles could.
Not, of course, that Brooks' Weekly Standard piece is a bad one. On the contrary, one of its unexpected joys is its wide-eyed, incredulous description of a semi-southern, slightly no-account place, full of its funny little customs and airs and snobberies, flush with money yet rather hating itself for this — a world of suburbs without cities, people with names like Nathan Bedford Forrest Shoaf [!], upper-middle-class white folk who can talk to other races and classes not only because of cheap labour and geographical proximity, but because in some cases these middle-class white folk were separated not by a few generations, but by a few college degrees or maybe only a few hundred thousand dollars and a few acquired social airs, from those other classes if not other races — a place not consecrated or condemned by history to a certain sort of generalised historical doom, but a place on the borderlands nervously checking itself for signs of modernity or liberalism or, conversely, godliness and timelessness — or, to put it another way, a simulacrum of the world in which I grew up, poor wretched place, neither Charlestown or Richmond, but the blank space on the map in between — Raleigh, my Raleigh, sister of Nashville in spirit if nothing else. Because of course, the anecdote is the natural idiom of the American South, and if Mr Brooks can talk from his own lack of experience, why should I not talk from mine?
Does that make any sense? I expect it doesn't.
The problem with Mr Brooks' article certainly isn't that the observation is bad. On the contrary, it's fantastically accurate — although it seems strange to read something that seems so normal to me atomised in tones of such amazement. But in a way, it could be boiled down, it seems to me, to a short paragraph along the following lines:
As recently as 1988, and probably much more recently, the better sort of Southerner would say, with a put-on accent but minimal irony, "The Republicans? Them's the party of Lincoln! Them's the folks that done burnt us out in '65!" Hence the first set of sane Southerners to be "out" Republicans (rather than secretly voting for Reagan while fundraising non-stop for the Democratic Party) were either people with nothing to lose, socially — or, in a few rare, starred cases, people so grand that it simply didn't matter. Unsurprisingly, the first places where such people felt it safe to band together socially were places on the periphery, where there were, frankly, few 'good families' and a lot of nouveaux types who had emotional and sometimes even genetic ties to the Old South but not the sort of name-related burden that operated [operates?] elsewhere; they were also, not to put too fine a point upon it, states which had not been universally pro-CSA during that terrible war, and hence where there was an honourable heritage of Republican voting (e.g. Tennessee). Thus finding that a God-fearing, recently middle class Tennessee man with some money is a Republican is — well, gratifying, perhaps, but not surprising. Find me a Republican candidate surnamed Pickett, or (the right sort) of Randolph or Carter, Broughton or even Lee — who grew up bare-footed, making friends with black children and living in those awesomely decrepit ancestral clapboard or old brick houses — and then we'll be getting somewhere.
My South, my poor broken South. For what can one do, faced with this sea of sloshing generalisations, than to get personal and anecdotal?
At least, unlike Mr Brooks, I'm writing about what I know. Born, as were so many Southerners, to a family in which being a Democrat was as natural and unproblematic as being a protestant Christian, I ended up a Republican Party member — but for heaven's sake, I'm (more or less) from Kentucky, I mourn family who marched with Sherman, my feelings about that terrible war are never going to be entirely 'Southern' feelings. (Rather, they are 'Kentuckian' feelings — paradoxical, self-destructive and unhelpful — and I certainly make no apology for them.)
But here's the point. Mr Brooks seems to say: 'Look at the WASPy aristocracy of the South — unlike the WASPy aristocracy of Yankeedom, they are still engaged, they are still winning!' To which one can only say: 'Look at the nouveaux hangers-on of peripheral states — look how they have jumped on the bandwagon of someone else's politics! Look how they are picking political stances according to rational [sic] decisions or a desire for power — ugh! Look how they have sold out to Yankeedom, to California, to a hell of a lot of things that are no part of their — of our — South!!'
Of course, whether I, or indeed the readers of ERO, think that decision is a good one or not is neither here nor there. Here's the truth. Something is dying in the South. If it hasn't died yet, the only signs will come from a few men with a few very obvious names, probably not doing much, but taking their wretched messed-up Democratic Party back and grabbing it by the scruff of the neck and making it fit for the few 'Yaller Dogs' who'd still consider voting for it. (I've met one or two such men, which is why — as perhaps you've guessed by now — for all their well-publicised flaws, I remain sentimental on this subject.) I'm not wrong, though. Sometimes honour is on the side of sticking with something you've signed up to, come hell or high water, and that is certainly how those few, dwindling, probably doomed Southern patricians view the old order.
There are though, even in the hands of as gifted an essayist as Mr Brooks, a few real howlers. Is Tennessee 'rich'? Last time I looked, it was one of the poorer states in the Union. And calling someone like Frist 'upper class' is simply mad. He isn't, which shows that Mr Brooks just won’t understand that there are parts of the world where this sort of thing still takes generations — as in, five or six or seven, and certainly at least a few war dead, governors, 'Episcopal bishops' etcetera, etcetera. There's no sense at all for how that ridiculous 'I'm going to start with clean water, jobs' (a wet effusion from Lamar Alexander) will play in the real South, or about what its relationship — a crucial point — to Democratic policy might be. And there's no sense, worst of all, of how the ground is sliding away under everyone's feet — how whatever money, communications and so forth there's been over the past few decades have altered the landscape. Nor is there enough about religion. Yet there are lines that, for all their poetic inaccuracy, one has to love: ‘Of course it's the South’, says Lamar Alexander, when vouching for the Southern credentials of Tennessee. ‘We go to church, hunt, and fish ... ’
And he got them in the right order, too! But then, Mr Brooks is right about other things. One thing that surprised me during my brief sojourn in Yankeedom was the need to 'connect' with people. If I met someone from Beacon Hill today, even in the most brief and glancing conversation, I'd feel the need to say 'When Toby Morse and I were at Amherst, and Eliza Sears came up for the day and we all went cross-country-skiing with Bertie Brewster, it was all such a hoot!' Well, in the South you'd never say that sort of thing — honestly, you'd die first — and instead, 'class' would come from things like calling some scruffy woman at the counter in a diner 'ma'am', and saying 'please' and 'thank you', and being patient about some mad person on a bus — and of course, once you got on the bus, sitting in the back with the black people, because I promise you, the grander sort of Southerner has as much depressing stupid witless liberal guilt as anyone else, he just has a funny way of showing it. Anyway, Mr Brooks hints at all of that very neatly. The observation is fine. It is just that he connects the dots in a faintly silly way, and in doing so, inexplicably misses the point of his own conclusion.
Thinking about the South is never without its bad moments — for an émigré like me, it is like holding someone else's cappuccino for too long after years of forswearing coffee. There are pains, the odd ad hominem screech of objection [or, Faulkernishly, abjection?], the odd sigh over how it's all gone. (And is this not the reason that every good book or song about the South is positioned as if written or sung about it by someone looking back from far away, as if a Southerner could only see the South from a distance?)
Poor South, poor old broken South. Of course, some of my friends here may well feel that it's deserved everything that's happened to it. It not only lost its most important war, but probably, at least at a certain social level, secretly enjoys this by now, or at any rate is so addicted to a certain complicated self-hatred that it could hardly live without it. Of course there are other social levels too — not least, the sort of people who still listen to 'Sweet Home Alabama' in their pickups, don't have too many black friends and always vote Republican now — who've bounced back. But who'd be like that?
Mr Brooks is both right and wrong. There probably is a new upper middle class taking power in peripheral Southern states, but it's been doing this for years, and I'd be careful about assuming that it hasn't had to take on board a lot of the formative prejudices and mores of that older upper middle class in order to do so; I'd remember that there are other Southern states where this process is by no means so far underway, and that in their heart of hearts the people in the peripheral states know this too; I'd be a little more careful than Mr Brooks is about pretending I fully understand the nature of the type of American conservatism that is growing up from such deep, twisted, strangely-nourished roots.
By way of conclusion, though: 'I don't hate it, I don't hate it' is what Quentin Compson, when at Harvard, used to shout to his boring Canadian friend in one of Faulkner's least good novels, of course referring as he did so to his birthplace, his people, his birthright — and who am I to demur?
Drusilla Breckinridge, January 24, 2003 01:19 PM