The normally neo-fascist Opinion page of the Wall St. Journal offered up some big props Monday in an essay by James Webb, a former U.S. Navy Secretary and author of "Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America."
Webb offers a thumbnail description of a minority culture in America that has been rather influential over the past 300 years: white guys. Not your evil, destroy the world for profits white guys who own everything, but white guys who embrace a culture that is:
...populist and inclusive, which has caused other ethnic groups to gravitate toward it.
Webb says these are the "guys with the Confederate flags on their pickup trucks" to whom John Dean was reaching out. Democrats will learn to engage them, Webb teases, and "John Edwards is at his visceral best" when doing just that.
If you can overlook for a moment that these "guys" are directly descended from (and still beneficiaries of) owners of slaves and murderers of indigenous people everywhere, they possess, in Webb's idealized characterization, some pretty admirable ideals and tendencies.
I can't provide a direct link to Webb's essay, "Secret GOP Weapon: The Scots-Irish Vote" (no subscription), but I've excerpted several of the most applicable lines. Consider:
Why are the 30 million Scotch-Irish, who may well be America's strongest cultural force, so invisible to America's intellectual elites? It is commonplace for commentators to lump together those who are descended from British roots into the WASP culture typified by New england Brahmins, or the Irish, who are overwhelmingly Catholic. But it is political nonsense to consider the Scots-Irish as part of either.
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True America-style democracy has its origins in this culture. Its values emanated from the Scottish Kirk, which had thrown out the top-down hierarchy of the Catholic Church and replaced it with governing councils made up of ordinary citizens.
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The Scots who headed into the feuds of 17th century Ulster, and then into the backlands of the American frontier, hardened further into a radicalism that proclaimed that no man has a duty to obey a government if its edicts violated his moral conscience.
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They demanded strong leaders, but would never tolerate one who considered himself above his fellows. Andrew Jackson, the first president of Scots-Irish descent, forever changed the style of American politics, creating a movement that even today is characterized as Jacksonian democracy.
Webb's conclusion is the most compelling of all. He seems to set the stage for Edwards/Obama 2012:
The decline in public education and the outsourcing of jobs has hit this culture hard.
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Their sons and daughters serve in large numbers in a war whose validity is increasingly coming into question. In fact, the greatest realignment in modern politics would take place rather quickly if the right national leader found a way to bring the Scots-Irish and African-Americans to the same table, and so to redefine a formula that has consciously set them apart for the past two centuries.
Maybe Obama/Edwards instead.