I live in the South. I get how an arrogant invading force, like the modern federal government with its corporate-sponsored drug war, inspire generations of contempt for government. I hold our government in contempt for this reason, for their blatant corruption, but I'm smart enough to see that there is a lesser of evils. Many of my fellow Southerners also saw that, and voted for Democrats, until a black man became president so they ran into the arms of the shameless purveyors of racism and hate in America: the Republican Party.
I didn't support Obama in 2008 because I suspected he was going to play the triangulation game like Bill Clinton, and sure enough that happened. But I voted for him both times because Democrats still ostensibly support social security and medicare, although less and less so as they take more and more from corporate donors.
Meanwhile the Republicans openly wage war against the poor using Orwellian rhetoric of civil liberties and such which is intended to mask their agenda of Christianist fascism and totalitarianism.
Southern "rebels" like to say the civil war wasn't about slavery but about protecting their "heritage." Anyone with a modicum of intelligence know that is just a red herring. It is well-established that the civil war was about slavery. It was about cheap slave labor. It was about money. It was and is about Christian-based power structure. Like the Taliban, they hate Constitutional rights.
Fast forward to today and, as this study shows, we see the same dynamics ruling Southern politics. Any attempt by "outsiders" to criticize Southern racism, economics, etc., feeds right into their argument.
So this study cited by Thinkprogress doesn't surprise me at all. I have long maintained that Obama's election strongly influenced NC going red for the first time since Reconstruction: the inbred hatred of blacks, minorities, and liberals pushed "blue dog" Democrats from eastern NC into the racist-coddling arms of the Republican Party. Already though, those rural voters are realizing they've been duped. But in their inbred minds, at least they aren't aligned with the blacks on the other side of the tracks!
Drawing on a sample of more than 39,000 southern whites, we show that whites who currently live in counties that had high concentrations of slaves in 1860 are on average more conservative and express colder feelings towards African Americans than whites who live elsewhere in the South. That is, the larger the number of slaves in his or her county of residence in 1860, the greater the probability that a white Southerner today will identify as a Republican, express opposition to race-coded policies such as affirmative action, and express greater racial resentment towards African Americans. We show that these differences are robust to a variety of factors, including geography and mid-19th century economic conditions and political attitudes. We also show that our results strengthen when we instrument for the prevalence of slavery using local measures of the agricultural suitability to grow cotton. In fact, our findings indicate that in the counterfactual world where the South had no slaves in 1860, the political views of white Southerners today would be indistinguishable from those of similarly situated white Northerners.
http://thinkprogress.org/...
The study:
http://www.mattblackwell.org/...
My extended family comes from Alabama and Georgia and they are racists to some extent or other: the older generations more racist than the younger, the less-educated more racist than the educated.
Ever wonder why Republicans hate education so much? This is why. Their political power is based in ignorance, and ignorance breeds racial prejudice. This is how they get poor whites to vote against their best interests time and time again...
My mother is one of these people. She has no shame of her racism.
My cutting contact for a couple of years didn't change her a bit. She likes to say "that is how people were raised" or "you don't understand what blacks have done to whites in certain areas" to justify her support of this evil. She makes comments in front of my son which is intended to spread this evil. It appears to me to operate much like how sexual predators pass along their evil.
The bottom line: these people have been brainwashed.
This is what we are dealing with in America.
"You can always hire one half of the poor to kill the other half."
-Boss Tweed, Gangs of New York by Martin Scorcese