April in the South

                                                                                         

April is an important month in American history. The Civil War both began and ended in April; between the April of Fort Sumter and the April of Appomattox Court House, more than half a million Americans died on battlefields stretching from Pennsylvania to Arizona.The North won the Civil War, of course, but in some ways the lines that divided blue from gray in the 1860s never completely went away. The South remains a different place from the rest of the country, its culture and history still distinctive in many ways. Recent trends in American politics have magnified the divisions between the South and the rest of the country; polls taken during the first few months of the Obama Administration have shown a sharp divide between the South (deeply skeptical of Obama and supportive of his Republican opponents) and the North, Midwest, and West (deeply skeptical of the Republicans and broadly supportive of Obama). Some commentators have even suggested that the modern-day Republican Party is in danger of becoming a regional party, viable only in the South. (What an irony for the famed Party of Lincoln!) A few disaffected conservative leaders have even begun speaking of secession.That kind of talk surely amounts to nothing more than overheated political rhetoric. But in the South, US History echoes in its own unique way. "The past is never dead," as the great southern novelist William Faulkner famously wrote. "It's not even past." (That, incidentally, works pretty well as a quick-and-dirty plot summary of his short story A Rose For Emily.) It's easy for outsiders to dismiss the South's opposition to the Obama movement as nothing more than racism, the latest chapter in a book that moves more or less directly from Uncle Tom's Cabin to To Kill A Mockingbird to the present.But while race matters, race isn't all that matters. If the South seems increasingly out of touch with the rest of the country on matters of political opinion, that difference is rooted in factors as much cultural and historical as it is in factors nakedly racial. The South has long embraced a kind of nostalgic conservatism; Obama and his progressive supporters, no matter their skin color, threaten that worldview. The question now is whether Obama can figure out how to bridge that gap, bringing the South back into alignment with the rest of the country… or whether the sections will continue to drift apart, as they did across those horrible Aprils 150 years ago.

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