New South, Old Sensibilities

...Far from the antibureaucracy thrust pictured during Carter's Presidential campaign, it was designed to centralize the bureaucracy, wrench it from legislative control, and bring it more under the governor's influence...

...If the mainstream of Georgia politics is a 15 percent ADA rating, then it is clear that the future of Southern politics isn't going to be quite as liberal as Bass and DeVries have in mind...

...Georgia's Sam Nunn, labeled by Bass and DeVries as"representative of the mainstream of Georgia politics," has about a 15 percent ADA rating...

...A new amity conjoins the races, however wary it may be beneath the surface...

...Maybe the Republicans will put Humpty-Dumpty back together again...

...But, whatever institutional framework emerges, it is clear that liberalism will have a diminished role to play...

...Sure...

...Liberals will be left thrashing about in search of their old selfconfidence, trying to determine why their cities are crumbling, why their expensive social programs are failing, why their physical security is threatened, why their kids are turning on them...

...Those of us who are not children of the Enlightenment, who pine just a bit for the traditionalism of old, may lament its passing...

...Meanwhile, visitors come in increasing numbers to marvel at all that development, not excluding the world's tallest hotel...

...But problem-solving in Atlanta remains sensible...

...Social reformers may have battled capitalism in the rest of the nation, but the South dismissed both camps, clinging instead to older valuesmspirituality, chivalry, kinship with the soil, an appreciation of tragedy...

...There's nothing to be defensive about any more, least of all liberalism...

...Social planning seems more sensible too...

...In his influential book of 1949, Southern Politics in State and Nation, Key had argued that the South's native liberalism was evident in the Populist uprising of the 1880s and 1890s, an alliance of poor whites and blacks against the moneyed capitalists...

...With the new restrictions on raising and spending money, it will be exceedingly difficult for anyone who is not very wealthy to unseat an incumbent...

...Merry is a staff wrfter for the National Observer...

...There can be no question that Bass and DeVries are correct in perceiving major changes in the region this past generation, but in drawing upon Key's thesis they fundamentally misinterpret the character of the South, beginning with the character of Southern Populism...

...And the hostility and meanness the white South directed against the region's blacks illustrate the power of the reactionary impulse...

...And major dislocations were avoided...

...and that if it was not evident in subsequent years, it was because conservative "Bourbon forces" had suppressed the Populist alliance by disfranchising the blacks and otherwise setting the poor of both races against each other...

...The result could easily be more, not less, corruption...

...And with that old hostility and defensiveness goes the Old South, the last defender of a dying way of life...

...But it won't be old-style liberalism any more than it will be old-style racial conservatism...

...Atlanta, for example, is 65 percent black, and that percentage has been climbing steadily for years...

...And so they banded together and rebelled, just as they rebelled a couple of generations later when it was the abstractionists and moralists who invaded their homeland and assaulted their heritage...

...Florida's Lawton Chiles, another bright hope for liberals, has a 40 percent performance...

...That white support was very soft, and the pull of Carter's nativity can't last forever...

...All things considered, the enormous faith that many have in campaign reform laws seems unwarranted...

...The lingering question is whether Jimmy Carter knows how much he needs it too...

...Of course the South's resistance to the onslaught of modernity had its ugly side...

...As Yale historian C. Vann Woodward, author of The Burden of Southern History, puts it: "Economic convergence will not mean convergence in all things...

...As the New Republic says of Atlanta's black mayor, Maynard Jackson: "Though he may indulge the black masses with a little demagogy from time to time, he is not likely to challenge the economic order...

...And of course many Southern cities are experiencing the same problems facing any American city, most notably the problems of race and white flight...

...Of course it is true that economic growth has had a modernizing effect on the South, providing it with the wherewithal for those mental-health centers and other social programs that are the oft-noted legacy of New South politicians such as Jimmy Carter and Dale Bumpers...

...Finally, there is the familiar tendency of regulatory agencies to be captured and controlled by those whom they are supposed to regulate...

...The reduction in political competition, brought about by limiting the costly campaigning required to unseat incumbents, may also have the same effect as a reduction in market competition--namely, a reduction in responsiveness to the demands of consumers of political services...

...With the election of Jimmy Carter, everyone's been talking about the New South, especially liberals only too happy to congratulate themselves for their longstanding faith in V.O...

...To those Presidential candidates outside the established political duopoly--from independents like Eugene McCarthy to minority party candidates like Roger MacBride of the Libertarian Party--such massive public exposure could hardly appear nonpartisan...

...In other words, the New Southerners Bass and DeVries write about aren't conservatives, but neither are they liberals in the Humphrey mold, which is to say hopelessly do-goody, dedicated to the proposition that something approaching earthly perfection is a realizable goal...

...and malapportionment of state legislatures, which concentrated power in the hands of rural conservatives...

...He does seem at times to surrender to rationalism, cloaked in almost embarrassing idealism, and his foreign policy pronouncements often are reminiscent of that dishwater of modern world citizenship that Weaver spoke of...

...They didn't spout rhetoric about abolishing poverty or eradicating the pains of existence...

...Does he represent the actual New South...

...All of which would be apparent to anyone who understands the Southern past and the Southern legacy...

...To suggest, for example, that this movement represented a Robert IV...

...But whatever his true colors, he would do well to review the voting statistics of the election just past...

...It could spell serious tax-base problems, and Atlanta politicians and business leaders are worried about it...

...Government assistance programs...

...sending us country music, the citizens band radio craze, and the President of the United States...

...Just what the Southern destiny is--or the nation's destiny, for that matter-remains a difficult question as the nation passes from one political era to another...

...But as the South returns to the fold, it brings with it some of that cultural legacy from its long history as Western Civilization's last non-materialist society...

...Today the South has a new perspective on all that...

...There is no doubt that he appreciates the Southern heritage, understands the Southern idiom, and relies on the collective wisdom of his home region...

...Well, this is a little difficult to believe when liberalism is manifesting little more than a faint heartbeat even in the North...

...And they knew that the merchants and bankers back in town who held the lien on next year's crops--and would soon have a lien on the following year's as well--were robbing them of the dignity of their toil...

...markedly influencing our styles, arts, journalism, and habits of mind...

...So it was with the South's agrarian rebels...

...Are we to suppose that the New South, liberated from its old political straitjackets, will now join forces with the liberal North just in time to go under with Abe Beame's titanic mess...

...In this case, the mere creation of the Federal Election Commission was in itself an act of capture by the agency's creators --the incumbent parties and politicians...

...The Southerner's instinctive wariness over American liberalism found articulate expression in his rhetoric of the primaries...

...But they knew from hard experience that capitalism was a callous, impersonal, exploitive system, just as the Southern mind had sensed it would be long before Tom Watson began collecting followers...

...But to say that race hatred fomented by the Bourbon interests prevented the South from going liberal is to misunderstand the Southern mentality...

...disfranchisement...

...More accurately, it was the South's inherent hostility toward the modern liberal ethos, and its devotion to a dying order, that intensified Southern whites' feelings on that issue, the most profoundly complex the nation has faced or will face...

...While his victory was so narrow as to give just about every junior George Meany a lien on his Presidency, there was one voting bloc whose bolt from recent tradition gave Carter his crucial extra boost--the white South...

...He took some criticism from liberals because it was voluntary, but black leaders supported the plan in exchange for more say in running the city's schools...

...And you can still park in the central city for $1.10 a day and ride a bus across town for 15 cents...

...Merry New South, Old Sensibilities Gone is the rawial polities of the Old South, but the antique courtesy, the love of plaee, and abborrence of abstraction remain...

...But it was enough--and it was a clear signal that the Republicans, as weak as they are, could have survived the challenge of any Democrat except that South Georgia peanut farmer...

...The city is vibrant in a way that Newark and Detroit may never be again, and Forward Atlanta continues to collect big sums of money for downtown development...

...And as Weaver puts it: "It is very nearly true to say that if one scratches a Southern liberal, he finds, perhaps not a conservative, but at least one with strong convictions about individualism and local prerogative...

...The authors do not spell out exactly what the "transformation" will mean in policy directions, but they do suggest it will lead to more "people programs," more governmental intervention, more domestic social spending--in short, more of your standard liberal fare...

...16 The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1977...

...Even if he wants to, it's speculative whether the Democratic Party will let him...

...These increased obstacles to entry into the political market should tend to lengthen the average stay in office and augment the potential payoff from lobbying efforts and bribes, since investments in an incumbent are not apt to be lost in the next election...

...It will be something new, but with a hint of a Southern accent...

...I doubt that anyone, least of all Carter himself, knows for sure what he represents...

...Or does he represent the confused New South Bass and DeVries write about...

...Gone is ihe old hostility toward business and capital...

...lost causes always do...

...Four institutions, Key believed, helped to perpetuate conservative hegemony: the one-party system...

...The South, in short, is returning to the fold...

...He remains, in short, an enigma...

...A case in point was Atlanta's busing plan, which Carter took credit for during the late campaign...

...No doubt...

...Arkansas' Dale Bumpers, the pride of New South liberals, has voted the ADA line less than 65 percent the past two years...

...And into that vacuum comes a new self-confident South that is rising as predicted...

...With the state treasury overflowing due to Georgia's economic growth, such a power shift was inevitable...

...It was an anticapitalist revolt, yes, but it never embraced the shibboleths of Northern social reformers...

...A good index is the rating scale put out annually by that desperate vestige of old-style liberalism, the Americans for Democratic Action, to which Humphrey regularly pays obeisance with 95 percent performances...

...the use of blacks as political scapegoats...

...Who knows...

...And it has bolstered the power of centralized state governments at the expense of the old courthouse-legislature hegemony...

...They didn't get themselves raveled up in the yarns of liberal abstraction...

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...And the South is shedding some of that reluctance about government social spending, too-not least because it has been the beneficiary of enormous federal largesse...

...But the Southern influence isn't likely to be insensitive to the idea of community (compare Atlanta's busing situation with Boston's), or to place absolute trust in faraway bureaucrats, or to permit the erosion of our military strength to dangerous levels...

...The liberalism of [North Carolinian Charles Brantley] Aycock, as well as that of...others who could be named, took the form of a battle for specific improvements, but did not include a surrender to rationalism, or 'the dishwater of modern world citizenship...

...The Election Commission ruled that the League of Women Voters could donate hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the networks could forego $2 million apiece in revenues, because the debate would be "nonpartisan...

...Gone too is the old defensiveness toward liberalism...

...They didn't place their faith in the idea of progress...

...liberal strain in the region is to miss the point...

...Pragmatism...

...Limitations on campaign contributions can be partially circumvented by such expedients as hiring the candidate's law fu'm or giving honoraria for speeches...

...Now comes a book by Jack Bass and Walter DeVries, with the revelation that these institutions have crumbled (The Transformation of Southern Politics, Basic Books, $15.95...

...He lost that vote--by 47.6 percent to 51.3 percent...

...including] much of the old courtesy, the antique personalism, the familial ambience, the love of place, the abhorrence of abstraction, the fear of being computerized...

...gaining on the rest of the country in population, business opportunities, and share of the Gross National Product...

...Whether Jimmy Carter will be the beneficiary of all this remains to be seen...

...The arguments over the Ford-Carter television debates provide an example...

...Take Carter's famous reorganization, for example...

...But Southern Populism would reassert itself, he maintained, as soon as these institutions crumbled...

...Much of the old distinctiveness will be retained...

...The profound conservative antipathy to capitalism is also disThe Alternative: An American Spectator May 1977 15 appearing, as new factories, new people, and new money transform the South into one of the fastest growing and most prosperous regions in the country...

...But it was more than any other recent Democrat had received--and enough, combined with his 92 percent Southern black vote (a typical Democratic harves0, to carry the region...

...But even if limitations are successful, they will have many unexpected drawbacks...

...As Richard Weaver has shown so well, the tragic role of Southern culture has been to stand athwart history, issuing a plaintive protest against the onslaught of Western rationalism and materialism...

...Key and the South's inherent liberalism...

...But the primaries are over, and the new President hasn't been the same since...

...Maybe a new party of some sort will emerge...

...All of which brings us to that enigmatic figure who inspired so much of this talk of the New South in the first place, Jimmy Carter...

...they're not likely to strangle the private economy there with public-sector spending...

...It was a signal also that the South has arrived, and with it a new era in American politics...

...But American politics needs the New South at this time in history...