Maybe it’s the Heat: An Irreverent Look at Southern Politics

(Copyright 2012 by L.A. Hill)

It wasn’t all that long ago that the road to the White House supposedly led through Dixie. This perception owed much to the intermittent successes of Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. Their Southern ties were allegedly helpful in breaching the otherwise solidly conservative South. It also owed much to Richard Nixon, whose infamous Southern strategy helped end Democratic dominance in the region. Recent events, however, cast doubt on this wisdom.

Clinton, for instance, didn’t need to take any Southern states at all. He would have won the Presidency without Georgia, Tennessee, Louisiana and Arkansas in ’92 and without Florida, Tennessee, Louisiana and Arkansas in ’96. Likewise, Obama, who managed to take Virginia, North Carolina and Florida in ’08, could have given John McCain all 55 of his Southern-fried electoral votes and still have won by a larger margin than Dubya enjoyed in either 2000 or 2004. 

So much for perception. Not only does the South presently mean very little in Presidential politics – irrespective of Rick Perry’s possible candidacy – but it meant as little twenty years ago.

Still, maybe this shouldn’t be a surprise. Maybe politics in the South often consist of more rhetoric than substance, more perception than reality, heavy on color and eccentricity but a bit thinner on long-term influence than her native sons would have you believe. You might say that, in today’s political arena, Southerners are more Sydney Greenstreet than Humphrey Bogart: colorful and informed, perhaps, but not exactly leading man material and not too terribly intricate to the plot. Case in point: Newt Gingrich, who, it turns out, is still running for President (who knew?). 

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Historically, Southern statesmen were rather prominent. There were, for instance, a slew of important Virginians, so many in fact that most school children only ever bother to learn the ones that were President, forgetting such luminaries as John Randolph of Roanoke (who was himself a bit of an eccentric) and a whole horde of guys named Lee who weren’t named Robert. But the Upper South (see also Maryland) seems to have been infected by the mediocrity, and the preposterousness, of the Deep South’s longer-term political dysfunction. After all, only the Deep South has ever produced an impeached President. And we’ve done it twice. What’s more: Only in the South could Zell Miller get a popularity bump from wanting to challenge Chris Matthews to a duel on national television. And only the South could cultivate a real-life John Grisham villain like John Edwards.

What Mencken once wrote about Southern art might well apply to today’s Southern politicians. “Down there a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician.  It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity.” To the Sage of Baltimore, politics, even in the Upper South, were “cheap, ignorant, parochial, idiotic,” with “scarcely a man in office above the rank of a professional job-seeker…” And just think: Mencken wrote that light-years before George Allen went around calling people monkeys.

The question, really, is why? Why does the talent pool of Southern statecraft suddenly –and so often – double as a drowning pool? I can think of five plausible, though imperfect, theories. Consider:

 1. If They Could Ever Just Get It on Paper  

Maybe the South’s great politician shortage is due to the very credible possibility that many of her intellectuals take to writing.

Ernest Hemingway (not a Southerner) famously said something about how all American literature owes a debt to Twain’s Huck Finn, and although Twain was a Missourian (thus also not a Southerner), his white suits and penchant for smoking and saying genuinely witty things about Yankees made him a Southerner in all but birthright. And when Faulkner later said something nice about him, that sealed his fate as a de facto Serious Southern Writer.

With Twain’s legacy hanging in the balance, what kind of Southern man, or woman, would dare bother with such trivial things as statecraft? Indeed, the South’s firm grip on American literature must be preserved against the onslaught of the great many authors who may have read Faulkner, but never really heard him, the sort of gents who think Gone with the Wind is just another melodrama and who throw darts at worn pictures of Tom Wolfe during extended periods of boredom and writer’s block.

Of course, there’s no reason why a Southern politician can’t also write. Other great architects of statecraft have written. Disraeli did it (and he’s still right about the Corn Laws).   

  

2. Mad Dogs and Southerners 

Maybe it’s all on account of the heat. Geographically speaking, Old Dominions like Jefferson and Madison were only nominally Southern; for while it can be dreadfully swampy and muggy in the Mid-Atlantic – as anybody who’s ever visited D.C. in the summertime can attest – Virginia gentlemen don’t cook in the sun like their counterparts do in the deep, way-down South. Some say that the reason Sherman burned his way to Savannah so easily was because everything was already smoking.

“Mad dogs and Englishmen,” the song goes, “go out in the midday sun.” Well, so too do Southerners. Most Britons, however, finally retreated from their colonial outposts back to their homeland, which is a far more suitable climate for venturing forth midday. Southerners, on the other hand, have withstood Dixieland’s warm temperatures for well over three hundred consecutive years. All that heat and humidity is bound to boil your brain, to the point where, if you’re Lester Maddox for instance, you might forget which way to ride your bicycle.  

That said, the South has no shortage of ways to stay cool, air conditioning not always being among them. Ceiling fans are useful. Seersucker is essential. And no Southerner who’s any Southerner doesn’t occasionally partake in a few cocktails on the rocks, a point which segues nicely into…

3. The Southern Art of Inebriation, or Bourbon: America’s (Official) Native Spirit Since 1964  

Maybe there’s a shortage of durable Southern political talent because Southerners tend to drink. Famously drink.

The have-nots, for instance, drink in part because they have nothing else to do and in part because they have an incurable addiction for government exploitation – i.e., the more the gub’ment taxes cigarettes and alcohol, the more inclined are welfare recipients to smoke and drink. Their desire is irrepressible, like Dr. Strangelove’s hand. I don’t know if this is learned or if Radical Republicans put something in the water during Reconstruction.  

The well-to-do, on the other hand, drink because their ancestors drank. Some say this lineage of alcoholics is traceable to the aftermath of the late great unpleasantness, when planters and other stylized aristocrats drowned their sorrows in bourbon-filled decanters, but it can probably be traced back even farther than that, to the mother country in fact, where folks have an ancient penchant for slugging whisky; a good Southerner, after all, is essentially an Englishman on the wrong side of the pond.

Southern intellectuals drink because they want to be initiated into that fraternity of Serious Southern Writers, and they know, as does everyone, that Faulkner never got where he did sober. Admittedly, there are grave risks to drinking oneself into oblivion just for the sake of literature. Faulkner, after all, never could keep his tenses straight, and, Lord, did he love run-ons. But blackout often enough and you might come-to with a Pulitzer or a Nobel Prize sitting on your mantle. 

Such copious amounts of alcohol have to account for at least some of the reason why Southerners either fall off the wagon of political stability or, else, never even manage to board. But even this theory, which is probably superior to the others, has problems:

First, many Southern politicos wind up drying out when they eventually find Jesus, which they all do. 

Second, drinking excessively was never a problem for many non-Southern politicos. Buckley, for instance, liked a good nip, and Churchill, who wasn’t all that shabby at governing, famously drank like a fish.

4. The Religiosity of College Football

Folks in the South take their college football the way they take their bourbon – seriously. Maybe too seriously. The unbearable strains of the college football season are enough to make even the most resolute of men crack. And although a once-fanatic alumnus may eventually learn to temper his emotional investment, all it takes to send a man into perpetual orbit around the cuckoo’s nest is one, single, last-minute, heartbreaking loss to a conference rival.

Then again, it’s not always losing that drives men to instability; some men actually crack under the euphoria of winning. The institutionalization of Louisiana Governor Earl Long, who once attended Louisiana State, came a year after LSU won the Southeastern Conference. Coincidence? Probably not.

And then there was former Texas Governor Bill Clements, who, between stints as Chief Executive, paid Southern Methodist student-athletes from a slush fund.  Clements, though, wasn’t impeached, for reasons which should be clear to any Southerner – politicians down here may have quirks; they may have a short shelf life; and they may be incorrigible; but they’re only as crazy as their constituents. 

The problem with the theory that the intensity of college athletics sends otherwise competent politicians into the loony bin is that, because so many schools in the South have entrenched winning traditions, their politically aspirant alumni can coast through life comforted by the successes they’ve already witnessed and thereby refrain from stressing too terribly much about victories yet to come. Long droughts, of course, might cause some men to relapse into seriously poor decision making, a la Clements, but few schools go through long droughts. It’s simply not tolerated. South Carolinians, for instance, will keep Strom Thurmond in the Senate for a half-century, but go a few seasons without beating Clemson and the Head Ball Coach in Columbia will be looking for a new job – guaranteed.

5. Behind Every Good Man…

Traditional Southern women are particularly skilled at having fun. This is certainly true of the Southern politician’s wife.

Almost every future male Guvnah or Sinnittuh dated, for at least some period in college, a sweet sorority girl. This girl accompanied him to college football games and socials and band parties and picnics at Twelve Oaks, always with a Dixie-Cupped cocktail in-hand or with a longneck wrapped in a koozie. Her light feet on the dance floor and ability to consume copious amounts of alcohol (see above – it applies to Great Southern Women, too), all the while displaying mannerly charm, entrenched in her then-beau the theory of the consummate Southern socialite, an idea which he then looked for in every potential mate.

Later, after one of these socialites becomes his wife, she uses her social skills to host her own gatherings, which always include well-stocked wet bars and a graduation from Dixie Cups to some combination of old fashioned tumblers and thin-stemmed flutes. This lifestyle of perpetual socializing only intensifies as her hubby-politician climbs each rung on his way to the proverbial top. The higher he ascends, the bigger the parties; the bigger the parties, the bigger the cocktails; the bigger the cocktails, the fewer the brain cells. And so on.

In other words, this theory is related to the theory that Southern men perhaps drink too much, a theory which I’ve already disproved.       

Of course, it’s hard to discuss the destabilizing impact women have on Southern politics without discussing the obvious – sex. More than a few aspiring Southern political careers have been derailed because of adulterous affairs. The thing is, I’ve no idea why Southern men are so bad at philandering. They should be quite adept at it, primarily because the South retained a sense of class and hierarchy long after the rest of the country democratized; aristocracies, in turn, require restraint. But when every man became a king, although no man wore a crown, every man subsequently became accustomed to aristocratic privileges without the necessary virtues for enjoying them; i.e., adultery, being immoral, should, above all things, be discrete. But discretion is necessarily rare in our democratic age, even in the South, which, like everything else, eventually gave way to democratization and all of its egalitarian pitfalls. 

If former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford had been a noble, maybe he would have been better at keeping his quirky, extramarital affair discrete. Nothing can end your governorship more prematurely, and scuttle your presidential ambitions quicker, than going to hike the Appalachian Trail… in Argentina. A Windsor would have known better.

Incidentally, in today’s post-feminist age, it is necessary to ask whether men cause female politicians to come unwound?  Perhaps. But it hasn’t been long enough since the glass ceiling shattered to consider the root of female politico instability, which may or may not be the same as that of the male variety.  And at any rate, most – though not all – of the Deep South’s crazy female politicos are either minor, unimportant Members of Congress, or ex-Governors from Alaska. Admittedly, Alaska is about as distant as geographically possible from the South. But Southerners have embraced said ex-Governor as one of our own. Lord only knows why. We have more than enough of our own walking non-sequiturs to go around. We needn’t adopt others.

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The foregoing theories of Southern instability, as irreverent as they are, nevertheless conceal a sacred truth: Southerners may be strange, but we’re still infinitely better off than any Yankee. 

Yankees don’t write like we do in the South; they don’t drink like we do; it’s cold like the Siberian wilderness up there; and their brand of college football is far inferior; what’s more, their women…

…Well, reflect on the two most recent Yankee First Ladies:

Michelle Obama is to today’s school children what Nurse Ratched was to R.P. McMurphy, keeping red-blooded American boys away from their World Series games and s’mores; and Hillary – who only married a Southerner; she couldn’t convert – hasn’t seen a good looking skirt since her husband asked what the definition of “is” is. 

In that kind of environment – cold, aloof, sober and puritanical – you get a whole different kind of political instability. 

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All sarcasm aside, there is much to be proud of in Southern political history. Mencken, to his credit, didn’t think that the South would always be barren of culture and class, nor can it. But this doesn’t change the fact that the days of great Southern statesmen seem to be on hold, nor does it change the fact that the road to the White House, and thus the road to healthcare reform, to reining in the budget and to narrowing our foreign policy, runs around, and not through, Dixie. This is particularly unfortunate because Southern conservatism, historically unique in so many ways, could be a great bulwark against, both, the collectivist and individualist tendencies present in Washington. 

Southern conservatism once drew from a succession of such minds as James Madison, John Marshall, John Randolph and John C. Calhoun. Today, though, Southern conservatism increasingly seems less and less conservative, having transformed into a shallow, generic, anti-statist populism. Moreover, even though such men as Marshall and Randolph differed in their views on consolidation and local control, they sought the same ends: the pursuit of virtue and ordered liberty. Today’s Southern “conservative,” on the other hand, seems to value liberty and self-preservation more than order; he bears an optimism reminiscent of Jeffersonianism (which is neither conservative nor Southern); and he is as egalitarian as his progressive enemies. Hence the unique support in the South for the Tea Party, even though Calhoun, who is still revered in Southern history, would perhaps be reluctant: “Who knows not that if you would save the people, you must often oppose them?” Indeed.   

The South isn’t as Southern as it used to be. But nor is conservatism as conservative. I’ve tried asking my intellectual friends if this is a coincidence, but they’re too busy trying to pen their magnum opus amidst a bourbon-induced haze.

As it stands, though, I’d venture that the answer is “no.”

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