> I think I had hit home. These weird ideas have something to do
> with race and civil rights. Limbaugh does not give him his
> ideas, but confirms his feelings, or he wouldn't listen to him.
>
> Once, somebody told him the media is "lib'rul" and he clings
> to the notion. Who was that somebody? I'm now working on the
> suspicion that it was the Southern churches. Basically,
> throughout the South, it is the fundamentalist churches --
> the Baptists, Church of Christ, and much worse that inform
> folks, not the papers nor even TV. Gingrich's ascendancy
> is based on the alliance between the Republicans and the Southern
> churches. Or so I guess.
One source you might look into is at
http://www.anet-dfw.com/~crawfsh/Index.htm
which is devoted to examining the Neo-Confederate Movement. I haven't checked it out, really, but a couple of years ago I got some VERY interesting material from the guy who set up the site.
My own thoughts: Long before the 1950s was the 1830s. That's when the Abolitionists challenged the Colonizationists, who had created a nationally unifying ideology that combined eventual colonization of blacks in Africa with present-day tolerance for slavery. Only after this challenge began taking hold did the South turn toward active pro-slavery ideas.
It was the Yankee Abolitionists who were blamed for stirring up all the trouble--by revealing the hypocrisy of the colonizationist position -- an excellent example, BTW of what Lani Guinier describes as racial hegemony in some of the writings that got her in trouble.
I think they still resent Garrison, and have got his paper confused with the NYT.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"