> That's the problem. Southerners are *not* losers. You'd have every
> reason to believe the Confederacy was the actual victor of the Civil
> War the way Southern cultural norms -- anti-intellectualism,
> hyper-religiosity, veneration of the military, hostility to organized
> labor, etc. -- have come to define US society as a whole.
Come on. The South is a huge geographical region with just as much social complexity as any other region in the U.S. The "Southern cultural norms" you cite are all over the U.S. -- and have been in some places ever since the white settlers arrived. Western Michigan is a good example. You make it sound as if every other region of the U.S. was a lot like France until these ig-nant Southern cultural norms took over.
> But despite the remarkable cultural hegemony the South has achieved,
> there is nothing Southerners enjoy more than a good wallow in
> self-pity over their "Lost Cause."
Well I've lived in NC for 2 1/2 years now and I have met exactly one such person: a horrible tour guide in Charleston, SC. I now know a lot of white Southerners who admit their ancestors fought in the Civil War and owned slaves, and you can tell they feel embarrassed and ashamed by it -- and by their relatives who aren't. And by the way, you can be certain that black Southerners are glad the Confederacy lost (or do they not count as Southerners? -- if not, that would be news to them!)
The one thing that has really struck my wife and I since we've lived down here is that people are _far_ more integrated here than they are in the Midwest, where we're from. "Based on the Census analysis, the top five most segregated metro areas were Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis and Newark, NJ, according to the Chicago Sun-Times." http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1355/is_26_102/ai_95632042 It's common to see integrated groups of black and white teenagers at the mall, for example, which is pretty rare in blue states like MN.
There are reactionaries everywhere -- there are certainly more in the South. But I don't see why that ought to make it intellectually respectable to make sweeping generalizations about the region -- even whites in the region. That's just silly.
-WD