Neocons Hate the South
Since the Charleston shootings, GOP officials have been scrambling to comply with Leftist demands that Southern Whites be stripped of visible signs of their Confederate heritage. The GOP has actually been downplaying the Confederacy for years—Jeb Bush conspicuously removed Confederate banners and insignias from the Florida statehouse back in 2001. [Jeb Bush Ordered The Confederate Flag Removed From Florida Capitol 14 Years Ago, By Scott Conroy,Huffingtonpost.Com, June 19, 2015] (But the GOP’s efforts to dump the Mississippi state flag including the Southern Cross were frustrated when a majority of the population, including almost a quarter of the black population, voted to retain it).
Party operatives are stupid enough to believe that black votes are there for the taking if they run down the Confederacy ferociously enough; and that white Southerners will remain Republican no matter what. Plus of course the GOP’s whorish Big Business backers have capitulated, as when they withdrew support from the Boy Scouts of America for not accepting openly homosexual scoutmasters. But it is not so much blacks who seem offended by the Battle Flag(in South Carolina as much as 40% of the black inhabitants are content to leave it at the Capitol) as it is the national Main Stream Media—and above all the neoconservatives.
Neoconservatives have long stood out from other Republicans and members of Conservatism Inc. by virtue of the intensity of their loathing for the white South. And, as I demonstrate in my books on the American Conservative Movement, they have an almost total lock on the Conservative Establishment. The funding, media access, and all the leading publications of the movement are now controlled by neoconservatives. Other branches of conservatism survive, but they are either marginalized, like paleoconservatism, or merely tolerated dissent, like the Catholic Straussians and the socially leftist Libertarians—especially the ones, like the Randians, who vociferously support Israel.
Although neoconservative anti-Christian broadsides continued through the 1980s, with such Commentary contributors as Ruth Wisse and Hyam Maccoby, the Christian enemy took a back seat to other bêtes noires after the neoconservatives began to cultivate the Religious Right as part of a pro-Israel alliance.
But the neoconservatives were still in the forefront of South-bashing for decades, from their organized defamation of Mel Bradford, the conservative Southern candidate for the directorship of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1981, through the crusade to remove Mississippian Senate Majority leader Trent Lott in 2002 after he had too fulsomely praised (former segregationist, former Democrat) South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond on his hundredth birthday, to the bile they are now pouring on the already-isolated defenders of the Southern cause.
None of this need surprise us. The persistent neoconservative prejudice against the South sprang from the ethnically parochial culture in which the older generation of neoconservatives grew up. In my youth, I was struck by the malice with which New York Jewish visitors to Florida described their road trips through the land of “rural bigots.” Next to the Germans, whom they assured me—the child of Austrian Jewish immigrants—were all Nazis, these Southern “anti-Semites” were the most unpalatable humans they were forced to share the planet with.
Neoconservative beneficiary National Review Editor Rich Lowry referred in a recent column to “institutionally racist backwater” that was the white South before both government reconstruction efforts and the influx of Northern suburbanites redeemed it. That is a polite way of expressing the anti-Southern bigotry that I heard from New York Jews in the 1950s, before the South ceased to be the South.
In what looks like a staggering effort to outdo the media Left, the quintessentially neoconservative New York Post ran a column by Lou Lumenick (email him) on June 25, demanding that we retire “this much-loved but undeniably racist artifact,” the movie Gone with the Wind, from TV and movie theaters. [‘Gone with the Wind’ should go the way of the Confederate flag]. Although Lumenick and his patrons do not find this film classic to be as much in need of censorship as other more offensively pro-Confederate movies like Birth Of A Nation, what makes Gone with the Wind particularly “insidious” is its “subtle racism”—disguised by the fact that its black co-star received an Academy Award.
Subsequently, the New York Post uncovered more insidious evidence of pro-Confederate pollution, this time in the Big Apple. It seems that the German Jewish press magnate Adolf S. Ochs, who moved his operations to New York from Chattanooga, Tennessee, had “strong ties to the Confederacy.” His mother Bertha Levy Ochs was a charter member of the Daughters of the Confederacy, and Bertha’s son, who set up the New York Times, brought her illiberalism to the neocons’ home base on the Hudson. Ochs even managed to have a mosaic with a design allegedly resembling the Battle Flag inserted in a wall in the subway station at Times Square. (See above)[Confederate flags adorn this Times Square subway station, By Georgett Roberts and Amanda Lozada, June 25, 2015]
(This is an interesting inadvertent reminder that there were Confederate Jews).
Leave a Reply