The "Neoconfederacy"

For a few years I have had the unsettled feeling that we were entering a period of American history where much like the Jim Crow years we had two regions of states with wildly different laws and worldviews.  This division is largely over pluralism and the acceptance of people who are different from us -- gays, immigrants, Muslims.  And also involving battles over women's rights and the rights of people to vote, as we saw this last campaign cycle.  All together fit under the pluralism rubric for me.

Writing for Salon.com Andrew O'Heir calls this era a "New Civil War" and that there is a "Neoconfederacy" of Southern and Plains states that is using the rhetoric of the 19th century to argue against the worldview and social progress of the 21st.  For example:

At the moment, two women who get married in Iowa will have no legal relationship if they move to Kansas, and a teenage girl in Seattle can easily get a safe and legal abortion while her cousin in Dallas faces mandatory counseling, a 24-hour waiting period and a parental consent law. (If they have another cousin in rural Mississippi, she probably won’t find legal abortion services under any terms.)

Regardless of how you feel about those issues, that’s nuts. No nation-state can function indefinitely on that kind of patchwork-quilt basis. 

 

Comments

[John K.]

I'm with you Scott, and it's unsettling. All my life I've felt resolute about wanting to live in Oklahoma. There are things I don't like here, but some of us have to fight to see those things changed. To leave would be, in a sense, to give in. Lately, though, with my retirement coming up pretty soon and one-party rule that is concocting ever-stranger ways to make like miserable, for the first time I'm starting to think I really may have to consider living elsewhere.

[Johnny Media]

I put DAMN YANKEE on my hard hat at work six years ago and within a week had a white supremist in my face threatening me with bodily harm. This is obvious stuf, but the big journalists don't see it. You see it, I see it--why doesn't everyone else? --Johnny Media