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[MFrohike]

64. I think of Jack Nicholson

You know that scene in A Few Good Men, where Nicholson gives his speech on the stand about a world with walls? I feel like that speech, suitably edited, is necessary at the moment. Why? This ignorant thread.

Tell you what, let's do a little historical exercise. Let's examine 20th century American history without the south.

1. No New Freedom. That means no central bank and no income tax. Southerners wrote and passed those laws. Guess they don't matter.

2. No New Deal. Again, guess who passed legislation like Glass-Steagall, the AAA, the NRA, the Public Utility Holding Company Act, the National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act), Social Security, FDIC, Fannie Mae, etc.?

3. No conscript army at Pearl Harbor. A draft had been held in 1940 to conscript soldiers for one year. In August 1941, the House extended the term of enlistment for another year by one vote. Southerners voted almost unanimously in favor of the extension. That first conscript army was the basis of American power in WW2.

Incidentally, it wasn't in the south that the America Firsters were popular. You had to go a bit north to find that bunch of Nazi bootlickers.

4. No Civil Rights Act or Voting Rights Act. Those bills would not have been nearly as strong as they were, if they even got cloture, without LBJ and Richard Russell. LBJ forced them through and Russell let him.

5. No Medicare or Medicaid. That dastardly old southerner LBJ at work again. Ditto for the Great Society and its few remaining successes.

6. No EPA. Again, guess who the committee chairmen were when that one got created.

That's just a few items. True, without the south there would have been no de jure segregation, but I don't think northerners should ever feel confident to boldly criticize the south on this issue unless they've faced up to the continuing residential segregation in their own backyard. The worst riots over integration weren't in Charlotte, they were in Boston.

I could really go on and on. McCarthy got slapped down by a southern senator named Sam Ervin. MacArthur got reamed by Richard Russell in a series of committee hearings. When Sam Ervin called for the impeachment of Nixon, the writing was on the wall. I'm a bit overly focused on the federal government, but there's plenty of evidence there to undercut any ludicrous notion that a divided country was a good idea.

The Democratic Party was historically a union of the south and northern ethics, such as Irish and Italians. You had fundamentalist Protestants and Catholics in the same party. No bullshit. You had southern drys and northern wets on the same side of the aisle. No joke at all. They were bound by common economic interests. They never had much commonality on social issues. Hell, Prohibition was the abortion of its day for the party base. It split the party wide open in 1924 and the rift really wasn't healed until the 1932 election.

The south has earned plenty of criticism throughout American history. It has also been a continuing wellspring of actual, effective action to remedy some of the worst ills in American history. Any suggestion that the US would be better off without us is both stupid and ignorant.