The Dumb South: What to make of regional difference

[True Blue Door]

61. I have a couple of thoughts on the seeming intractability of the South.

The more optimistic one is that it's due to the legacy of Reconstruction being sabotaged, and that simply restarting some of that federal emphasis on making the South a fair, educated, equal, and prosperous place would eventually lead to better integration with the rest of the country.

The more cynical one says some cultures reach a point of no return down a path of cruelty, malignance, and consciously waging war on the truth. That past that point, a society has only one of three futures: Withering away to nothing in its own toxicity, turning cancerous and destroying this country, or once again being destroyed in self-defense by it.

You can fine-grain it all you like and say the usual "yeahbuts": Yeahbut there are plenty of good people; yeahbut so-and-so town elected a liberal Mayor; yeahbut, yeahbut, yeahbut. And yet despite the long and ever-receding predictions of liberalization, the modern North-South line has advanced slower than the trenches of the Somme while the Southern right radicalizes at breakneck pace (a phrase that seems horribly likely to become literal as the Tea Party sector eventually, probably rediscovers the joys of lynching that they seem so rhetorically nostalgic for).