Conservative Southern Values Revived: How a Brutal Strain of American Aristocrats Have Come to Rule

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25. I really take issue with the argument that the problem is the wrong set of elites taking power.

The articles makes the claim that all our problems arose, essentially, because Northerners lost control of American culture when the South developed its own higher educational institutions and prosperous cities. Northern businessmen did not play any better of a role in Southern class or race relations than Southern elites did. They looked down on the music, food, and culture of the people who lived there--hillbillies, rednecks, worthless hicks, whose toothless, inbred, racist character was often invoked; the children of degenerate thieves, worthy of sterilization in the era of eugenics, who are still routinely portrayed as inferior and subhuman due to conditions that have nothing to do with ideology, and everything to do with good old fashioned classism--and exploited their labor in horrendous ways that were quite literally no better than slavery. Claiming that things would be better if Northerners had simply been allowed to dictate their superior views to their cultural and intellectual underlings is not one iota better than claiming that Southern elites should be able to control their underlings.