Why Do the Neocons Hate Dixie So?



“Howard Dean wants the white trash vote,” wrote Washington Post columnist
Charles Krauthammer in mockery of the Vermonter. “[T]hat’s clearly
what [Dean] meant when he said he wanted the votes of ‘guys with Confederate
flags in their pickup trucks.’”

After Dean was savaged by Al Sharpton, who called the Confederate flag an “American
swastika,” Krauthammer was rhapsodic. His humiliation serves Dean right,
Krauthammer chortled. He should never have pandered to Southern “yahoos”
and “rebel-yelling racist redneck[s].”

What is it in the wiring of these neocons that they so loathe white Southerners
who cherish the monuments, men, and memories of the Lost Cause?

Last December, Krauthammer, David Frum, and Jonah Goldberg squabbled noisily
over who was first to join the media mob that lynched Trent Lott for his tribute
to Senator Thurmond on Strom’s 100th birthday. When Lott lost his leadership
post, these neocons reveled.

Why the Hollywood Left hates Dixie is easy to understand. It is conservative,
Christian, traditionalist, hostile to the cultural revolution. But why do the
neocons? After all, the folks Krauthammer calls “white trash,” are
the most reliable conservative voters in America, God-and-country people. They
enlist in disproportionate numbers in the military and die in disproportionate
numbers in America’s wars.

The neocons are pro-Israel. So, too, are these folks who believe in standing
by Israel because the Bible tells them so. Yet, when it comes to Southerners
who revere the Confederate flag, neocons like Krauthammer echo that Washington
Post writer who dismissed white Southern Christians as “poor, uneducated
and easy to command.”

Yet, even the Post did not use the venom Krauthammer employed. Indeed, I never
heard George Wallace or Lester Maddox, whom I came to know late in their lives,
use the kind of language on political foes that Krauthammer uses on people he
doesn’t even know.

A point of personal privilege: I have family roots in the South, in Mississippi.
When the Civil War came, Cyrus Baldwin enlisted and did not survive Vicksburg.
William Buchanan of Okolona, who would marry Baldwin’s daughter, fought
at Atlanta and was captured by General Sherman. William Baldwin Buchanan was
the name given to my father and by him to my late brother.

As a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, I have been to their gatherings.
I spoke at the 2001 SCV convention in Lafayette, La. The Military Order of the
Stars and Bars presented me with a battle flag and a wooden canteen like the
ones my ancestors carried.

Has Krauthammer been to one of these meetings? Has he any knowledge of these
people he calls “white trash”?

Discussing the Dean-flag issue, one New York Times columnist wrote of the campaign
“to remove the Stars and Bars from the top of the South Carolina Statehouse.”
But it was not the Stars and Bars, first flag of the Confederate States of America,
that flew over that statehouse. It was the battle flag of the Confederate army,
with St. Andrew’s Cross on it, on which, tradition holds, the apostle
Andrew was crucified.

And that flag atop the statehouse flew beneath Old Glory. What were South Carolinians
saying by putting it there? Only this: “We are proud of the bravery of
our grandfathers who fought under this blood-stained banner, but we are Americans
and the Stars and Stripes represents our country now and forever.”

What is wrong with that?

To Krauthammer the battle flag is a racist symbol. And, yes, it has been used
by racists to insult and intimidate. But so, too, has the Christian cross when
it was burned on hillsides. And so, too, has the American flag.

These symbols are abused because they have power. But to Southern kids who
put battle-flag decals on book bags, and their fathers who put replicas on cars
and trucks, it does not mean they hate anyone. It means: “We love our
Southern heritage and we shall never forget our ancestors who fought and died
under this flag.”

Late in life, Joshua Chamberlain, the Union hero who won the Medal of Honor
for holding Little Round Top when Lee sent the Texans to turn Meade’s
flank on the second day at Gettysburg, said that whenever he saw that flag,
it recalled to him the indomitable courage of the men who had fought under it.
At re-enactments of Civil War battles, high-school football games, and NASCAR
races, that flag is ubiquitous across the South.

If Krauthammer and the neocons really believe the only folks who cherish this
symbol are “white trash” and “yahoos,” that tells us
more about them than it does about the South, of which they know nothing.

December 1, 2003 issueCopyright © 2003 The American Conservative

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