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Neo-Confederates in the Basement: The League of the South and the Crusade against Southern Emasculation
- Louisiana State University Press
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Neo-Confederates in the Basement The League of the South and the Crusade against Southern Emasculation michael prince It’s only in the South that the past is a curse, an industry, an institution, a constant companion who’s not always soft-spoken and discreet. —hal crowther, Cathedrals of Kudzu It has often been said that, though Germany and Japan lost the war, they won the peace. By the same measure, it might also be said that the South lost its war but won the peace that followed—and did so by, as Walker Percy put it, “taking over the national myth.”1 Percy was, of course, referring to what some have dubbed the “Dixiefication of America,”2 in particular its entertainments and its politics. This phenomenon is merely an extension of the post–Civil War national romance with southern myths and the southern mystique that grew out of them. There are others, however, who see things in quite the opposite way. Rather than a triumphant South, they see a South on the verge of surrendering to prevailing national myths. The “Americanization of Dixie” poses a threat, as they see it, not only to the South’s sense of itself but to the historical, cultural, and political underpinnings supporting the South’s separate and distinct identity. For them, the glass is already at least half empty and getting emptier all the time. Thus it is that those in the southern heritage movement, with the neo-Confederate movement at its core, have take up the cause once more, to fight what they see as the manly fight of their ancestors in defense of southern honor and southern identity. If manliness—at least from the point of view of males—may be defined as the ability to set one’s own course, to exercise independent control over one’s destiny and, as such, to reject submissiveness to outside dictates, then emasculation could be defined as the loss of this sense of self-sovereignty, accompanied by resentment over the imposition from outside of norms and rules that do not adhere to or, indeed, discredit and undermine what one considers a good and proper way of living. The southern heritage movement is largely an expression of wounded pride and injured machismo, an attempt to reestablish control over regional self-definition and to reassert a Burkean view of the way things ought to be. The southern traditionalists and neo-Confederates of the southern heritage movement set themselves against the tide of social and political dislocation that they see undermining “normality” and traditional order. For them, the struggle is embodied in the battle to define the southern past and through it southern identity. It is there that they have chosen to take their stand. The South has been chasing after a durable identity for the past century and a half or more—at least since the “late, great unpleasantness.” Every time the South thinks it has a tight hold on its identity, along comes another “New South” to knock it off balance and set it grappling for a tighter grip on something more stable and everlasting. The most recent New South came in the guise of the social and political shifts of the 1960s—and their echoes in the “multiculturalism” of the 1970s and 80s. The social-cultural change that swept the nation during the 1960s—civil rights, the sexual revolution, the women’s movement, etc.—posed a direct challenge to the fundamentally conservative and masculine mores of the traditionalist South. In its wake came the politics of social reform carried out by an “activist” government and urged on by national media. These agents of change not only encouraged these developments (by encoding them in law, for example), they also further undermined the local community’s sense of autonomy—of its ability to deal with change as it saw fit. Together, they posed an elemental threat to the southern way of life, as defined by regional traditionalists. But it was the multiculturalist “assault” on the South—on its historical memory and, in particular, on its symbols and heroes—that finally led southern traditionalists to feel compelled to mount a countercharge. Acceding to or tolerating social and cultural change was bad enough, they felt, but acquiescing to “libel” on the southern past, to a concerted campaign to discredit Confederate-era gallants and to remove or eliminate the South’s premier symbol, the Confederate “battle 147 Neo-Confederates in the Basement [54...