Conservatism and Racism, and Why in America They Are the Same

Chapter 3. The Special Place of the South in American Conservatism

CHAPTER THREE The Special Place of the South in American Conservatism The South is and always has been the most conservative part of America, conservative in an almost militant espousal of Lockean principles and institutions , as well as the only part of the country that claimed some sort of Burkean aristocratic or organic conservatism. The South also has always been the most racist part of the country. Here in a very simple and direct sense is the connection between racism and conservatism in America; for in spite of all the denials of southern intellectuals and politicians, past and present, the South’s militant conservatism was rooted fundamentally in its hyperracism. But it is more complex than this since, as observers from a wide range of vantage points have noted, southern conservatism is a fraud, schizophrenic, or what Hartz called the “madhouse of southern thought.” He called it a madhouse because it embraced Locke for whites, while, like virtually all white Americans, denying Locke to blacks. But almost at the same time many of the South’s leading thinkers rejected Locke because slavery could not be squared with his idea of inalienable natural rights. It is one thing to deny Africans civil rights as northern whites did, but to deny them liberty and their property in their labor was more difficult, leading to a full-throated embrace of a bastardized Burke. Although the South did have “something that resembled an aristocracy,”1 it rested on slavery, and no amount of “intellectual gymnastics” could make slavery justifiable on either Lockean or Burkean principles. Auerbach notes the irony: “Slavery had made southern conservatism possible; now conservatism was being used to justify slavery.”2 Thus, Southern conservatism was morally bankrupt, intellectually dishonest, and superficial. But there is more. A self-conscious conservatism did not emerge in the South until the rise of industrialism in the North, the emergence of the abolitionist movement, and the periodic slave rebellions and rumors of revolt. These developments posed a serious threat to the slaveocracy.3 Huntington 33 34 Conservatism and Racism, and Why in America They Are the Same draws the connection this way: “The combination of these forces which these events [Nat Turner’s revolt and the founding of William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator in 1831] symbolized forced the South on the defensive and led it to abandon its Jeffersonian heritage and develop a considerable apologia in the language of Burke.”4 Similarly, George Fitzhugh, after Calhoun perhaps the leading intellectual expositor of a distinctive southern conservatism, wrote “until the advent of abolitionism . . . the abstractions of the Declaration did little harm.”5 Localism and federalism are often considered abiding principles of southern conservatism. However, as Fehrenbacher and others have shown, it was not until southerners began losing or perceiving a loss in their predominant power in the federal government that they began to embrace states rights. “Thus, at a critical juncture, the Jeffersonian strategy of majoritarian politics had failed to provide adequate protection for the sectional institution of slavery , and many southerners accordingly began to place more reliance on the Jeffersonian theory of states-rights constitutionalism.”6 In other words, states rights, like many principles of southern conservatism, is not principled but reactionary, reaction in large part to the stirrings of oppressed Africans. In his sagacious Mind of the South W. J. Cash analyzed several enduring elements of southern tradition, of the southern mind. These include an intense individualism, a glorification of the agrarian, hostility to modernism, anti-intellectualism, localism, a tendency to violence, and a militant, evangelical Protestantism.7 However, Cash writes that the “ancient fixation on the Negro was always perhaps the single most primary thing. . . . The maintenance of the superiority to that black man is the thing in southern life.”8 This “hypnotic Negro-fixation,” this “fear and hatred” and the “terrorization of the Negro” and not the “shell of aristocracy” is the essential element in the distinctiveness of southern thought.9 As we briefly excavate the special place of the South in American conservatism, whatever its intellectual pretensions, not far below the surface is the “Negro bogey-man.”10 Slavery and the Burkean Variant of Southern Aristocratic Conservatism Slavery was not feudalism and the owners of the large plantations were not an aristocracy and there was little basis for an organic, society of harmony in the South that would sustain the European style conservatism validated by Burke. Instead, as Barrington Moore Jr. shows, rather than feudalism the southern plantation economy was a...