Don't Let the South Go

Chuck Thompson is by no means the first to argue that many of the nation’s pathologies can be traced back to the South. Tax policies fostering economic inequality; the rolling back of consumer, worker, and environmental protections; efforts to underfund public education so as to provide tax cuts for the wealthy and subsidies for the world’s most profitable energy companies; and end of times-driven foreign policy all have their core constituencies well south of the Potomac. Writers from Kevin Phillips to Michael Lind have been pointing this out for years. Nor is it novel to say that other parts of the country are falling under the South’s influence—Stephen Cummings’s The Dixification of America was published back in 1998, when few would have bet that Texas Governor George W. Bush could be elected president.