From the beginning of my career in the 1950s, I have argued that the Left would have to learn some hard lessons from southern conservatives...The hard lessons I have had in mind, which especially concern the Left's rosy view of human nature and the irrationalities of its radical egalitarianism; may be gleamed in this book...
The northern victory in 1865 silenced a discretely southern interpretation of American history and national identity, and it promoted a contemptuous dismissal of all things southern as nasty, racist, immoral, and intellectually inferior.
...sanctified northern institutions and intentions, which included the unfettered expansion of a bourgeois world view and the suppression of alternate visions of social order.
In consequence, from that day to this, the southern conservative critique of modern gnosticism has been wrongly equated with racism and white supremacy.
We are witnessing a cultural and political atrocity - an increasingly successful campaign by the media and an academic elite to strip young white southerners and arguably black southerners as well, of their heritage, and, therefore, their identity. They are being taught to forget their forebears or to remember them with shame. Still we may doubt that many young southerners believe that Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens, John C. Calhoun, James Henly Thornwell, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson were other than admirable men. It is one thing to silence people, another to convince them. And to silence them on matters central to their self-respect and dignity is to play a dangerous game - to build up in them harsh resentments that, sooner or later, are likely to expode and bring out their worst.
The principal tradition of the South - the mainstream of its cultural development - has been quintessentially conservative.
Tradition - embodiment of "givens" that must constantly be fought for, recovered in each generation, and adjusted to new conditions.
-Eugene Genovese - The Southern Tradition
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