Southern Conservatives as the US Third Party

[lpetrich]

Southern Conservatives Are America's Third Party -- nice article on this subject.

A system of winner take-all-elections and single-member Congressional districts has concentrated American political power into two parties. Over the centuries those two parties have carried different names and brands, but their composition has remained remarkably constant.

Democrats have traditionally been the party of farmers and laborers. Republicans were the party of tradesmen, merchants, investors and professionals. Both parties supported a broad spectrum of liberals and conservatives and neither of them fully dominated any geography outside the South. Splinter parties and offshoots appeared from time to time, but this Republican/Democratic dichotomy has defined our system from its earliest days.

There is an unofficial third party, the party of the southeastern states, the party of the former Confederacy. This party has effectively had one-party rule over its domain, and it has been in coalition with one or the other of the two main parties. First the Democrats, until northern Democrats started talking about black civil rights at the end of World War II. They split off as the "Dixiecrats", and over the next half-century, they gradually shifted allegiance from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, changing the latter party from the party of Abraham Lincoln to the party of Jefferson Davis.

Southern conservatism presumes the existence of a natural, inherited hierarchy. As Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens explained in his criticism of the US constitutional order, “They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.”

Quoting from his "Cornerstone Speech" in which he argued that the honky race is the race that ought to rule.

Southern conservatism finds freedom and equality, by its unique definitions, through adherence to a social hierarchy based on race, Christianity, a male duty to protect women, and a commodity-driven economy.

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This bloc falls into occasional alignment with business interests due to their far greater fear of central government power. Their distrust of bankers and industrialists is less pressing than their loathing of a central government premised on “all men are created equal.”

...
Southern conservatism held two supreme prerogatives: 1) Central government must remain as weak as possible, and 2) White racial and cultural supremacy must be enforced at all costs. ...

Voting rights were jealously guarded and subject to a myriad of largely arbitrary local limitations. A system of private violence, without recourse to the justice system, was leveraged to maintain cultural conformity.

Part of this heritage is gun-rights absolutism.

Southern conservatives worked to block every exercise of federal influence other than those connected with internal security. Early in the republic they blocked national investments in canal-building, railroads, banks and schools. Later they fought the establishment of public schools. Mass public schooling only arrived in the South with Reconstruction. Mississippi continued its fight against public Kindergarten and compulsory school attendance all the way into the 1980’s. Public spending on any function other than security was, and still is, viewed with the deepest skepticism among Southern conservatives.

Thus believing that government is supposed to punish people and never to help people.