Boreal supremacy

A phrase I coined several years ago, to describe that prejudice which assumes the superiority of all things Northern, applies perfectly to Michael Lind's proposal for the compulsory unionization of the South.

At AOSHQ, Dave in Texas pauses -- between moonshine-inspired reveries about his sister -- to ponder the ways of Yankee enlightenment. Jonah Goldberg remarks that Lind's "insinuation that the South isn't sufficiently 'American' is revealing." Indeed, this puts me in mind of an appropriate anecdote:

In his elegant memoir, Destruction and Reconstruction, General Richard Taylor recalled the occasion in 1865 when the duty fell to him to surrender the last Confederate army east of the Mississippi River. At Union headquarters, a German, wearing the uniform of a Yankee general and speaking in heavily accented English, lectured General Taylor that now that the war was over, Southerners would be taught "the true American principles." To which General Taylor -- the son of Zachary Taylor --- replied that he regretted that his grandfather, an officer in the Revolution, and his father, President of the United States, had not passed on to him these "true American principles."

UPDATE: Unionized prostitution? (Via CG.)

Yee. Haw.

Appomattox undone, says Newsweek senior editor Michael Hirsch:

In the summer of 1863, Robert E. Lee led an ill-advised incursion into Pennsylvania. His army was defeated at Gettysburg, and thence afterward Lee beat a fighting retreat until the South lost the Civil War. One hundred and forty-five years later, the South--or what has become the South-Southwest--has won another kind of Civil War. It has transformed the sensibility of the country. It is setting the agenda for our political, social and religious mores--in Pennsylvania and everywhere else.

(Via Hot Air.) My great-grandfather, Pvt. Winston W. Bolt of the 13th Alabama Infantry, was captured during that "ill-advised incursion," so I suppose I should smile at Hirsch's metaphor. Instead, I must confess my shock at Hirsch's assessment of this belated triumph of the Lost Cause. After trundling through a non sequitur paragraph about an "American Idol" contestant, Hirsch looks down from the Olympian heights and shares with us this "analysis":

As John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge observed in their 2004 book, "The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America," the nation's population center has been "moving south and west at a rate of three feet an hour, five miles a year." Another author, Anatol Lieven, in his 2005 book "America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism," describes how the "radical nationalism" that has so dominated the nation's discourse since 9/11 traces its origins to the demographic makeup and mores of the South and much of the West and Southern Midwest--in other words, what we know today as Red State America.
This region was heavily settled by Scots-Irish immigrants--the same ethnic mix King James I sent to Northern Ireland to clear out the native Celtic Catholics.
After succeeding at that, they then settled the American Frontier, suffering Indian raids and fighting for their lives every step of the way. And the Southern frontiersmen never got over their hatred of the East Coast elites and a belief in the morality and nobility of defying them. Their champion was the Indian-fighter Andrew Jackson. The outcome was that a substantial portion of the new nation developed, over many generations, a rather savage, unsophisticated set of mores. Traditionally, it has been balanced by a more diplomatic, communitarian Yankee sensibility from the Northeast and upper Midwest. But that latter sensibility has been losing ground in population numbers--and cultural weight.
The coarsened sensibility that this now-dominant Southernism and frontierism has brought to our national dialogue is unmistakable. We must endure "lapel-pin politics" that elevates the shallowest sort of faux jingoism over who's got a better plan for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Note that Hirsch attributes to the North "a more diplomatic, communitarian Yankee sensibility" -- a sensibility that seems lacking in any actual Yankees anyone has ever met. Far from being "diplomatic" and "communitarian," the typical Yankee is a rude, pushy, vulgar, grasping materialist, Donald Trump being the perfect embodiment of this type.

Anyone who has lived in both North and South can testify to the difference in manners. Southerners are, in general, more friendly and courteous. Visit any commercial establishment in the South -- especially the small-town South -- and you will be thoroughly sirred and ma'amed and thanked and pleased. While the small-town North lacks the pushy rudeness of Northern cities, even small-town Yankees are less outgoing, their courtesy more formal and less enthusiastic, than in the South.

Yet Hirsch calls the South "savage" and "unsophisticated" -- quite true, if patriotism and courage are "savage," and faith and honor are "unsophisticated."

Best of all, Hirsch is a graduate of Tufts University (in Massachusetts) who's spent nearly his entire journalism career as a foreign correspondent and has never even set foot in the South, so far as one can tell from his Newsweek biography.

The arrogance of infernal Yankeedom!

UPDATE: In re-reading Hirsch's column just now, I find myself asking, "What's your point?" Is there any actual newsworthy relevance to this?

Hirsch contrasts "nativism and yahooism versus eagerness for the new and openness to innovation," then he says that in the Texan Bush there is "little trace left of the Eastern WASP sensibility into which he was born and educated," and there are some references to John McCain and Barack Obama. But there's no actual point, except that Michael Hirsch hates Southerners.

A senior editor at Newsweek has leisure to compose a 1,200-word screed telling more than 80 million Americans that he considers them uncouth barbarians? Nice work, if you can get it.

UPDATE II: Welcome Ace of Spades HQ readers. I've been a closet AOSHQ Moron for a long time, but I've never been a "Top Headline" before. I feel so ... special. Please give me money.

UPDATE III: Just for the heck of it:

How's that for savage and unsophisticated? If that doesn't make you stand up and salute, I don't know what will.

UPDATE IV: Instapundit:

"Jeez, they used to at least wait until after they lost the election to start this talk."