Conservative Anti-European Rhetoric Reflects Distinctive Southern Attitudes
The fascinating finding in this dKos polling data on people’s attitudes to various locations that frequently serve as right-wing bogeymen is to some extent obscured by the presentation of all the cross tabs. This chart I made boils down the key facts that San Francisco, New York, Europe, and even the dread France are popular among the public at large and even Republicans at large but held in low esteem specifically in the South:
Way back in his 1998 Atlantic article “The Southern Captivity of the GOP”, Christopher Caldwell was warning that “the Republicans have narrowly defined ‘values’ as the folkways of one regional subculture, and have urged their imposition on the rest of the country.”
Like most articles describing why political parties are suffering from deep, structural flaws, Caldwell’s was ultimately undermined by the basic reality that events matter. A combination of poor ballot design, a compliant Supreme Court, and America’s moronic election system put George W. Bush in the White House despite the fact that most people didn’t want him to be president. Then 9/11 changed which issues people care about and led to GOP wins in 2002 and 2004. But you do see that pattern Caldwell identified coming into play a lot nowadays. It’s not really clear why you would think that “disdain for cosmopolitan cities and Europe” should be constitutive of conservatism, but it does seem to be a widespread element of the southern worldview, and it’s increasingly been adopted as the overwhelming posture of conservatism as such.
74 Responses to “Conservative Anti-European Rhetoric Reflects Distinctive Southern Attitudes”
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April 13th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
I’ve found a photo of an actual teabagging protest already in progress.
April 13th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
I assume the label on the vertical axis should be something like “approval rating” or “favorable opinion”, but once again you’ve given us a poorly thought-out graph.
April 13th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
I think it’s simply a reflective of the sort of intense southern localism that the sociologist John Shelton Reed pointed to back in the 1970s. While a lot of nonsense gets written about southern peculiarities, I think these polls are onto something.
April 13th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Caldwell’s was ultimately undermined by the basic reality that events matter.
Also, DLC Democrats (Clinton, Gore) weren’t, themselves, well-positioned to define themselves against the South, given that the founding purpose of the DLC was to increase the Southern influence in the party. It wasn’t just “basic reality.”
April 13th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Let’s remember that Nixon’s Southern Strategy was one of the cornerstones of the modern Republican party.
George Wallace invented it.
Richard Nixon perfected it.
Sarah Palin attempted it.
April 13th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
“It’s not really clear why you would think that “disdain for cosmopolitan cities and Europe” should be constitutive of conservatism [...]”
Matt, is this irony, or are you actually unclear? Opposition to the cosmopolitan is defining of 20th century European & American cultural conservatism, in the sense that conservatism is opposed to classical liberalism. From before the Civil War to the Agrarians and Fugitives, the South has been the source of American conservative thought.
April 13th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
Shows once again just how clueless Republican politicians are. They chose as their bogeymen things loved by their own voters.
April 13th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
A combination of poor ballot design, a compliant Supreme Court, and America’s moronic election system put George W. Bush in the White House despite the fact that most people didn’t want him to be president.
I suppose it falls under “America’s moronic election system”, but Ralph Nader is blameworthy enough himself to merit being named explicitly.
April 13th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
1) I think , by definition, that the Republicans had to go to where the morons are.
2) If you are a party devoted to advancing the interests of the richest 2 percent of the population by fucking the other 98 percent, then by definition you need for your “grassroots” base to be kinda..uh..stupid. And low info.
The people who think Professional Wrestling is real. And who can be diverted from noticing that broken beer bottle in their butt by several cultural hot buttons.
Who think Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh became Millionaires by promoting the interests of common folks.
3) George W Bush even admitted it on one occasion. He said “There are some people you can fool ALL the time –and those are the ones you want to focus on.”
The Reporters thought he was making a joke.
April 13th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
They chose as their bogeymen things loved by their own voters.
They choose as their bogeymen things hated by the voters who are the loudest about what they hate.
This is like gun control: a majority of people polled might agree, in the abstract, that they support gun control, but the opposition to gun control is held by a faction that really, really cares about the issue much more than the pro-gun-control faction.
The southern voters are really, really demanding that the party to which they owe their allegience follow their lead.
April 13th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
On the other hand, those who think Obama got $700 Million by promoting himself as the Champion of the Plebes at $10,000 per plate dinners ain’t much brighter.
April 13th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Ralph Nader is blameworthy enough himself to merit being named explicitly.
If you added Nader’s vote to Gore’s, you got a 51% center-left majority – the largest such vote since 1976, and something that makes Obama’s 53% slightly less impressive. In 2000 you also had Democrats getting within spitting distance of electing Speaker Gephardt and winning 5 seats to split the Senate 50-50. The most effective Republican campaign of 2000 was probably the House campaign, which nabbed seats in areas that now look utterly hopeless for the GOP – eastern Connecticut, suburban Michigan, Pittsburgh. It should have been pretty clear at the time that the GOP was becoming a Southern Party that would be pretty well fucked if it lost the suburbs. Aaaaand…
April 13th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
Did the poll ask people for their attitudes toward the US South?
My guess: favorability ~ 30%.
April 13th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
Another thing that surprises me is how close are those numbers for each location. What is there in common between SF and “Europe”? Not much. Yet in the mind of most people, they seem to be pretty much the same thing.
I mean, why would a patriotic Southerner hate an American city as much as France?
April 13th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
It should have been pretty clear at the time that the GOP was becoming a Southern Party that would be pretty well fucked if it lost the suburbs.
I believe that this was the thesis of “The Emerging Democratic Majority” which had the misfortune of being published in the fall of 2002.
April 13th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
Secession 2.0, anyone?
April 13th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Some of this (though not all) is not just nativism but chauvinism. There was a bumper sticker a few years ago that was popular in Alabama –
American by birth. Southern by the grace of God.
April 13th, 2009 at 5:58 pm
I remember the couple of times I went to Atlanta on business in the 90’s and was struck by how popular the names “San Francisco” or “New York” were for coffee shops or bakeries. Clearly the expectation was that the Georgia customers, and presumably that mostly meant white customers, would assume that “San Franisco coffee” or “New York bagels,” which usually had nothing to do with their eponymous cities, would be a cut above what other people were offering.
Of course “Texas” and “Southern” are used in California as trade names for other kinds of food, mostly barbecue, although the assumption tends to be that Kansas City Barbecue beats Texas Barbecue.
April 13th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Because a patriotic Southerner doesn’t believe that San Francisco, or New York for that matter, are part of the United States. Witness the snide remarks about “real Virginia” vs. “fake Virginia” from John McCain’s rep who is from Oakton, VA, just a few miles from Tyson’s Corner, which is ground zero for douchebaggy Republicans. Hell, even Alexandria, VA, native John McCain’s brother called his hometown “the People’s Republic of Alexandria”.
As a native New Yorker (Long Islander actually), one of the thing that really pissed me off about 9/11 was the tendency of those people who thought that anyone from New York was a Jewish banker/America hater/teh GHEY looking to rot America from within by spreading syphyllis to their wholesome white daughters while impregnating them with a black baby to wrap themselves in the bloody shirt of the NYFD. It took me until about 13 September to want to kick the shit out of people who, just three days before, would have been happy to see New York burn to the ground and take all the American hating minorities with it.
/rant
April 13th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
I remember the couple of times I went to Atlanta on business in the 90’s and was struck by how popular the names “San Francisco” or “New York” were for coffee shops or bakeries.
My brother lives in Atlanta. Atlanta is not really “the south”. It is, to a fairly large degree, the transplanted north. Drive 40 or 50 miles outside of Atlanta, and things are VERY different. (Cue the dueling banjo and guitar.)
April 13th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
“What is there in common between SF and “Europe”? Not much. Yet in the mind of most people, they seem to be pretty much the same thing.”
As a San Francisco resident, I would agree there isn’t really very much in common between SF and “Europe” generally. In many respects, actually, SF is much less like Europe than the South really is: the policy of the US government (particularly under the Bushes) has been to shift defense (i.e. government) spending away from the West Coast to the South. Remember that the defense industry was a central pillar of California’s economy from the Civil War to the early 1990s (the Hendy Iron Works of Sunnyvale, the Union Iron Works of San Francisco and the other iron works of San Francisco, Oakland and Richmond were major armaments suppliers from the Civil War onwards). Defense spending IS the major form of government spending in the US, so the South was the beneficiary of the socialism of the American military-industrial complex after 1988, while San Francisco’s government/defense spending was greatly reduced during the same period (thus, SF needed to have capitalism because we weren’t getting as much government money, while much of the South could rely on increased socialism).
April 13th, 2009 at 6:32 pm
What is there in common between SF and “Europe”?
Excellent chefs, superb wine, beautiful scenery, accessible marijuana . . . you know, un-American things.
April 13th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
What is there in common between SF and “Europe”?
Museums, education, the arts … you know, un-American things.
April 13th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Dave Weigel is quite right. As usual.
The Democrats were on a consistent upward trend in the elections of 96-98-2000. If you draw the trend line of Democratic House seats from that period, it links up nicely with the numbers after the 2006 and 2008 elections.
It looks very much like 2002 and 2004 were eccentric outliers, a brief pause from a trend that was happening well before those years, and which continued after them. In a sense, 2006 wasn’t really a revolutionary year, so much as a return to normal conditions after a brief, eccentric interlude.
April 13th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
“Museums, education, the arts … you know, un-American things.”
Museums: the museums in SF aren’t particularly notable – the ones in Houston are actually better.
Education: ? San Francisco doesn’t actually have a major university. Sure, there are major universities in its environs (Stanford and Cal) but not in San Francisco itself.
The Arts: If you like artists who do things with poop, robots or giant insects (preferably all three together), then I suppose you could call SF a center of the arts. Otherwise, not so much.
April 13th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
I happen to live (and grew up) not terribly far from where Deliverance was set (and filmed) and while there is a lot of yahooism, ignorance, silly clinging to an ahistorical view of the Old South, and just plain cussed “agin-everything” attitudes, there are spots of light.
Some decent colleges, the arts live, artists and musicians and writers live here, and a really good Tuscan restaurant named “Cuccina Rustica” is doing a bang up business.
The South is not the South you imagine, and progressives here need some help.
Also, local now sporting a bumpersticker “I hear Banjo music, paddle faster”.
April 13th, 2009 at 7:07 pm
What is there in common between SF and “Europe”?
This is really the rural/urban split in another costume. All most of us know of Europe are its cities. So it’s really a city-to-city comparison. The difference, I think, is that the South isn’t defined by its cities in the way that many of the Deep Blue states are.
April 13th, 2009 at 7:14 pm
This is a little off-topic but since you brought it up in passing: With regard to your mention of poor ballot design, why can’t someone, somewhere, come up with one universal type of ballot that could be used in every state?
If there could be a uniformly-designed ballot that is inexpensive to reproduce,, and easy to read, wouldn’t it save states tons of money – not to mention time? It would also eliminate cities and states losing representation while awaiting lengthy recounts!
April 13th, 2009 at 7:42 pm
San Francisco doesn’t have a major university? What do you call UCSF? The museums aren’t as bad as the commenter says (and San Franciscans have been saying for the fifty years I can recall), the opera is still good, although not the best in the US as it was in the Adler/Bing days, and the symphony is super, with a gay conductor who is not only charismatic but appeals to a wide range of the population.
Having lived in both SF and Rome, the major difference was that in Rome I never felt funny about walking around a blind corner in an area I didn’t particularly know very well after dark with wife and baby; never try that in SF. The most common denominator, other than both of them were full of people who spoke Italian, SF much less so now, was the proliferation of sub-luxury restaurants, bakeries, and coffee shops, and the diversity of the population. I still know people who would rather go to Starbucks than an independent place, but they mostly live in Orange County. Plus when I first became aware of such things (1950 something) you really couldn’t get espresso outside of the Caffe Trieste and a few other places with Caruso on the juke box. And a lot of people in the suburbs even thought that was unAmerican and threatening.
Oh, and I know Atlanta isn’t the South. On that same trip a waitress in Underground Atlanta asked if my accent (I of course think I don’t have one!) was southern because she had never heard a southern accent and had been wanting to. But the San Francisco and New York brand names were still pretty striking. By the way, the first thing I saw on entering Gingrich’s congressional distric was a huge porno house — but they’d probably deny it’s there!
April 13th, 2009 at 7:56 pm
@13: “On the other hand, those who think Obama got $700 Million by promoting himself as the Champion of the Plebes at $10,000 per plate dinners ain’t much brighter.”
The best way to acquire a $700 million dollar war chest was for Obama to promote himself as the Champion of the Plebes at $10,000 per plate dinners.
If he is a Champion of the Plebes he worked the system masterfully on our behalf.
If he is not a Champion of the Plebes then we plebes are cooked.
Either way, he masterfully worked the system.
April 13th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
While perhaps statistically significant (not random chance), this data does not say much. So Southerners are more likely to dislike other places. There is still significant support for all these places among Southerners. I’m also curious how the South was defined. In the end, stereotyping Republicans or Democrats or parts of the country is foolhardy. There are diverse attitudes, interests, and traits amongst people that associate in a political faction or form a community.
April 13th, 2009 at 8:14 pm
[The Republican "grassroots are t]he people who think Professional Wrestling is real. And who can be diverted from noticing that broken beer bottle in their butt by several cultural hot buttons.
If you’re going for the wrestling metaphor, the Republicans are an alliance of marks and smarks arrayed against the smarts.
April 13th, 2009 at 8:15 pm
“The museums aren’t as bad as the commenter says”
They aren’t bad so much as not particularly strong – LACMA is much more interesting than San Francisco’s Legion of Honor / DeYoung. SFMOMA is a great building filled with too much second-rate work. SF museums just tend not to have collections that are really first-rate consistently (the buildings tend to be a lot more interesting than what’s inside them). The Legion of Honor has to fill it’s walls with stuff like Matthias Storm or David Teniers, for example.
“San Francisco doesn’t have a major university? What do you call UCSF?”
Genentech’s trade school. UCSF isn’t a university – it’s one-quarter or one-eigth of a university.
April 13th, 2009 at 8:22 pm
UCSF isn’t a university – it’s one-quarter or one-eigth of a university.
Vicious. Yet pretty much accurate.
April 13th, 2009 at 9:06 pm
The GOP has decided to live by the Old South’s culture of resentment, while trying to concoct grievances out of whole cloth. It is a horrifying, depressing, surrealistic moment in our history. I say “moment” but it dates back at least to the hoohah about Al Gore sighing and “lying”. The GOP invented lies and then complained about Gore’s penchant for lying. The current assault on Obama is just more of the same. The GOP thought they had Bill Clinton. Everything said that they should have. Except most of the country. What their fixation reminds me of is the scene at the beginning of Lolita where the teen Humbert never quite gets to go all the way with the ur-nymphet. The GOP was sure it was going to score with bringing down Clinton and now they’re living in a state of permanent political frustrated priapism. They’ve become predators.
April 13th, 2009 at 9:38 pm
What is there in common between SF and “Europe”?
Very expensive housing, high cost of living generally, high taxes, lots of homeless people …
April 13th, 2009 at 10:02 pm
On the other hand, those who think Obama got $700 Million by promoting himself as the Champion of the Plebes at $10,000 per plate dinners ain’t much brighter.
I don’t know anyone who thinks that.
April 13th, 2009 at 10:19 pm
Re “Museums: the museums in SF aren’t particularly notable – the ones in Houston are actually better.”
Yes — they have much bigger paintings.
April 13th, 2009 at 10:25 pm
I myself prefer the bronzes of China’s Shang Dynasty (circa 1500 BC) to paintings of cowboys, horses and cows. So I kinda think the Asian Art Museum is a point in San Francisco’s favor.
April 13th, 2009 at 10:26 pm
jt @38,
Just as the more urban, coastal states pay more into the federal purse than they get back in spending, and vice-versa for rural and Southern states, cities take on costs from their whole region that they have to pay with their own funds. Cities by their nature attract the homeless and the drug trade, and have to pay for care or housing for the former, and police for the latter, and hospitals for both. Cities with subways or bus or streetcar systems (like SF’s MUNI) that take suburban commuters from light rail (like BART) stations elsewhere in the city are subsidizing the travel of people who don’t pay for that subsidy with their taxes. Cities also have a lot of cars coming in the middle of the day, and have to provide parking and parking enforcement for people who, again, do not pay for this out of their taxes. (Cities, of course, should implement the schemes that MY talks about to reduce parking and also to price it appropriately and collect user fees from the parkers rather than having to pay for it out of general city coffers.)
So, yes, San Francisco has high taxes, as do most cities compared with their surrounding region in the U.S. Cities pay for regional services and costs, but cannot spread the tax burden to these free-loading regions. In Germany, for example, this isn’t as much a problem because funds for local governments are apportioned out of federal receipts–there are not, to my knowledge, separate local taxes. Of course, Germany has a higher overall tax rate than the U.S., but Germans pay higher taxes than rural or suburban Americans because they have better social services, while San Franciscans pay higher taxes than rural or suburban Americans additionally because they have to pay for the externalities of the same rural and suburban Americans.
April 13th, 2009 at 10:32 pm
Oops –My apologies to Houston. I was thinking of Dallas’s
art offerings. George W Bush will fit right in.
April 13th, 2009 at 10:39 pm
As for UCSF, well, duh, it’s unbalanced in the sense that it doesn’t have anything outside of biological sciences or medicine, but it has so much of that at so high a level that’s it’s more like three quarters of a university, where all three of those quarters are bioscience/medicine. For what it’s worth, it has more faculty and has more significant research than, say, Princeton. But assuming that you take the University of California at San Francisco at its word, and consider it a university, and allow that an operation with the third most NIH funding of any university is a major one, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that UCSF is a major university.
April 13th, 2009 at 10:51 pm
Cities, of course, should implement the schemes that MY talks about to reduce parking and also to price it appropriately and collect user fees from the parkers rather than having to pay for it out of general city coffers.
Then cities should also price transit appropriately and pay for it with user fees collected from the transit riders rather than having to pay for it out of general city coffers.
April 13th, 2009 at 10:57 pm
@burritoboy,
Wow…I’d hate to hear what you have to say about UC Hastings…
And, for the record, San Francisco (the city itself) has UCSF medical school, UC Hastings law school, University of San Francisco (a small, Catholic school), San Francisco State University (Part of the Cal State University System), Golden Gate University, and a bunch of “Academy of Art” Colleges.
Yeah, it’s not Cal or Stanford, but it not too shabby.
April 13th, 2009 at 11:18 pm
I am a Frenchman. I have found that by subsituting the word “retard” for “southerner,” US culture much eaiser to understand.
April 13th, 2009 at 11:20 pm
charles @46,
I fear I can’t respond without getting into a general discussion of the social costs of driving versus transit. Driving is paid for by all of us and our children in the form of climate change, pollution, the need for a highway patrol, deaths/injuries from driving and the associated costs of that, etc. So if the costs of driving were completely internalized, then I’d find it harder to disagree with you. But since they aren’t, transit should be subsidized to the extent that the savings to society from decreased driving minus the cost of getting people around by transit rather than by car is maximized. This ideal level of subsidy from a purely maximizing-efficiency standpoint might be greater than it is now, or it might be less.
There’s also the problem of people who simply can’t afford cars, so they would be priced out of the transportation market by suburban office-workers who could pay five bucks for a subway ride at rush hour. In the U.S., we have decided as a society that things like police protection and emergency care are public goods that are available to all without regard to ability to pay. This argument again boils down to something broader, in this case, which services you believe should be publicly provided or made available to all citizens of a rich country, and which shouldn’t be. I do not believe anyone in the U.S. should be priced out of police protection, or a minimal level of health care, or education, or local transportation–I don’t think it’s all right for us to tell the poorest that they’ll just have to walk.
April 13th, 2009 at 11:25 pm
I happen to live (and grew up) not terribly far from where Deliverance was set (and filmed) and while there is a lot of yahooism, ignorance, silly clinging to an ahistorical view of the Old South, and just plain cussed “agin-everything” attitudes, there are spots of light.
There’s a bunch of vineyards and wineries in that part of northeast Georgia, too, doing decent things with French varietals and really interesting things with American ones that go back to the early 19th c.
In all honesty, I think the anti-SF, anti-France stuff shouldn’t be associated with the dirt-poor bits of the rural South, but treated as a learned dittoism from the middle-class Rushbo demographic of the strip-mall South.
April 13th, 2009 at 11:29 pm
I fear I can’t respond without getting into a general discussion of the social costs of driving versus transit.
“charles” is very lonely and wants to spend the next five hours repeating the same trollshit he’s spread over this site on countless times past.
April 13th, 2009 at 11:30 pm
Yeah, it’s not Cal or Stanford, but it not too shabby.
The thing is that your list doesn’t give SF much of a leg up on other, much lamer, cities like Pittsburgh and Baltimore, which can all boast a similar list of state, Catholic, and reputable professional schools within their city limits. As far as cities of comparable size, DC and Boston are much better than SF in the “college town” category.
April 13th, 2009 at 11:44 pm
Driving is paid for by all of us and our children in the form of climate change, pollution, the need for a highway patrol, deaths/injuries from driving and the associated costs of that, etc. So if the costs of driving were completely internalized, then I’d find it harder to disagree with you.
Transit emits about the same amount of carbon per passenger-mile as automobiles. Pollution is a negative externality of both cars and transit. Accident costs are mostly internalized through insurance. Police are needed for both transit and highways.
Transit fares cover only about 27% of the costs of providing transit service. If you seriously think you can make a case that transit subsidies to the tune of 73% of total costs are justified by externalities or on any other grounds, please do so.
There’s also the problem of people who simply can’t afford cars, so they would be priced out of the transportation market by suburban office-workers who could pay five bucks for a subway ride at rush hour.
Nonsense. If the purpose is to provide affordable transportation for the poor, then the way to do that is through direct subsidies to poor people themselves, not by subidizing transit. Why should affluent working professionals pay only $1 or $2 for subway or bus rides that cost $4 or $5 to provide?
In the U.S., we have decided as a society that things like police protection and emergency care are public goods that are available to all without regard to ability to pay.
Police protection is a public good. You can’t effectively exclude anyone from the benefits of enforcing the law. Transit clearly is not a public good. It is both rivaled and excludable.
April 13th, 2009 at 11:47 pm
You’re not fooling anyone, ‘Mixnerspotter’.
April 13th, 2009 at 11:51 pm
I am a Frenchman. I have found that by subsituting the word “retard” for “southerner,” US culture much eaiser to understand.
I am a Brit. I have found that by substituting the words “smelly effete loser” for “Frenchman,” French culture is much easier to understand.
April 14th, 2009 at 12:16 am
“I am a Brit. I have found that by substituting the words “smelly effete loser” for “Frenchman,” French culture is much easier to understand”
And when I am thinking about the english, I think about William Churchills big huge cigar and the drunken soccer hooligans and the novel “Brideshead Revisisted” then the word “closeted homosexual” substitutes itself for the term English “Man” and then the whole of English history becomes into focus.
April 14th, 2009 at 12:21 am
The French have always been insanely jealous of the British.
April 14th, 2009 at 12:24 am
@50: “There’s a bunch of vineyards and wineries in that part of northeast Georgia, too, doing decent things with French varietals and really interesting things with American ones that go back to the early 19th c.”
Interesting. Could I buy a bottle from the region, in say, New York state?
April 14th, 2009 at 12:56 am
Let’s remember that Nixon’s Southern Strategy was one of the cornerstones of the modern Republican party.
George Wallace invented it.
Huh? Wallace was never a Republican, so I’m not sure I understand how he could have pioneered the Southern Strategy. If anything, Wallace’s national significance was that he appealed to blue collar white Democrats outside the South, not that he got racist whites in the South to vote for Republicans – in 1968, his votes in the South were largely votes which would have otherwise gone to Nixon, not to Humphrey. The Southern Strategy had almost nothing to do with George Wallace – if anything, Wallace delayed the switch of southern whites to the Republican Party.
April 14th, 2009 at 1:16 am
Interesting. Could I buy a bottle from the region, in say, New York state?
I have no idea, to be honest. I do know that the NE Georgia wineries will mail bottles if state laws allow it. (PA is a different matter.) But there’s something very intensely American about people prepared to take on the Norton grape and do the same thing as people working with somewhat marginal grapes and challenging climate in France and Italy for what sometimes gets called “rustic wine”. If there’s a market for Madiran or Calabrian aglianico, there ought to be one for Rabun County reds.
April 14th, 2009 at 2:22 am
@ 61: pseudonymous in nc
Thanks for the explanation and the link. I will definitely make some inquiries around town. It seems probable Norton wines have made their way the few hundred miles north.
It was interesting for me to note in the Roberts article that Ulysses Grant “kept a righteous supply (of Nortons) in his White House cellars.” I thought Grant had quit drinking by this stage in his life. Perhaps overindulgence in the regional grape explains his rather difficult Presidency.
April 14th, 2009 at 6:36 am
Re: Atlanta is not really “the south”.
What is the real South? From Houston in the west to Raleigh in the East all the major cities are full of transplanted northerners and immigrants. And check out the voting patterns in the second-tier cities like Charleston– Obama won there too.
April 14th, 2009 at 7:49 am
And it seems to me that Johns Hopkins and Carnegie-Mellon are straightforwardly better all-around universities than anything in San Francisco proper.
Yes – and so is the University of Pittsburgh, which is a solidly second tier public research university. Among major American cities, San Francisco’s lack of a major research university is notable. It’s not just that the list is comparable to Baltimore or Pittsburgh – it’s that it’s considerably worse than Baltimore or Pittsburgh.
One might, however, note the following major cities which are not noticeably better than SF from a university standpoint or are arguably worse – Detroit, Kansas City, Cincinnati, Phoenix (has no universities in the city limits), Portland, San Antonio, Charlotte, Indianapolis. Basically, SF is the definition of whatever the opposite of a college town is.
April 14th, 2009 at 7:57 am
Sure Republicans love San Francisco – it has good restaurants and an enormous selection of sexual services, is always trying to beautify the city through cleanups or relocation, and is run by corporate interests that always seem to get the better deal in those public-private ventures. If you build a fun playground that caters to rich white people they tend to like it.
April 14th, 2009 at 10:22 am
This is like gun control: a majority of people polled might agree, in the abstract, that they support gun control, but the opposition to gun control is held by a faction that really, really cares about the issue much more than the pro-gun-control faction
=========================================================
Not lately
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/04/08/gun.control.poll/index.html
Now, a recent poll reveals a sudden drop — only 39 percent of Americans now favor stricter gun laws, according to a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll.
The gradual, long-term decline in support for gun control from the early 1990s to 2008 coincided with a decline in the murder rate. But this year’s sudden drop seems to be influenced by politics, namely the Obama administration.
April 14th, 2009 at 10:29 am
“I myself prefer the bronzes of China’s Shang Dynasty (circa 1500 BC) to paintings of cowboys, horses and cows. So I kinda think the Asian Art Museum is a point in San Francisco’s favor.”
I just discovered Shang Dynasty bronzes and they’re wonderful. But the Houston MFA has a superlative Zhou bronze, so again, while the SF Asian Art Museum is a distinctive plus, it doesn’t outweigh the weaknesses of the other museums in SF.
April 14th, 2009 at 10:29 am
Re obvious’ comment, for “rich white people” read “upwardly mobile Asians.” And remember to walk around the Mission District next time you’re there. They may be Hispanic, but they don’t bite. And on the appeal of sexual services, you are joking, aren’t you? Moved away from the Bay Area in 2002, but had twenty plus years of walking around the city with small and then not so small children (and little money), never ran out of things to discover, and didn’t have to take them to a strip club once.
On more sensible comments, back in my day (forty years ago, ugh) before real estate became so pricy SF was the residence of lots of Stanford and Berkeley faculty, so the ambience was somewhat different. For the record, Ferlinghetti had a reputation as an excellent landlord.
And someone has made a point about the Asian Art Museum, which I would extend to practically everyhing beyond Western painting — there are excellent sculpture collections, medieval and modern, good Greco-Roman antiquities, non-Western art, and a really superb graphic arts collection at the Legion of Honor. Plus intelligent curators who design good shows. Unfortunately as I recall two of the three best paintings (Monet and Segantini) are no longer in SF.
April 14th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Let’s not forget about the Exploratorium in SF. Sure, it’s not as polished as the Boston Science Museum, but it’s a lot of fun if you’re a science geek.
I also think that it’s splitting hairs a bit to say that SF doesn’t have a major university given the proximity of Berkeley and Stanford. The fact that Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island are glommed together with Manhattan is a weird fluke of history. No, SF is not a college town in the sense that Boston is, but by the standards listed above, Harvard and MIT aren’t in Boston.
re: calipgyian
Amen. I get so sick and tired of having my home cities trashed by the Right. Pro-America, my a**.
April 14th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Regarding support for gun control, the reality is more complex than the CNN poll suggests.
April 14th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
Oops forgot the link:
April 14th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
Damn it. here’s the link:
April 14th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
Well, a lot of slow-witted motherfuckers live in the South, but France-bashing remains popular with such courageously stalwart thinkers as Bob Beckel and Jay Leno. The only MSM pundit taken to saying things such as: “You know you’re right if the French are with you” is Chris Matthews. For that alone, he gets a gold star.
April 14th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
calipgyian made the point all you need to do is look at the world through a Southern Baptist lens.
Per Baptist theology Methodists and Presbyterians are barely Christian. Baptists don’t just get born into a Christian family, that is an important first step but not as crucial as establishing a personal relation with Christ through a ‘Come to Jesus moment’.
And Catholicism is even worse, the idea that your relationship with God is mediated by the Pope and subject to the assistance of Mary and the Saints is anathema to a good Southern Baptist, leading some to identify the Pope with the Antichrist. Then you have Judaism and Islam that each denies the devinity of Jesus and worship their respective Books. (I am not saying the Jews or Muslims would agree with this, but that is how it looks from Biloxi). And it just spirals out of control from there, the beliefs of Hindusism, Wiccans, Animists eliminating the very concept of a singular God-Creator. The fact that all of these people are from a Baptist perspective literally hell-bound is small immediate consolation for the fact that they control everything.
When the South looks at San Francisco and its ‘San Francisco liberals’ certainly they are thinking about Teh Gay. But they also see a Catholic Pelosi and a Jewish Feinstein, and people who famously sip white wine and nibble on brie while watching football {these people have obviously never been to a 49er game}. Worse they see people driving Volvos from that known socialist hell-hole Sweden, and not one with a rifle rack in the back.
Europe and NY and SF blend together because none of them look ANYTHING like Biloxi, they flunk every test of what determines that you are a Real American. First you got Catholics EVERYWHERE, second you can’t even FIND a Southern Baptist Church (except the ones with all the blacks in the congregation), while every time you turn around you run into a Cathedral or Synagogue, plus good luck even finding the GUN SHOP. And maybe worst of all tea comes hot and you have to add your own sugar. All of your home town certainties just end up challenged by one big poly-ethnic, poly-religious, poly-cultural urban blur.
Meaning you could just flip that graph on its head and say it was measuring net non-Southerness, you not having to really find what Amsterdam and San Francisco have in common (even though the answer is ‘plenty’) instead they equally don’t resemble a small city or town in Georgia or Mississippi.
April 15th, 2009 at 9:58 am
I’ve been thinking about that poll since I saw it yesterday. I grew up in the rural, deep south, and I am extremely familiar with the mindset of the “average person.” I will not dispute many of the points raised in the comments, but you are all making it much more complicated than it really is.
If you took a similar poll in New York and San Francisco and asked for their opinions on the deep south what do you think you would find? One person estimated that it would show a 30% favorable rating – lower than that in the south for NY and SF. Most of the country thinks the people in the south are backward, ignorant, poor, racist, morons. As a rule, the rest of the country looks down on the south with disdain; they don’t like the deep south and what they perceive it to be. The feeling is mutual.
April 15th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
The analysis is incomplete I think. Attitudes towards cosmopolitan cities and Europe (which is full of cosmopolitan cities) correlate certainly with income and degree of urbanisation, but probably not with geographical latitude and longtitude (when every other variable has been controlled for).
Using the South as a proxy for lower incomes and less urban environments is misleading and slightly unfair I reckon.
April 15th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Steven says “Most of the country thinks the people in the south are backward, ignorant, poor, racist, morons. As a rule, the rest of the country looks down on the south with disdain; they don’t like the deep south and what they perceive it to be. The feeling is mutual.” Cw says “I am a Frenchman. I have found that by subsituting the word ‘retard’ for ’southerner,’ US culture much eaiser to understand.”
Is there any way to measure how much of the mutual hatred between folks living in cosmopolitan areas like N.Y.C. and areas such as Alabama or West Virginia has to do with the perception that if someone from West Virginia moved to N.Y.C. they would be socially ostracized for being “white trash,” i.e. Appalachian, while if someone from N.Y.C. moved to West Virginia they would similarly be ostracized for not being part of the culturally dominant ethnic group, i.e. they would be ostracized for not being Appalachian?
April 16th, 2009 at 10:06 am
I’ve had the pleasure of spending time in 37 of the states, in the most rural areas imaginable and in the biggest cities, and I’ve spent even more time in chatrooms and message boards discussing issues with people from all over the world. I have found that no matter where I go or who I meet, people from all places have two things in common: 1) other people and places they do not understand are threatening and it is easier to ridicule than to analyze and comprehend and 2) there are plenty of “retards” to go around.
I don’t take offense to the stereotypical characterizations, I mostly just chuckle at the irony of listening to someone who would soil himself in anger and righteous indignation if he heard someone refer to all Mexicans as lazy or all black people as criminals or all Muslims as terrorists or all Frenchmen as surrender-monkeys make the same kind of broad, sweeping, ignorant statement about people from the south.