Speaking of the New York Times:
South Carolina, with its hardscrabble political culture, small-town milieu and complex role in American history, has produced its share of notable politicians, from John C. Calhoun in the 19th century to Representative Joe Wilson, whose contemporary claim to fame was yelling “You lie!” at President Obama as he delivered a speech before Congress.
I don’t see the complexity inherent in retarding every conceivable form of human progress, but I don’t write for the New York Times’ DC bureau. Every Thursday or Friday, one of their reporters has to submit a view-from-nowhere, faux naive, source-fluffing piece of “analysis” that will run on Monday’s front page. As far as I’m concerned, we’d all be better off if they occupied that space with sudoku or celebrity gossip.
beltane
With rare notable exceptions, South Carolina politicians behave with civility and decorum.
The Greenspan disease afflicts them all, doesn’t it.
dr. bloor
I don’t think “a band of inbred, rabid and galactically stupid racists” is allowed in the Times style book.
Comrade Javamanphil
What the NY Times means is that South Carolina politicians are just so genteel and civil when they call you racist names. Quite complex, really.
OzoneR
I’m surprised they did not include Preston Brooks, who stood up for the good people of his state when he beat Daniel Webster nearly to death.
Cat Lady
@OzoneR:
It was Charles Sumner, but yeah, this.
JPL
Disunion’s column today is on Fort Sumter. Maybe today’s piece on the genteel gentlemen from South Carolina is not that coincidental. Disunion is an online series about the Civil War for those who have not read it.
kdaug
“Fuck off, fucking asshole! I hate you!”
Now do I get my contemporary claim to fame?
Elia Isquire
“or celebrity gossip.”
It basically is — just with far uglier “celebrities” that no one can name.
Ash Can
So if I yell insults at the POTUS on national TV will I become “notable” too?
cat48
It’s a lot like another country. When we moved here, there was a state constitutional ban on interracial marriage. We did not know that until a few yrs later when the ban was overturned. The beaches are nice……
RosiesDad
Yes, and these changes are certain to make things all kinds of better for the people of South Carolina. Fuck ’em, they elected these stooges.
13th Generation
They left out the ultimate “daddy”, huckleberry Graham.
OzoneR
I guess they’re just waiting for their white knight to come in and tell them all “fuck the debt, we’re going to spend more money on stuff and the economy will get better” and then they’ll change their minds, just like that!
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Well, SC did take on its shoulders the burden of forcing Abraham Lincoln’s hand. Rather than wait and see if someone else was ever going to secede, it chose to accept that responsibility itself.
Punchy
It appears they’ve badly misspelled “racism” and “biogtry”….
Dave L
They forgot to mention South Carolina’s puzzling use of Islamic symbols in its state flag.
Chris
@OzoneR:
Now, this is just a wild-assed guess, but tell me: would South Carolina happen to be one of those lovely states who take in far more money from the feds than they hand out? And nevertheless feel entitled to bitch about how the other parts of the country are the ones with the real entitlement mentality?
The Political Nihilist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Chris:
So they’re essentially the Koch Brothers of the states?
Hawes
Calhoun was a complex figure. He started out a supporter of Henry Clay and the Nationalists and wound up an ardent Sectionalist who still wanted the country to survive (albeit in a bastardized form). You go back far enough and South Carolina was a bastion of Federalism, too.
I blame it all on Andrew Jackson (who I believe was born in South Carolina). He showed how powerful white supremacy was as a political posture.
JGabriel
mistermix:
South Carolina: Standing athwart history and screaming “We HATES it! They’re changing MY PRECIOUS!”
With, of course, the exception that in Gollum’s case, you at least feel sorry for him.
.
JGabriel
Hawes:
That’s not really as much a contradiction as it’s made out to be. If I recall correctly, the Confederacy in fact had a strong federal government, going so far as to not only permit slavery, but mandate it’s legality across the states. It wasn’t really a confederacy; it was a just mock federal union with the right to own slaves guaranteed.
.
Chris
@Hawes:
At the same time, if memory serves, South Carolina threatened to secede during his administration, and he basically responded “get the fuck back in your seat before I have the Army go Gengis Khan on your asses.”
Thus successfully delaying the inevitable for another forty years.
Chris
@JGabriel:
Yeah, and a lot of the North/South arguments pre-slavery were because the South was trying to interfere with Northern laws regarding slavery (e.g. one law in I think New York which said that they weren’t allowed to bring slaves to New York with them).
The “states’ rights” thing is dubious at best: like the conservatives today, it’s completely variable depending on how they feel about the laws and rights involved.
Hewer of Wood, Drawer of Water
Isn’t their motto, “Too small to be a country, too large to be an insane asylum”?
JGabriel
@Chris:
Yes, in 2005 SC took in $1.35 from the feds for every $1.00 they paid in taxes. That’s the most recent data I could find, but I only spent a couple minutes looking.
.
Dennis SGMM
Seems like rather than being appalled at the Republican’s turn toward being the Party of the Confederacy, the NYT has decided to legitimatize neo-Confederate revisionism. “That’s right folks; it’s just like Mayberry – only more serious. And pay no heed to the scorch marks on that colored fella’s front lawn. The boys weren’t burning a cross, they were just doing a historical re-enactment.”
El Cid
‘Given that interest in reporting on South Carolina politics always focuses on its white right wing majority…’
On the plus side, it’s not NPR having someone in the field making sure to have audio of local color commentators and evocative background sound.
Seanly
I got laid off a couple of months ago here in Columbia SC. Wife and I decided to speed up our timetable for getting out of this cheap skate paradise. There are some very nice people here, but the overall conservative nature is too much for us.
Bulworth
Heh, indeedy.
Also, too, the fine, genteel anti-gov folks of OK sure luvs them sum gov cash and jobs:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-okla-a-beneficiary-sours-on-federal-spending/2011/04/10/AFd24AHD_story.html
catclub
@Chris: “would South Carolina happen to be one of those lovely states who take in far more money from the feds.”
No,South Carolina happens to be one of those lovely states THAT take in far more money from the feds.”
or WHICH – I am confident a more superior language pedant than I will tell you.
Paul in KY
@Dave L: Yeah, what about that! Maybe the whole state should be gitmoed. Also. Too.
cmorenc
@Seanly:
Therein lies a key contradiction. I grew up in a small town in southeast North Carolina close to the border with South Carolina, with a very similar social and political culture. INDIVIDUALLY one on one, people are very considerate, polite, thoughtful, and sociable, though not far below the surface you’ll find you run into barriers of cliquishness and clannishness (not the KKK kind) if “you’re not from around these parts”. The mindset will quickly grow prickly, even ugly though if anything you do, advocate, or even seem too connected with suggests change to the existing order of things, including giving off vibes that you’re uncomfortable with it.
Mike in NC
Senator Graham is working furiously to get the HQ of the US Africa Command to relocate from Europe to one of the old military bases in the Charleston area. Oh, the irony.
"Fair and Balanced" Dave
Shorter NY Times:
“South Carolina has been sending treasonous unprincipled scumbags to the US Congress for over a century”
Amir_Khalid
@catclub:
Either “that” or “which” is correct in the sentence given. “Who” doesn’t fit here as a relative pronoun because the antecedent “South Carolina” is not being used to mean a person or group of people.
4jkb4ia
It wasn’t a bad story. The thrust was that local ties and expectations might be as important as Tea Party ties.
I remember from Sean Wilentz that, as TNC said, South Carolina before the Civil War stood out for being a highly concentrated slaveholding state, as in a majority of the state was black. But there were regional differences as far as the power of the aristocracy there. So a national trend like Jacksonian Democracy would have different effects in different places. I have a reviewers’ copy with no index, but I will try to find more.
And I do have a snarky remark. The story would have done better in the Styles section than the latest Juicebox Mafia story which had no women that did appear there.
4jkb4ia
Google Books comes through. Wilentz is talking about nullification.
First of all, Calhoun comes to the nullification movement late. Governor Hamilton is the main ringleader for the nullification movement, “overseeing the creation of a formal political party, the staffing of public committees, the writing and printing of pamphlets, and the calling of two statewide antitariff conventions, one in Charleston, the other in…Columbia”. “There was significant opposition, strongest among up-country planters and yeomen and Charleston merchants and lawyers.” [See? Charleston is so relatively cosmopolitan for the South that it had a cameo in “Gone With The Wind”. The Charleston Jewish community is one of the oldest in the United States.] Jackson writes, “You may expect to hear from South Carolina a great noise…but the good sense of the people will put it down”.
“In Charleston, scene of the worst battles, roving bands of armed Unionists and nullifiers confronted each other nightly. Nullifier rhetoric bristled with attacks on majority rule as oppressive, and with defenses of nullification as…the best means to “obtain all the good which has resulted from monarchies and aristocracies without any mixture of the evil.” The nullifiers left little doubt that they believed the protective tariff was not simply an abstract political wrong but an attack by Yankee outsiders on the planters’ prerogatives–and, finally, on slavery itself…..The Unionists countered with a variety of appeals. In the yeoman-dominated northwestern parishes and among the artisans of Charleston, they attacked the undemocratic slaveholders and slavery itself as an evil. More often, they appealed to the voters’ patriotism, insisting that South Carolina’s interests were far more secure inside the Union than outside, and that nullification was a dangerous, unrepublican experiment. The Unionists nearly carried Charleston, and won handily in the northernmost, yeoman-dominated parishes. But the nullifiers’ lopsided victory margins in the cotton-plantation districts gave them 61 percent of the total vote. Thanks to continued malapportionment of the state legislature, this was sufficient to gain the nullifiers the two-thirds’ majority required to authorize the calling of a nullification convention, as laid out in the South Carolina Exposition and Protest.” Then the Unionists lose all hope and the nullifiers dominate the election of delegates to the convention.
So not only are there regional differences but the way this story is told is very important for the real existence of a Slave Power that more and more people came to believe in in the North before the Civil War.
(Once again, the Evil Inclination’s work here is done.)
4jkb4ia
And part of the reason they can’t say “racist” is not only civility but that Tim Scott is black.
Chicago Todd
I got in a back and forth email conversation with this particular reporter making a point that her article was “democrats said, however Republicans said” leaving facts and context to the readers knowledge from other sources . . . or imagination. Apparently critiques from readers are a big no no with NY Times reporters.
Why would I pay any more money for a digital subscription for the same information I can get at Politico. I think that is the NY Times political editors’ goal — to be more like Politico. More drama, less facts.