Southerners are used to bigoted screeds
by limp-wristed liberals, even those who purport a common heritage. Michael Lind has made a living at bad
mouthing the Southland. His latest rant
is just one in a long train of abuses.
And like most liberals, he’ll fabricate, conflate and outright lie to
propagate a narrative.
Mr. Lind’s latest derision is based on
Southern exceptionalism which he describes as “higher violence and less social
mobility.”
Newsbuster poked a huge hole in his
violence accusation:
Lind conveniently
leaves out the fact that eight of America's ten most dangerous cities are
northern, or in the case of Oakland, very “progressive.” He also specifically
mentions the ongoing racial issues, violence, and unrest in South Carolina, but
ignores recent struggles in Baltimore, Chicago, and New York City- more facts
that go against the rhetoric needed to condemn a more conservative faction of
American geography –
Mr. Lind’s
assertion on social mobility has to be questioned also. He wrote the following:
Today there is more
inter-generational social mobility in Europe than in the United States,
contrary to the American myth that the United States is still the world’s No. 1
land of opportunity. The Economic Mobility Project of Pew Charitable Trusts has
shown that children are far less likely to rise above the socio-economic levels
of their parents in the U.S. than are those in Britain, Canada and Australia,
as well as Germany, France and the Nordic nations. The American South, with the
lowest rates of intergenerational social mobility in the U.S., clearly skews
the national statistics, creating an embarrassing and depressing version of
American exceptionalism.
The Pew Charitable
Trusts report didn’t mention regional intergenerational social mobility. I don’t know where Mr. Lind concluded the
South is depressing American exceptionalism; it’s not from this report. However,
Pew did publish the following:
These findings are more striking when put in
comparative context. There is little available evidence that the United States
has more relative mobility than other advanced nations. If anything, the data
seem to suggest the opposite. Using the relationship between parents’ and
children’s incomes as an indicator of relative mobility, data show that a
number of countries, 5 including Denmark, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden,
Germany, and France have more relative mobility than does the United States
(see Figure 3).12
Even progressives have criticized Mr. Lind’s
abnormal obsession with the South. Ed
Kilgore, a managing editor at The Democratic Strategist and senior fellow at
the Progressive Policy Institute, took issue with Mr. Lind’s unending angst:
Ah, Michael Lind,
that maddeningly erudite but tunnel-visioned scholar of American history and
politics, has struck again! In a piece for Salon that
epitomizes his strengths and weaknesses, Lind forces Rick Perry’s “Texas
Miracle” economic development scam into his eternal mold of virtuous Yankees
and satanic southerners, and manages a drive-by slur on those who think the
Earned Income Tax Credit is a pretty important boon to the working poor.
And this:
So attached is
Michael Lind to his theory of ethno-regional determinism, however, that he
extends the southern conspiracy to include those who support the Earned Income
Tax Credit for the working poor:
Mr. Lind should see a
psychiatrist. I’ve heard of “daddy
issues,” but nothing reaches the magnitude of this psychosis.
Source:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/how-the-south-skews-america-119725.html#ixzz3filNGQuF
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2013_02/the_original_sin_of_southernom043090.php
