The End of the South: How Obama vs. McCain Is Unsettling the Old Confederacy

By: Christopher Dickey

Newsweek, August 11, 2008

“For as long as I’ve been alive the old Confederacy has been a land without closure, where history keeps coming at you day after day, year after year, decade after decade, as if the past were the present, too, and the future forever.  Cities grew and populations changed in the South, but the Civil War lurked somehow in the shadow of mirror-sided skyscrapers; the holocaust of slavery and the sweet-bitter victories of the civil-rights movement lingered deep in the minds of people on both sides of the color line.  Yes there was change, progress, prosperity, and a lot of it.  Southerners put their faith in money and jobs and God Almighty to get them to a better place and better times – and for a lot of them, white and black, those times came.  The South got to be a more complicated place, where rich and poor – which is pretty much all there was before Word War II – gave way t a broad-spectrum bourgeoisie with big-time aspirations.  But as air conditioning conquered the lethargy-inducing climate and Northerners by the millions abandoned the rust belt for the sun belt, the past wasn’t forgotten or forgiven so much as put aside while people got on with their lives and the business. 

Now this part of the country, where I have my deepest roots, feels raw again, its political emotions more exposed than they’ve been in decades.  George W. Bush and Barack Hussein Obama have unsettled the South: the first with a reckless war and a weakened economy, the second with the color of his skins, the foreignness of his name, the lofty liberalism of hi language.  Suddenly the palliative prosperity that salved the old, deep wounds no longer seems adequate to the task.”

South troubled by changes that goes well beyond this “change” election:

• Paying for health care
• Jobs disappearing to places that are truly foreign
• New immigrants that are introducing brown into a color map that has long been dominated by black and white

There is a sense that a world is ending, maybe not this year, but inevitably.

A rising business class was key to the South’s transformation into a Republican bastion in the last half of the 20^th century.

• They mistrusted government, especially the federal government.
• They resented any politician who might tax away their newfound prosperity.
• The GOP appealed to the South’s newly prosperous suburb-dwellers while using unsubtle talk about “states’ rights” and “quotas” to touch nerves earlier galvanized by unreconstructed racists like Alabama governor George Wallace

These white, Christine, middle-class Southerners are as disconcerted as anyone by the country’s current economic turmoil. But that doesn’t make them any more amenable to change.  While they may be unenthusiastic about McCain, they are leery of Obama’s liberalism if not his skin color.

If Democrats have hopes for making serious inroads into this Republican bloc, they are probably long term.  “As the society becomes more diversified, there’s a huge opportunity for the Democratic party,” said Merle Black.  Native-born Southerners are a shrinking part of the population, while the numbers of people who are foreign-born like those Spanish speakers, or foreign-born like Yankees, are growing.

Never in the last century and a half has the South been home to so many people who were born and who continue to live outside its history.  A Census report estimated that the South’s Hispanic population nearly tripled between 2000 and 2006, more than in any other U.S. region; nearly 60 percent of this population was foreign-born.  These newcomers have little interest in re-enacting the Civil War, no reason to revive the emotions of the civil-rights movement.  They did not move here for iced tea or a more leisurely pace of life.  The South to them is future, not past.

The Post-American World

By: Fareed Zakaria

Excerpted in Newsweek, May 22, 2008

From the Editor’s Desk: Jon Meacham

As you will see, Fareed has characteristically avoided both blind optimism and predictable pessimism, instead offering a new and compelling way to think about the world.  His book, as he says, is not about the decline of America but the “rise of the rest” – the rest of the world.

Fareed Zakaria

“I came to this country as a young foreign student, found a country that was open to outsiders, to hard work, innovation and to the future,” he says. “I remember being so struck by how easy and fluid life was in the States – from renting a car to getting a summer job.  I made it my home and built a family and a life here.  So this story has been one that obsesses me in a deeply personal sense.  In traveling around the world I’ve watched the ‘rise of the rest.’ Other nations have their strengths, but boy, so do we.  This place has unique virtues.  But it’s when I travel around America that I get worried.  We’re losing faith in the very things that have made us great – our openness, flexibility, adaptability.”

A new poll revealed in April that 81 percent of the American people believe America is on the “wrong track.”  In the 25 years pollsters have been asking this question, April’s response was by far the most negative. Reasons to be pessimistic – a financial panic and looming recession, a seemingly endless war in Iraq, and the ongoing threat of terrorism are simply not dire enough to explain it. 

American anxiety springs from something much deeper, a sense that large and disruptive forces are coursing through the world.  In almost every industry, in every aspect of life, it feels like the patterns of the past are being scrambled.  Americans see that a new world is coming into being, but fear it is one being shaped in distant lands and by foreign people. 

Factoids that reflect a seismic shift in power and attitudes:

• The world’s tallest building is in Taipei, and will soon be in Dubai
• The largest publicly traded company is in Beijing
• The biggest refinery is being constructed in India
• The largest passenger airplane is built in Europe
• The largest investment fund is in Abu Dhabi
• The biggest movie industry is Bollywood, not Hollywood
• The largest casino is in Macao
• The largest shopping mall in American wouldn’t even make the world’s top ten

In America, we are still debating the nature and extent of anti-Americanism. But while we argue over why they hate us, “they” have moved on, and are now far more interested in other, more dynamic parts of the globe.  The world has shifted from anti-Americanism to post-Americanism.

In 2006 and 2007, 124 countries grew their economies at over 4 percent a year.  That includes more than 30 countries in Africa.  Over the last two decades, lands outside the industrialized West have been growing at rates that were once unthinkable.  While there have been booms and busts, the overall trend has been unambiguously upward.  Antoine van Agtmael, the fund manager who coined the term “emerging markets,” has identified the 25 companies most likely to be the world’s next great multinationals.  His list includes four companies each from Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, and Taiwan; three from India, two from china, and one each from Argentina, Chile, Malaysia, and South Africa.  This is something much broader than the much-ballyhooed rise of China or even Asia.  It is the rise of the rest – the rest of the world. 

We are living through the third great power shift in modern history.  The first was the rise of the Western world, around the 15^th century.  It produced the world as we know it now – science and technology, commerce and capitalism, the industrial and agricultural revolutions.  It also led to the prolonged political dominance of the nations of the Western world.  The second shift, which took place in the closing years of the 195^th century, was the rise of the United States.  Once it industrialized, it soon became the most powerful nation in the world, stronger than any likely combination of other nations.  For the last 20 year, American’s superpower status in every realm has been largely unchallenged – something that’s never happened before in history, at least since the Roman Empire dominated the known world 2,000 years ago.  During this Pax Americana, the global economy has accelerated dramatically.  And that expansion is the driver behind the third great power shift of the modern age – the rise of the rest. 

At the military and political level, we still live in a unipolar world.  But along every other dimension – industrial, financial, social, cultural – the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from American dominance. In terms of war and peace, economics and business, ideas and art, this will produce a landscape that is quite different from the one we have lived in until now – one defined and directed from many places and by many peoples.

Do we live in dark and dangerous times?

• Wars of all kinds have been declining since the mid-1980s
• We are now at the lowest levels of global violence since the 1950s
• Although deaths from terrorism have risen in recent years, 80 percent of those casualties come from Afghanistan and Iraq, which are really war zones with ongoing insurgencies

Harvard professor Seven Pinker ventured to speculate that we are probably living “in the most peaceful time of our species’ existence.”

Why does it not fell that way? Why do we think we live in scary times?

• The explosion of information
• The threats from Islamic Jihadists are real (but they make up a tiny portion of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims and support of violence of any kind has dropped dramatically over the last five years in all Muslim countries)
• Rogue states like Iran (in context, no comparison with the dangers posed by a rising Germany in the first half of the century or an expansionist Soviet Union in the second half)
• China, Russia, and assorted other oil potentates (but countries are now choosing to get rich within the existing national order rather than become great military powers, overturn the existing order, and create their own empires or spheres of influence)

Problems with Global Growth

v     Almost all commodities are at an all-time high due to global demand.  The effect of more and more people eating, drinking, washing, driving, and consuming will have seismic effects on the global system.

v     The appearance of new economic powerhouses on the scene: China, India, Brazil – will have a large footprint on the future

v     National pride (that could morph into something uglier)

§         Coming from being poor and marginal to being a symbol of economic progress and success

§         Pent-up frustration over having to accept an entirely Western, or American, narrative of world history

v     Traditional mechanisms of international security are fraying

§         U.N. Security Council has as its permanent members the victors of a war that ended more than 60 years ago

§         The G8 does not include China, India, or Brazil – the three fastest growing economies in the world

§         By tradition, the IMF is always headed by a European and the World Bank by an American

America has benefited from globalization

• Currently ranked as the globe’s most competitive economy by the World Economic Forum
• Remains dominant in many industries of the future like nanotechnology, biotechnology, and dozens of smaller high-tech fields
• Its universities are the finest in the world
• Per capita, the U.S. trains more engineers than either China or India (however, most of them are immigrants)

America’s great – and potentially insurmountable – strength is that it remains the most open, flexible society in the world, able to absorb other people, cultures, ideas, goods, and services.  The country thrives on the hunger and energy of poor immigrants.  Faced with the new technologies of foreign companies, or growing markets overseas, it adapts and adjusts.  When you compare this dynamism with the closed and hierarchical nations that were once superpowers, you sense that the United States is different and may not fall into the trap of becoming rich, and fat, and lazy. 

Americans – particularly the American government – have not really understood the rise of the rest.  This is one of the most thrilling stories in history.  Billions of people are escaping from abject poverty.  The world will be enriched and ennobled as they become consumers, producers, inventors, thinkers, dreamers, and doers.  This is all happening because of American ideas and actions.  For 60 years, the United States has pushed countries to open their markets, free up their politics, and embrace trade and technology.  American diplomats, businessmen, and intellectuals have urged people in distant lands to be unafraid of change, to join the advanced world, to learn the secrets of our success.  Yet just as they are beginning to do so, we are losing faith in such ideas.  We have become suspicious of trade, openness, immigration, and investment because now it’s not Americans going abroad but foreigners coming to America.  Just as the world is opening up, we are closing down.

Generations from now, when historians write about these times, they might note that by the turn of the 21^st century, the United States had succeeded in its great, historical mission – globalizing the world.  We don’t want them to write that along the way, we forgot to globalize ourselves.