from the bigdumbHoosier Archive
the Green Shift - jumping the fence
If you've been following the bigdumbHoosier's occasional writings here, you know that I'm an unflinching liberal. What may come as a shock to some of the younger readers is that I was a Republican for most of my youth, and only partly because I was raised in a family of Republicans. In fact, I didn't entirely give up on the Republican Party until Bush was elected president (Classic Bush, not new Bush Lite).
But really folks, once upon a time there was a liberal wing in the Republican party, although it seems a faint and hazy memory nowadays when one has to look carefully to find the liberal wing in the Democratic party. As for the Republican leadership, they're so southern in accent and attitude that I'm beginning to feel I might be Canadian, except that I'm not much interested in hockey. I wasn't fond of Nixon, but he was at least mainstream, if you ignore the bouts of paranoia. But now the Republican leadership Trent Lott, Dick Armey, Strom Thurmond types are just plain embarrassing.
polar shift
I wondered how this all happened and started doing some reading. I found an excellent article online (hosted in the U.K., oddly enough). It's America's Tribes by Michael Lind of the New America Foundation, in Washington, D.C. Lind explained American politics in a way that really rang true to me: it's Plymouth vs. Jamestown, chowder vs. grits, factory vs. plantation, machine vs. slave, union vs. confederacy, federal vs. state. It's an ongoing competition between two cultures or tribes - "Yankees" from New England, and descendents of Virginia and south whom he calls "Cavaliers". Yankees came to America to build a new society, and one with certain Utopian qualities. Cavaliers came to America to make a lot of money and lord over the natives and Africans they captured.
from ludd to yank
Things get muddied up along the way, of course, but this schism is so fundamental that it may never be resolved. Perhaps the civil war was just a big mistake after all.
We call this 'the luddite review' because I've come to believe that we need to carefully and critically examine the role of technology and science in our life. Luddism is primarily a labor, human rights, and quality of life movement that opposes the use of machines as tools of oppression, the same kind of oppression that made southern planters rich. Also, the Luddites are associated with Methodism, which is of a Puritanical bent and therefore a Yankee institution. So it makes sense that Yankees should now be Democrats if one assumes the existing two party system. But, alas, the social idealism at the root of Yankee-ness seems to be lacking from today's Democratic party.
will yankees wear green?
Because of that, Green is starting to look better, and once you've jumped parties you can't get too upset about doing it a second time. Thinking about Lind's article, one has to conclude that the Greens speak the Yankee creed much more cogently than do the Democrats of late. Some blame Nader for Gore's defeat, but it was Gore who failed to take an uncompromising stand in favor of traditional Yankee values. If the Greens do take such a stand (and Ralph Nader is a veritable icon of Puritanical-Utopian values), they may inherent, if not the earth, one of the best parts of it, the northeastern United States.
