The rise of the South

Ed Laskey has a long piece at the American thinker about the southern states in the US. Here are a few brief excerpts:

For generations, American elites from the North have treated the South as a benighted land of knaves, fools, and charlatans, a proper subject of scorn and satire and certainly not a region to be admired or emulated. They are comically wrong.

The South has long risen from the ashes of the Civil War, and by many measures it the most admirable region of our nation. It may well be on the verge of becoming America's dominant region, eclipsing the Eastern Seaboard that has reigned from our nation's birth, and sprinting past the ambitions of the West Coast challenge, as the reference point for where America is going and as the heart of American culture.

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The nation's growth engine is located in the South. Northerners, fed up with onerous taxes, growth restrictions, and anti-business rules and regulations, have fled to the South. Ambitious migrants have always flocked to areas of opportunity where their talents and ambitions can flower. These geese that could have laid their golden eggs in the North will be laying them in sunnier climates. While factories close in the North, they are opening up at a rapid clip in the South. Many of these factories use very advanced methods to produce high-tech goods.

The South, in fact, has been a hotbed of business innovation. FedEx (Memphis) was a revolutionary company that has transformed transportation and business logistics in America. Wal-Mart has been a pioneer in bringing low prices to the American consumer and has immeasurably benefited the lifestyles of Americans, especially lower income people; Tyson Foods, Sanderson Farms, Smithfield Foods, Cal-Maine Foods (the number one egg producer in the nation); innumerable soybean farmers are protein factories that have fed America and are feeding the world (and helping our balance of payments). America's largest bank, Bank of America, is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina.

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Home Depot was a pioneer in retailing and has helped to make homes and home improvements affordable for millions of people. Texas Instruments and Dell computer have created a technological corridor in Texas that will benefit the region for years to come. The Raleigh-Durham Research Triangle can hold its own against Silicon Valley and surpasses Route 128 in Massachusetts. More prosaically, Coke has been refreshing the world's billions for years.

While Texas and Oklahoma and the Southern states bordering the Gulf of Mexico supply our energy needs, many blue states (and Florida) forbid the development of their offshore oil reserves and prevent the rise of nuclear power, while the Kennedys lead efforts to stop a wind farm from spoiling their view off the coast of Cape Cod.

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The South might be the last, deepest reservoir of patriotism we have in our nation. While Northern colleges have been dropping the studies of military history at a rapid clip (despite America's high level of interest in military history -- see the schedule of the History Channel and book sales figures), military schools and classes in military studies still find a home mostly south of the Mason-Dixon line. Well-regarded scholars have bemoaned the fact that Northern universities have dropped these types of courses from their offerings. Even the liberal New Republic criticizes this trend. These critics realize that in the days ahead an appreciation of military history may be crucial in defending our nation. Operational concepts, military strategies and tactics, historical lessons and analogies, let alone concepts such as valor and heroism, have completely vanished from the minds of many of our future leaders, assuming that the North will provide out future leaders.

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There is much more. He also discusses race, religion, charity and other aspects of southern life.

One of the biggest myths about the south has been perpetrated by the Democrat party with its failure to comprehend why southerns do not vote for it any more. It is still hung up on segregation and race and southerns have long since moved passed those issues. Segregation has not been a serious issue in a political campaign in the last 40 years. What has been an issue has been national security and that is where the Democrats have lost their support, but they are not willing to admit to themselves, so they will keep on doing the things that make them fail in the south.