"Redneck Nation", by Michael Graham

At first hearing most will wave a dismissive hand in the air. We Northerners don't talk with a drawl or drink mint juleps on the front porch waiting for the Kentucky Derby results. For goodness sake, we don't get cable TV just so we can watch NASCAR or tune in weekly to the WWF. We don't have a hard anti-intellectual strain running through our...

Wait a minute, this is starting to sound too familiar, and in any case, it is only the tip of the iceberg as Michael Graham wittily, breezily and too easily demonstrates in his book, "Redneck Nation: How the South Really Won the War".

Although "Redneck Nation" is stock full of humor, it is also a rather frightening expose on what has happened to American Culture at the hands of demagogic politicians. We see how traits once singularly Southern have supplanted Northern ideals of hard work, self-reliance and freedom. We can easily label the Southern invasion of the North and call it Liberalism. For it is the "Nobless Oblige" of the southern Aristocrat that has been transplanted to the Northern Intellectual (or pseudo-intellectual as the case may be.)

The upper crust of Northern culture deigns to look down its nose at the lower classes and prescribe various programs to help the poor and downtrodden that will ultimately keep them in their place. It is reminiscent of slavery, in that it assumes people cannot take care of themselves so they must be mollycoddled by the government (which stands in for the slave owner). People are never challenged to rise above their circumstances and are kept on the plantation to bring their vote to their masters in the Democratic party.

Michael Graham gets considerable mileage out of demonstrating how the victim mentality spreading in American Culture began in the old South. He blasts education, political correctness, racial quotas, feminism and more. The scary thing about this book is that it all rings true. It does appear that the South has won. All of the tenets of its pre-1964 culture seem to have infiltrated the whole of American society.

With fluid style and piercing intelligence, Michael Graham ably demonstrates the "Redneck" nature of modern Liberalism. What Michael Graham does not explain fully is why Southernism/Liberalism has had such a pervasive influence on our culture in the last half of the last century. It is not because Carpetbaggers and Scallawags invaded the North in huge numbers. It was not an insurgency led by underground organization bent on destroying the "Union". In fact, a look at the modern South, shows it to be least liberal and the least like the old South in many ways.

Rather the move toward liberalism was more a response to modern media that opened the way for demagoguery by left-leaning politicians that was not possible before say 1932. Be that as it may, Michael Graham's book is jam packed with prescient analysis and biting satire. This is a fun read on the politics of liberalism from a new perspective.

This book is available at Amazon.com"