Yankee Values vs. Identity Politics

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I have to have a good laugh at this whole rant about "Yankee values".  Now, I do agree that there is a lot wrong with the state of "Identity Politics" but coming up with a whole new term to describe what to most people should be objectively good things and then labeling it "Yankee values" and arguing that just one brave group of people are responsible for the success of it all?

How is that not Identity Politics, man?

This thread lacks completely in the self-awareness.

There is a desire on the part of the left/progressives to identify a "pure" historical group who has throughout its history sought only good and then latched onto them as being their philosophical antecedents. After a whole lot of white washing of the appropriated group and the assignment of many faults in American history to the "THOSE PEOPLE" and you have this thread.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

History is made by flawed people, because people as a whole are by nature flawed. That means you have good people who sometimes do horrendous things. At the same time you have bad people do on occasion something great.

Andrew Jackson is a horrible person, but he is credited with the expansion of government for better or for worse beyond just a select group of elites.

Now here is the kicker that undermines a lot of what this thread was saying. If Yankees are the anti-authority/rebellious/egalitarian ones, than why was the whole of the 19th century defined by a largely New England centered party that almost always sided with the elites, versus a party based in the South and west that was almost universally defined at its core of opposing the elites?

The OP got one thing right, Yankee values were in fact defined by religion and the reason why these values and this group are losing ground to Southernization is because said religion has waned substantially in its influence to almost nothing. These regions of the country vote Democratic, because they are secularized not because they are "Yankee", and we live in a political era that is polarized based on religious fervor.

Now lets look at the dirty laundry. 

Part I: Immigrants and Religion:

These supposed egalitarian Yankees, were aghast by Catholicism, their opposition to the Church of England was because it was "too Catholic" in its trappings as much as anger at hierarchical control and they disdained such influences. So what happens when a bunch of Irish Catholics start arriving by the boatload in Boston. 1) You discriminate like crap against them and 2) you move to Michigan/Illinois/Oregon.

 For the ones that remain, you try to use compulsory public education to teach them the King James Bible and then you try to keep them from voting (And you thought the South were the only ones who believed in restricted voting rights). Early Federalists and Whigs (which yes included Plantation Owners in the South as well) were very much against expanded voting favoring land and wealth requirements, because it would mean ceding power and control to those low class and later largely Catholic immigrants. Once the immigrants started to be exclusively Catholic, then the class divide among Yankees evaporated and both joined forces in a political alignment defined by religious identity. Later on they would use rivalries for jobs and political influence among more recent immigrant groups as a wedge against the Irish political machines.

This dynamic lasted for over 100 years until the Great Depression and the Greatest Generation swamped out the WASP-Yankee led political machines in the cities of the North and even whole states like Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

Anti-Ethnic politics also helped to galvanize support for Prohibition as well, which united Calvinists both North and South in support in the 1920's. Just as the same two groups (Northern Yankees and Southern Plantation Society) locked arms to pass the Immigration laws in the 1920's, as well.

Part II: Native Americans. While it is easy to think this is something that was exclusive to Southern originated folks, you must never forget that there is a reason why Native American Groups hate Thanksgiving (Yankee originated) as a holiday and often protest on that day. From the time of the landings on Plymouth Rock all the way until end of the 19th century, guess who was just as zealous if not more so in persecuting the indigenous peoples of America? You guessed it! This also was motivated in part by religion and it also a joint project carried out by people both North and South just like prohibition. 


Abolitionism: Yankee culture has one redeeming quality that sustains it about most everything else and it is the reason why modern day Progressives will engage in any amount of historical revisionism to latch onto the group while shirking off any traces of their other antecedents (Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson say hello). Groups that supported abolitionism did so for many different reasons over the course of the period leading up to the Civil War, but it should be noted that it was not because of widespread egalitarianism, it was for most of them, again because of theology. Some believed that slavery ran contrary to God's will, for others it was simply more practical, slavery was an impediment to spreading the gospel to the enslaved peoples. Contained within this was extreme levels of 19th century cultural Imperialism and white supremacy that would make most on the left sick. But history is full of good things being done by a mixed group of people, some of whom are doing so for the wrong reasons.

There is a reason why Republicans have for most of its history been a party hostile to immigration, whether it was based in New England and fighting for abolition or based in the South and fighting for the end of abortion. Over the course of that same period Republicans have generally been the party most favorable to business interests as well.

Yes when you shift your base from one group to another, some other aspects of the political culture will change as well as a result and that leads to others shifting subsequently in reaction to that. However, the reason why the North is Democratic and Republicans began the migration to the South with the Southern Strategy to begin with is because Yankee culture was on the decline in the 20th century.

1. Massive Immigration and low rates of birth meant that percentage of the population that was Yankee was declining.
2. Further complicating things is the Germanification of the North over the course of the early to mid 20th century through a combination of displacement and inter-marriage. That is why those census maps show so little English and so much German in the Northern States, when accounting of course for reporting bias in those surveys.
3. The loss of political clout and the dethroning of pre-New Deal era political machines meant that the Republicans could no longer sustain themselves in the region while being shut out from the South and Southwest.

The effects of this process meant that the Republicans no longer had a firm base that could dominate their base region of the country anymore and not only that but internally were no longer majority Yankee by the strictest definition of the term, as a lot of German, and even and other non-Yankee whites had joined the party by the 1950's.

Over the same period of time, secularization had a substantial impact on the same group of voters and so you had a now secular group of people on the one hand and a Republican Party that is becoming more and more Catholic over the course of the mid 20th century. Tribalistic rivalry based on religion had been what had kept Yankees Republican for so long.

The Republican's Southern Strategy and the shift towards a more Catholic base in the North were reactions to the decline in power of the Yankee demographic, and then by shifting served to intensify that political realignment over the coming decades.

I have long been of the opinion, that our present political ideologies and also the parties themselves share interwoven antecedents and origins and to try and latch onto one and say this is where all good things came from whereas all bad things came from everything else, is in my opinion a dangerous example of historical revisionism.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Now here is the kicker that undermines a lot of what this thread was saying. If Yankees are the anti-authority/rebellious/egalitarian ones, than why was the whole of the 19th century defined by a largely New England centered party that almost always sided with the elites, versus a party based in the South and west that was almost universally defined at its core of opposing the elites?

This didn't happened unless you mean the Greenback and Populist parties, yet you seem to speak of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party simply favored Southern slave-agricultural elites and the Catholic hierarchy over Protestant clergy and Northern industrialists.

Even if you are right, that doesn't make the Republicans in this equation not a party bought and paid for by robber barons. But of course you are not right.

One of the greatest misnomers going around and it is one spread by the right often is that the Democrats "were the party of slavery and slave owners from its founding", that is not correct. The Democratic Party's natural base was the populist small farmer and the immigrant laborer. The existence of the Populist Party is down to the failure of the Democratic Party to service its traditional base in favor of yes the Plantation Owner and the bourbon elites, but this was corrected for in 1896. Decades before the Democrats stopped being the "Party of the South".

A large percentage of the plantation owning class and slave traders were Whigs not Democrats prior to the Civil War and these people only joined the Democrats because 1) they hated the Republicans and 2) They had common cause with those small farmers and immigrant laborers in their hatred of blacks, hatred of Republicans and preference for free trade. By the 1880s and 1890s, their interests had diverge and liberalism was evolving across the globe in a direction of more direct aid for the poor through Government action. The Bourbon elites kept hocking the same Jacksonian lines thinking that is what Jackson's old base still wanted, fun fact economy is dynamic and evolving while political establishments are glued to the past.

The history of the Democratic Party and the Jeffersonian Republicans before them, is one of an egalitarian revolution overthrowing a decadent elite that lost touch with its base. Happened in the 1800s, the 1830s, the 1890s and it is arguably happening now.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

The Federalists were not great egalitarians. I have to agree with North Carolina Traitor on this one.

How am I traitor.

I am a carpetbagger, not a traitor.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Finally someone who gets it!

These supposed egalitarian Yankees, were aghast by Catholicism, their opposition to the Church of England was because it was "too Catholic" in its trappings as much as anger at hierarchical control and they disdained such influences. So what happens when a bunch of Irish Catholics start arriving by the boatload in Boston. 1) You discriminate like crap against them and 2) you move to Michigan/Illinois/Oregon.

They were opposed to Catholicism because of their egalitarianism, which came from their religion. The Catholic Church was a deeply reactionary institution that all radicals and liberals, Protestant or not, American or Italian, English or French, fought against for the cause of liberty.

These two papers have also got a lot on 19th century Yankee liberalism and its coming into conflict with conservative Catholicism, the Republicans being the party of Protestant liberalism vs. the Democrats being the party of reactionary Southerners and Catholics, the role these ideologies played in the Civil War and the slavery debate, reactions to liberal revolutions of 1848, etc:

https://ir.library.louisville.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3440&context=etd

https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/55595/PDF/1/play/

I would encourage anyone who is immediately dismissive of the OP’s argument to spend some time reading these.

One of the core tenets of liberalism is religious tolerance Henry. Just because of historical political leanings and allusions to such made by figures in the times, it doesn't change that fact that you have the dynamic of a religious minority being discriminated against by a religious majority in power.

Taking these people at face value either because of personal religious bias or naive trust in spoken words of people is folly. They are engaging in an action, that objective implementation of the enlightenment would regard as being unacceptable. It is not without accident that by this point already, most of the support for Catholic minority rights in England are being advanced not by the Tories, but by the Liberal Party of course with a few exceptions obviously.

I get the sense you are trying to shoe horn a 17th century dynamic 200 years later and relying on hypocritical bigots doesn't well lend credence to your arguments. We don't take the slave holders at face value when they say they are acting in the best interest of their slaves, why should we take religious bigots at face value when they engage in this kind of obfuscation to defend their actions in the name of protecting freedom from the Popish menace?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

The Federalists were not great egalitarians. I have to agree with North Carolina Traitor on this one.

How am I traitor.

I am a carpetbagger, not a traitor.

Because you have Yankee in your username yet have made the post most critical of "Yankee" identity.

Well unlike the caricature created by Lost causers and for some reason embraced by left wing revisionists of yankees seeing themselves as pure and noble champions of all that is good in history, I prefer a more realistic and honest approach that demonstrates that far from being a 400 year old champion of "egalitarianism" they were in fact during the period in question a dominant political force and establishment in terms of politics, economics, religion and culture and went to great lengths to "conserve" that power dynamic, but did happen to get it right once because of varying motives ranging from noble, to self interested, to cultural supremacy and that of course being abolitionism.

Understanding that myriad of motivations as well as understanding the power dynamic of the 19th century is critical to an accurate understanding of the period, and also to appreciating the impact that power has on people in positions of strength in terms of corrupting them and also the impact that one's placement in an inferior positions relatively speaking can thus be impacted differently.

I am sure the Catholic immigrant slaving in the coal mines reveled in this reactionaryism as he fought for the right to unionize against the fat Yankee WASP swimming in robber baron cash.

Its times like this I miss Mechaman, who being if memory serves me Irish and very left wing would eat Henry for lunch in these discussions.

He certainly had no patience for this glorification of Hamilton and the Federalists as "liberals" and posted a thread that literally nuked this conceptualization.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

The Federalists were not great egalitarians. I have to agree with North Carolina Traitor on this one.

How am I traitor.

I am a carpetbagger, not a traitor.

Because you have Yankee in your username yet have made the post most critical of "Yankee" identity.

Well unlike the caricature created by Lost causers and for some reason embraced by left wing revisionists of yankees seeing themselves as pure and noble champions of all that is good in history, I prefer a more realistic and honest approach that demonstrates that far from being a 400 year old champion of "egalitarianism" they were in fact during the period in question a dominant political force and establishment in terms of politics, economics, religion and culture and went to great lengths to "conserve" that power dynamic, but did happen to get it right once because of varying motives ranging from noble, to self interested, to cultural supremacy and that of course being abolitionism.

Understanding that myriad of motivations as well as understanding the power dynamic of the 19th century is critical to an accurate understanding of the period, and also to appreciating the impact that power has on people in positions of strength in terms of corrupting them and also the impact that one's placement in an inferior positions relatively speaking can thus be impacted differently.

I am sure the Catholic immigrant slaving in the coal mines reveled in this reactionaryism as he fought for the right to unionize against the fat Yankee WASP swimming in robber baron cash.

Its times like this I miss Mechaman, who being if memory serves me Irish and very left wing would eat Henry for lunch in these discussions.

He certainly had no patience for this glorification of Hamilton and the Federalists as "liberals" and posted a thread that literally nuked this conceptualization.

Mechaman would do that.  If Mechaman at all took HenryWallace seriously.

That just takes the fun out of it.