Metaculturation: How White America is Becoming More Southern

The past generation and a half have seen the development of a new dominant political coalition in the United States under the banner of the Democratic Party.

Where the Republican and Democratic parties both had sizable support across class lines throughout the 20th century, since the 1980s the two parties have comes to represent not mere opposing factions, but distinct cultural elements.  The upper-middle-class demographic who now lead the Democratic coalition has homogenized—you will find effete Brahmins in California who have the same political views, the same taste in nearly everything from music to fashion, and even much the same bland accent, as on the East Coast. Middle-and working-class Whites, who often vote Republican despite increasingly finding themselves unrepresented by either party, maintain some of their regional distinctions—if you meet a New Yorker who actually sounds like he’s from New York, or a Southerner who actually sounds like he’s from the South, you’re probably talking to a Vaisya, someone who has a sense of pride in his origins and values them over the ‘authenticity‘ of deliberately sounding like you’re from nowhere and refusing to eat genetically modified foods.

But just as the Brahmin caste has consolidated not only politically but culturally since the Reagan administration, a parallel trend has arisen: the  Southernization of middle- and working-class Whites. As noted above, this is not so much discernible from dialect as from the fact that you can find Confederate battle flags being flown in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maine. You’ll also find that Southern country music is massively popular in States as far apart as Montana and Ohio. As the United States are increasingly divided along caste lines, regional differences are subsumed into broader clusters of general values, beliefs, and practices.

This subsumption, thanks to the treatment of cultural matters by the media and by the political system—but we repeat ourselves—includes the watering down of distinct thedish elements that do not have some political relevance. Regional, or even national, trends wash away subtle differences in local custom and speech, unique forms of trade and organization give way to more widely applicable and politically actionable models, the finer points of Protestant theology become crowded out by a conspicuous attachment to Zionism by many Christian conservatives, whose love for Israel is not reciprocated in the slightest, and even Jews themselves drift away from their religious traditions in favor of an idea of Jewish identity centered around political activism and remembering the Holocaust (and otherwise, who would do the job of reminding Germans of their “everlasting” guilt?). Elements of culture that are not directly politically useful are lost, and replaced by weaker ones, designed and promoted by political interest groups, allowing less room for communal identity, but carrying more political content.

This process, this political weaponization of culture, can be called metaculturation. Just as normal enculturation occurs when one is either born into a particular culture or is adopted into it at some later point, metaculturation involves the adoption of these weakened and exaggerated forms of one’s ancestral culture. In this case, Vaisyas are metaculturating due both directly to the general watering-down of old thedish distinctions and as a reaction to the antagonism of the Brahmin caste. Vaisyas are simultaneously losing what remains of their great-grandparents’ culture and distorting it, because even as progressive ideas maintain the upper hand, even as culture becomes progressively homogenized (in both senses of the word: many activists of the Progressive Era argued in support of this process), Vaisyas don’t want to be Brahmins.

A look at Wikipedia’s brief article on Southernization reveals the casual contempt for the South held by the typical US progressive. The sentence about the South having “infiltrated the national stage” tells you almost all you need to know. Infiltrated! The South especially, but the entire middle and southern section of the US in general, is viewed increasingly not only as a foreign entity by the namaste-and-a-latte set, but as an enemy. It is entirely lost on Brahmins that the divisions of the Civil War were reconciled as the 19th century ended, with tens of thousands of Southerners signing up to fight with their fellow Americans in the Spanish-American War in 1898 and putting the carnage of the 1860s and the contemptuous treatment of Reconstruction behind them. For these smugly irresponsible pseudo-sophisticates, it’s always 1861.