How to explain this dramatic break with tradition? Where does the Bush administration’s profoundly conservative America-firstism come from? For a clue, look to the same region that’s causing trouble for the Republican leadership right now–the American South. The political base of the Republican Party is the South, coupled with the Prairie and Rocky Mountain states. The Bush Doctrine may enrage the largely Northeastern foreign-policy establishment. But it plays well below the Mason-Dixon Line, not least because it melds two Old Dixie traditions–militarism and Protestant fundamentalism.
Consider the new unilateralist impulse, which holds that the United States should maintain its overwhelming global power and sway in the world, even if that means downgrading old alliances and considering pre-emptive wars. To the liberal and pluralist Northeastern and West Coast, the very idea is alien. To much of the South, by contrast, it is only logical. White Southerners are the most martial subculture in the United States. Private military academies are as commonplace in the South as liberal-arts colleges are in New England. Southern whites have always been, and remain, over represented in the U.S. military–and underrepresented in the diplomatic corps.
It has always been so. From the 18th century until the present, Southerners have been more eager than white Northerners to support wars. “From the quasi-war with France [in 1798] to the Vietnam War, the two southern cultures strongly supported every American war no matter what it was about or who it was against,” writes the historian David Hackett Fischer. In a Gallup poll last August, Midwesterners were almost evenly divided about going to war in Iraq–47 percent in favor and 44 percent against–while Southerners favored an invasion by 62 percent to 34 percent.
When the House of Representatives voted on Oct. 10 to authorize the president to go to war against Iraq, a majority of Democrats voted against the resolution. Democrats who broke with their party to support Bush were mostly from Southern states like Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi. The entire Democratic delegation of Tennessee joined all of their Republican colleagues in voting for war. The journalist John B. Judis described the profile of these different constituencies: “a high-school-educated white male from the rural or small-town South.”
Southern militarism is often joined with a contempt for civilian diplomacy and suspicion of international organizations. In his book “Dixie Looks Abroad: The South and U.S. Foreign Relations, 1789-1973,” Joseph Fry writes that, after World War II, “the South quickly became disillusioned with the United Nations after 1945 and persistently favored unilateral actions when U.S. interests were in question.” More recently, according to polls, the groups that showed least support for U.S. participation in U.N. peacekeeping efforts in Kosovo were Southerners and those without college degrees.
Along with unilateral militarism, Protestant fundamentalism is deeply woven into Southern culture. Not all white Southerners are fundamentalists, of course, but the white South is the homeland of the religious right. Southern fundamentalists are ardent supporters of the state of Israel, for religious reasons. Many know the geography and history of “the Holy Land” as well as–or better than–they know the geography and history of the United States.
Most Jewish Americans oppose the religious right. But for decades right-wing Israeli politicians like Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir and Ariel Sharon have cultivated Southern Christian conservatives. American fundamentalists supported Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, opposed the Oslo peace process, demanded an end to U.S. negotiations with Palestinians and encouraged the expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories that both Christian and Jewish conservatives call “Judea” and “Samaria.” In 1981, after Israel bombed Iraq’s nuclear facility in Osirak, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin phoned Jerry Falwell even before he called President Ronald Reagan, asking him to “explain to the Christian public the reasons for the bombing.” In 1979, the government of Israel gave Falwell his own Learjet. Falwell’s fellow Southern preacher and religious-right leader, Pat Robertson, was given the Jabotinsky Award by Ariel Sharon’s government in 2001. In 1998, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Washington, D.C., he addressed more than a thousand Protestant fundamentalists before he met with President Clinton.
By 2002, American fundamentalists in the United States, convinced that God gave the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the Jewish people in ancient times, had launched an “adopt a settlement” program. Southern conservatives in Congress, many of them born-again fundamentalists, are among the most fervent supporters of the far right in Israel. In the last week of April 2002, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay said that all of the West Bank–which he called “Judea and Samaria,” in the manner of the Christian and Jewish right wing–belonged to Israel. On May 1, 2002, on MSNBC’s program “Hardball,” House Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey endorsed the call of some on the Israeli right for what would amount to the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and Gaza of Palestinians. “I’m content to have Israel grab the entire West Bank,” said Armey.
To students of the American South, then, the foreign policy of George W. Bush comes as no surprise. The president is a born-again Christian, converted at age 39 by none other than Billy Graham. He supports the teaching of anti-Darwin “creation science” because, in his words, “on the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created the earth.” His core constituency consists of white Southern Protestants.
The American South is not alone in having distinct preferences in foreign policy. For generations the Midwest has been the center of American isolationism. Protectionism has historically been popular in Northeastern industrial states threatened by foreign economic competition. With a Southern conservative president now in charge, it should come as no surprise that policies traditionally favored by Southerners–like free trade, a close Israeli-American alliance and military assertiveness–have become the hallmarks of U.S. strategy in the world.
