Free It's My Party by Peter Robinson

continued, “is real middle
     class.” The GOP does not belong to rednecks and bigots, in other words, but to young managers like those you see trying to
     get their grass to grow outside Atlanta.
    If Haley and the Black brothers had a theme, it was change. The New South was just that, new. The South had become Republican
     because it had become more industrial, more middle class, more Yankee-fied. Yet I thought I saw a second reason. The South
     had become Republican because it hadn’t changed.
HOW THE SOUTH REMAINED THE SAME
    Yankee-fication? Millions of Yankees have indeed moved south. But they have tended to cluster together. In northern Virginia,
     there are so many Yankees among the government workers who commute across the Potomac each morning to Washington, D.C., that
     if you picked the region up and put it down someplace else, most of the residents would feel more at home in New Jersey or
     Connecticut than elsewhere in Virginia. In South Florida, Yankees outnumber the natives, and in the long coastal crescent
     from Key West to Miami to West Palm Beach you’re more likely to hear the accents of the Midwest or New York than of Dixie.
     But outside these Yankee clusters genuine southerners still predominate. As recently as 1981, Yankees made up less than a
     tenth of the population in 750 of the Old Confederacy’s 1,145 counties.
    Industrialization? True, the South is a great deal more industrial today than it was as little as one or two decades ago.
     Yet even now much of Dixie remains heavily agricultural. Put yourself in the middle of the most industrialized, Yankee neighborhood
     in the South that you can find. You still won’t have to drive more than an hour to find a place where farming continues to
     be the main source of income and Yankees remain rare. (Even in Yankee clusters, it’s a good question whether the northerners
     have more influence on the southerners who surround them or the other way around. My cousin, Tom, and his wife, Marsha, moved
     from New York to a suburb of Memphis when their children were little. Now adults, all three children speak with a Tennessee
     accent and root for Ole Miss.)
    In spite of all the changes it has undergone, the South remains a place set apart, possessed of its own culture, different
     from every part of the country. I suspect that two distinctively southern traits in particular had a lot to do with the region’s
     entry into the Republican fold. I learned about the traits from books, not firsthand experience. But they fit with everything
     I know about the South. Both traits go back—far back. According to David Hackett Fischer, the author of
Albion’s Seed
, a study of colonial America, they date from at least the seventeenth century. The first is a love of the military.
    As Fischer explains, the first settlers in the South were comprised of two groups. One was aristocrats, displaced after the
     Puritans defeated Charles I. The other was border-country people, inhabitants of the fierce, lawless regions between England
     and Scotland. Each brought with it a military tradition. They bequeathed their love of the military to the entire region.
    While at the outbreak of the Civil War the North possessed few military academies, the South was dotted with them (including
     the Virginia Military Institute, or VMI, which became famous a few years ago when a court ordered it to go co-ed and it at
     first resisted). And during the Civil War itself, as Fischer writes, “the south was superior to the north in the intensity
     of its warrior ethic.” When a Yankee like me looks at Pickett’s charge, the exposed Confederate advance across open fields
     at Gettysburg, he sees only slaughter. Plenty of southerners I know see gallantry.
    Even today the southern military tradition remains powerful. The nation’s armed forces draws a disproportionately large number
     of officers from the South, and at one point during the 1980s the South boasted an astonishing ninety-one