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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - V. Politics - 20. Underlying Factors - 3. The North and the South - 4. The Southern Defense Ideology
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Chapter 20. Underlying Factors 441
the liberals are the party of law and order, while the conservatives are the
habitual transgressors. The ’party which works for change has the established
law on its side^ or rather^ wants to enforce ity hut has not the political
power: the party which stands for the status quo has the power but not the
law.
To try to understand how this extraordinary situation has come about
must be our next task. As a background we shall have to remember the
weak development of political legality generally in America, so visible in
its relative lack of an independent administration. Even in the North the
conservative forces have occasionally faltered in performing their ^‘func-
tion” in democracy, to stand for the law. But the difference between the
two regions is immense. In the South a veritable reversal of the usual order
of democracy has established itself.
4. The Southern Defense Ideology
Part of the explanation is that Southern conservatism is “reactionary”
in the literal sense of the word. It has preserved an ideological allegiance
not only to status quOy but to status quo ante. The region is still carrying
the heritage of slavery.
In the last part of the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth
century, the moral righteousness and the socio-economic advantages of
slavery came to be doubted very much in the Old Upper South,^^ and
even in the Deep South dissenting opinions were heard. But from about
the 1830^8—under the double influence of the rising profitableness of the
slavery and plantation economy and the onslaught from the Northern
Abolitionist movement—^the apologetic ideology became stabilized and
elaborated into a complicated theory of state which every Southerner had
to stand for as a matter of regional pride and patriotism.^^
This ingenious theory was based oA the dogma of Negro racial inferior-
ity® and also on unique interpretations of the Bible and on general principles
for a rational social order. In fact, it is seldom duly recognized that the
pro-slavery thought in the South in the decades before the Civil War was
the most uncompromising conservative political philosophy which ever
developed in Western civilization after the Enlightenment.^® From a
logical point of view, it is the only brand of modern conservatism consistent
and courageous enough openly to make human inequality basic to political
philosophy, to accept the static state as ideal and to denounce progress.
Conservative thinking elsewhere after the Enlightenment was seldom in
a position to develop a closed system of principles like liberalism or the
various schools of socialism, anarchism and syndicalism. Lack of rigid
principles, acceptance of logical compromises, and the view that the growth
of society is an arational, organic process was often even pronounced as a
See Chapter 4.
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