Heart of valor.

Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, by James Webb (Broadway, 384 pp., $25.95)

WITHOUT really intending to do so, James Webb may have written the most important political book of 2004. Born Fighting helps explain why George W. Bush won reelection by a margin greater than conventional wisdom predicted. Democrats especially, but Republicans as well, ought to take note of this book.

The Scots-Irish, writes Webb, are all around us. They shape our culture,

   more in the abstract power of emotion
   than through the argumentative force
   of law. In their insistent individualism,
   they are not likely to put an ethnic label
   on themselves when they debate societal
   issues. Some of them don't even
   know their ethnic label, and some who
   do don't particularly care. They don't
   go for group-identity politics any more
   than they like to join a union. Two hundred
   years ago the mountains built a
   fierce and uncomplaining self-reliance
   into an already hardened people. To
   them, joining a group and putting themselves
   at the mercy of someone else's
   collective judgment makes as much
   sense as letting the government take
   their guns. And nobody is going to get
   their guns.

These are the "red state" voters. They are family-oriented, take morality seriously, go to church, join the military, and listen to country music. They strongly believe that no man is obligated to obey the edicts of a government that violates his moral conscience. They once formed the bedrock of the Democratic party--from Andrew Jackson until Vietnam--but have been moving to the GOP ever since. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Webb called the Scots-Irish in America the "the secret GOP weapon."

This is Webb's first nonfiction book, and it is a tour de force. He describes the migration of a stubborn, individualistic people from the mists of Northern Scotland through Ulster to the highlands of America, and thence--by the "hillbilly highways"--to the Midwest and Far West. Throughout, they have refused to bend the knee to kings, bishops--or modern American elites. It is important to recognize that we are talking about culture here and not "blood": Scots-Irish culture is so populist and assimilative that other ethnic groups have gravitated toward it. That's how it has become, arguably, America's strongest cultural force.

For many Americans, however, the Scots-Irish culture is either invisible or an object of derision. In today's group-identity politics, the Scots-Irish are usually lumped into the WASP category, which illegitimately papers over many significant differences among white, "non-ethnic" Americans. When they are noticed at all, they are liable to be ridiculed by the coastal elites, who view them as violent rednecks or trailer-park trash. After the elections, for instance, novelist Jane Smiley wrote that "the election results reflect the decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry.... Ignorance and bloodlust have a long tradition in the United States, especially in the red states.... Listen to what the red state citizens say about themselves, the songs they write, and the sermons they flock to. They know who they are--they are full of original sin and they have a taste for violence."

Unfortunately, the Left does not have a monopoly on this attitude. Commenting on a statement that Howard Dean made during the Democratic primaries, Charles Krauthammer opined that Dean was campaigning for the "white trash vote" by pandering to the "rebel-yelling racist redneck." In the Wall Street Journal, Webb called this "the most vicious ethnic slur of the presidential campaign," noting dryly that Krauthammer "has never complained about this ethnic group when it has marched off to fight the wars he wishes upon us."

Webb is a remarkable man: a graduate of the Naval Academy who, while serving as a Marine officer in Vietnam, was wounded twice and awarded the Navy Cross for valor (think non-posthumous Medal of Honor). A graduate of Georgetown Law School, he was secretary of the navy during the Reagan administration. He is a man of letters whose most important fictional characters are convincingly realized representatives of the people he chronicles in Born Fighting: Robert E. Lee Hodges Jr. (Fields of Fire, the best novel about Vietnam), Bill Fogarty (A Sense of Honor and Something to Die For), and Judd Smith (A Country Such as This). And--most important for Vietnam veterans like me--Webb is the man who time and again stood on the front lines of the culture war that still rages between those who served and those who didn't, a culture war that played a major role in the recent election. And just as he stood up to the elites who peddled falsehoods about the Vietnam veteran, he now takes them on about this important group as well.

Not surprisingly, the two stories are related. The Scots-Irish have an age-old military tradition: They have turned up disproportionately for all of America's wars. In Born Fighting, the scene shifts seamlessly from Berwick and Bannockburn, to Ulster, to Civil War battlefields, to the An Hoa basin of Vietnam--where Webb led a platoon and a rifle company of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines. Webb is writing about his own "people," his forebears. "History becomes personal," he writes. "And the personal becomes history." Readers of Born Fighting will already have heard of Andy Jackson and Braveheart's William Wallace, but Webb also recounts the stories of his own family--among whom no one stands taller than his father, who passed on to him the Scots-Irish code of honor, courage, loyalty, and audacious leadership.

The Scots-Irish tend to see politics and religion from the bottom up rather than from the top down. In the British Isles, they resisted Norman feudalism, adhering to political relations based on personal honor and voluntary associations. In America, especially the South, they fought against a top-down political system imported by the Cavaliers, and they shaped Jacksonian democracy. In the British Isles, they resisted both Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism, preferring the Kirk and Presbyterianism (the rule of elders); in America, they became Baptists and fueled the various Great Awakenings.

In Scotland, they lived in dugouts and cabins that reflected the reality of frequent English depredations. In America, they lived in cabins that reflected the reality of an often-dangerous Indian frontier. Unpainted barns and trailer parks are today's legacy of an uncertain environment. The English imported Scots Presbyterians to Ulster to manage their unruly Celtic cousins, the Irish. These Scots were repaid by the Test Acts of Queen Anne that essentially outlawed their religion. Growing tired of fighting Anglican England's battles against the Catholic Irish in Ulster, in the 18th century they migrated in large numbers to America, where both the Virginia aristocrats and Pennsylvania's Quakers saw them as a buffer against the Indians. As in Ulster, the elites of Pennsylvania and Virginia likewise often repaid the Scots-Irish with legislation that was disadvantageous to them.

Some 95 percent of the Ulster Scots who immigrated to America ended up in the South, so that region and the Scots-Irish are irrevocably linked. And of course, the mythic event for the South, even more than for the rest of the country, is the Civil War and Reconstruction. Despite the fact that poor whites, especially the Scots-Irish, had no stake in the preservation of slavery, the planter class was successful in recruiting them for the war: They formed the core of the Confederate armies that struggled against the odds for four long and costly years. But the impact of the Scots-Irish did not stop here. They also provided the bulk of Union soldiers in the Western armies--Hoosiers, Buckeyes, and other "butternuts" from the Northwest, as well as Unionist groups in east Tennessee, western Virginia, northern Alabama, North Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana that resisted central Confederate authority just as assiduously as they had federal.

The Scots-Irish paid a high price for the Civil War. The economic status of the Scots-Irish is similar to that of black southerners--but since they are lumped in with other non-ethnic whites, they do not benefit from "affirmative action." America's elites do not see this. All they see are rednecks waving the Confederate flag. But while the Confederate battle flag unfortunately has been co-opted by racists, most descendants of the Scots-Irish see it as I do: a tribute to honorable men who fought bravely against great odds.

If the Democrats ever want to be competitive again, they need to figure out a way to appeal to the Scots-Irish culture of the red states, and indeed of the red counties within blue states. Maureen Dowd can stamp her feet all she wants, but it is this culture that gave rise to true American-style democracy. James Webb has shown us that as long as the likes of Dowd and Michael Moore are the arbiters of the Democratic party, the Democrats are unlikely to win another national election. But the flipside is just as important: The Republicans cannot afford to take this culture for granted.

Mr. Owens is an associate dean of academics and a professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I.