The Southern Front: History and Politics in the Cultural War.

My favorite moment of the 1992 campaign--a brief scene that went largely unremarked upon--came one sunny afternoon in late September. At the time, I was a reporter for The Chattanooga Times and President Bush, panicked by the possibility that his rival all-Southern Democrat ticket might break the solid GOP South, was scurrying around the region. At one airport rally after another, his voice ringing with ridicule, Bush thumped Clinton's Arkansas record. In an appeal to a caricature of Southern life, the President portrayed Clinton as nothing less than the enemy of beer, sports, and trailers. "Governor Clinton," Bush charged, "raised the gas tax. He raised the tax on mobile homes. For you ESPN watchers, he raised the tax on cable TV. And for good measure, he even raised the tax on beer."

Bush's frantic pitch was an obvious attempt to bring out the worst in a certain kind of Southerner. Nevertheless, Clinton, a son of the region, was never able to answer with an appeal to the best in the Southern character. That's striking, and important, because Clinton, with his drawl and his Ivy League credentials (insecure Southerners love the Ivies), should have been liberalism's best hope of selling again in the Sunbelt. But it didn't work--and certainly hasn't in the ensuing three years.

In part this is true for reasons that are peculiarly Southern. You might have thought Clinton's rise to power from a poor state would have inspired a kind of tribal pride. The proper analogy here would be the enormous pleasure Catholics--who, like Southerners, were a notoriously insecure lot--took in John Kennedy's carnpaign, election, and presidency. What is crucially different is that Kennedy made a point of appealing to the best in his people--not only fellow Catholics, of course, but all Americans--and generating loyalty by conducting himself as a graceful and thoughtful president.

Clinton has not pulled that off. To be sure, he had a lot to overcome in the minds of his fellow Southerners: This is a region that thought 1976 would redeem it and the memory of Jimmy Carter's implosion is still painfully fresh. To put that humiliation away, Clinton had to be more Atticus Finch than Boss Hogg, and he has been exactly the opposite. From leering remarks about Astroturf in his truck bed to his boxer rebellion on MTV, there has been too little dignity and too much down-home.

Given the South's continuing domination of national politics, this is spectacularly unlucky for Clinton. In eight of the last nine elections, the candidate who has carried a majority of the old Confederacy has won the White House. Most important, the themes that play in Savannah are equally effective these days in Cincinnati or Sausalito. You might ask, 130 years after Appomattox, who really won the war? Read the returns and listen to the drawls of the nation's most prominent politicians--Clinton, Gore, Gramm, Gingrich, Armey, Lott--and it's pretty clear the South has come out on top.

This undeniable connection between what unfolds in the 11 states of the old Confederacy and what's going on in the country at large concerns Eugene Genovese, a noted historian of slavery and the Old South, in his new book. On hearing that a self-described Marxist was writing about the contemporary South, you can be forgiven for expecting a vituperative diatribe against the trailer-loving rubes Bush thought he was speaking to.

But Genovese is a complex, thoughtful man. A collection of his latest reviews and essays, the book is implicitly about what liberals might learn from the South. Many may doubt that the land of Orval Faubus, Ross Barnett, and George Wallace would have anything constructive to offer aside from lessons in buffoonery and injustice. Genovese, however, has long sojourned in the intellectual and political history of the South. He reports back that the region does in fact have civilized voices which, if heeded, could help the left close its enduring cultural gap with the right. He reminds the right, too, that only in times when Southerners (and conservatives generally) put aside their prejudices has progress--both material and, ultimately, spiritual--come to a proud, but defeated, region.

An example: Southerners have been, at times, apt critics of the market, arguing that the rapid industrialization and attendant materialism were both consuming American life and damaging the nation's spirit. Beginning in the twenties, more and more Americans were leaving tight-knit, largely rural lives to go off to the big city. Southern writers were among the first to see the possibly destructive consequences of such a shift. The Southern antidote--a collection of Burke's "little platoons" of churches, farms, market-days--now goes by the unwieldy term "communitarianism." Back then, it was just called life.

But another popular relic, one of the most consistent applause lines of the 104th Congress and of the upcoming 1996 campaign, is the urge to return power to the states. (This is merely a respectable way of speechifying about the same forces that prompted the assault on Fort Sumter in 1861.) The problem with many of my fellow Southerners--I grew up in Chattanooga--is that they tend not to acknowledge that bad things can grow out of good impulses. Yes, concentrating power in Washington might not always be best. But as slavery and Jim Crow illustrate, concentrating power in local hands certainly doesn't automatically produce the best results.

There is, then, much irony in the Southern example. Southerners have long, and laudably, been concerned with manners, values, and patriotism; so, now, are most Americans. But Southerners, too, have long been hypocritical about Washington's contribution to their lives; so, now, are most Americans. Without Washington--especially the Washington of Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson--the region would no doubt have languished in the dust. When FDR said he saw a third of the nation ill-clad and ill-fed, he was mostly talking about the South. Electricity, Social Security, good roads, military bases, and, later, airports and integration were all federally funded or inspired. Turning Mencken's "Sahara of the Bozarts" into the prosperous Sunbelt is one of the federal government's singular twentieth-century achievements.

Genovese, though, is most concerned about the future. His vision is, admittedly, lofty: He hopes for a "coalition across racial and inherited ideological lines to combat the moral degeneracy that now runs rampant throughout both white and black America." (There is a long tradition of sentimental thinking in the South. Many generations of Southerners have sat up late, bourbon in hand, wondering what if Braxton Bragg had held Missionary Ridge against the Union charge, preventing Sherman's March to the Sea?) Yet it is true that the New Deal coalition was founded along just the lines Genovese imagines: A liberal faith in government, and a conservative adherence to traditional social and cultural mores.

Redemption--White House take note--is a possibility. Although Clinton's character problems (Whitewater, Paula Jones, Troopergate) have embarrassed the South, the President has a gift for the evangelical and charismatic. He could repair some of the damage. Yet Southerners, too, must be willing to take a second look at their complicated native son, a man who understands in his bones that government turned a sluggish South into the Sunbelt. Until Bubba understands that Washington is not inherently bad, and that true manners mean more than holding open doors but also being generous of spirit--the culture wars will go on. And the losers will be all of us, North and South.

Jon Meacham, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, is national affairs editor of Newsweek.