SOUTHERN ARISTOCRATS VERSUS PSEUDO-ARISTOCRATS | 2002-03-30
After Dale Earnhardt's death, a writer for National Review made fun of the people who mourned him so openly. She used her column to show how they didn't know the high-class music she knew and how that made her a true aristocrat.
Pretty standard silk pants aristocracy stuff, fitting perfectly with modern conservatism.
Can you imagine Southern working people following that sort of person into the Yankee guns the way they followed the Southern generals in the Civil War?
As Lake High points out, the first thing a Yankee asks you is what you do. The first thing a Southerner asks you is where you're from.
The Southern aristocracy is my model. I am not from Paris, I am from Pontiac, South Carolina.
The first rule with the real aristocracy was that it was FROM somewhere. The silk pants types keep spouting French, but they never notice that words like the French "de" or the German "von" meant FROM, as in the Marquee OF Salisbury.
The poor clowns don't even really understand basic French.
When I formed the Populist Forum, National Review types thought I was putting on some kind of hillbilly act (to New Yorkers, everybody in the South is a "hillbilly"). They simply could not believe that we had genuine respect for the people we were helping out.
We were in Kentucky, the West Virginia coal mines, South Boston, and riding with the striking independent truckers. But we were there as people with the education and experience these people, OUR people, needed.
That's what real aristocrats do.
One of my proudest moments was when a leader of the textbook protest in West Virginia said, "Whitaker speaks for us and he's not even a hick."
We did their writing and put on their press conferences, but every word was checked with them, and THEY were at the press conferences, not some self-styled "intellectuals".
Not surprisingly, respectable conservatives like National Review and the Marxists have very similar ideas of "aristocracy." Marxists call it "the dictatorship OF the proletariat." It means that the self-styled "intellectuals" like Marx and Trotsky and Lenin have absolute power and say they are kicking the masses around for their own good.
The reason working Americans trusted us was because they were right to do so. Even in Boston, they could sense the ideal of the Southern aristocracy.