Poor white folks claiming "the South will rise again" are talking about how they wish to be serfs to a feudal lord, more or less.
"The South" was never wealthy. The big landowners were, though.
"The South rising again" would only be more of the same poverty & exploitation for most of its residents. These fools don't realize that when there is a landed, propertied class, everyone else lives at their whims. It should be obvious, but I guess it's not.
@artemis All because they fervently believe that once the "uppity others" have been put in their place they'll get to sit at their "rightful" place at the same table with the plantation owners.
A two-century grift that keeps working because of hate and ignorance are an incredible carrot-stick combination.
@artemis TBH, I think this focus on wealth disparity misses the point of the whole “the South will rise again” bit.
It’s not some dream of wealth and prosperity for all white people. Hell, a lot of these white people hate each other nearly as much as they hate black and brown people. Hatred is foundational to their worldview.
So, too, is a spirit of lack, as A. R. Moxon calls it: the idea “that life must be earned, and that receiving basic needs are a matter of deserving them.” To these people, it’s only natural that there will be wealthy owners and poor serfs. They have no desire for equality—can’t even imagine it—only a desire to one day “earn” their way into the owning class.
No, when white people say they want “the South” to “rise again,” they are communicating a malicious yearning for a return to a time when black people were property owned by white people.
Sure, it was only the rich white people who owned other human beings; but poor, racist white people were allowed to be openly cruel and racist to an entire people treated as sub-human. Encouraged, even, to be cruel.
The cruelty is the point.
I used to believe that as racist as white Americans can be, no one but outright neo-Nazis and Klan members actually wanted a return to slavery. I was a child, then. The past 10 years or so have shown me that there’s a significant portion of the white American population—numbered in the tens of millions—that would gladly welcome the enslavement of their black neighbors, the expulsion of all brown people, and the genocide of all non-Christians around the globe.
(Let’s be honest: they’d be happy to kill all the “wrong” kinds of Christians as well.)
@pluvialgeist
So, I see what you're saying, but I think it does matter who or what people are identifying themselves with. As someone who used to believe in the "Lost Cause" mythology (despite not even being Southern—Christian Nationalists are wild), there is a mistake people are making about the mythologized past.
Part of the Southern mythology is that they lost something precious, some way of life that was genteel & beautiful. They believe they lost a "culture" they never actually had.
@pluvialgeist
It's not that I don't think anyone is straight-up racist. I'm just saying people also have false beliefs about what they "lost" & don't understand the nature of the exploitation they express longing for.
It's not merely a comment about "wealth disparity". They imagine they lost a "way of life".
@artemis I have a very difficult time believing that even the most ill-informed Confederate-at-heart doesn’t know that the “genteel and beautiful” culture of the South was reserved only for white people, and that black people were enslaved. Content to be slaves, maybe, but slaves all the same.
In fact, I can’t believe that.
I got the same shitty public education as everyone else in this country, and even with all the whitewashing and Daughters of the Confederacy propaganda, there was never any denial that black people were, in fact, enslaved.
I’m sorry, I just don’t see eye-to-eye with the distinction you’re making here.
That’s okay. You see it one way, I see it another, but I think we both see the desire for “the South to rise again” as a bad one, for various reasons.
@pluvialgeist
>I have a very difficult time believing that even the most ill-informed Confederate-at-heart doesn’t know that the “genteel and beautiful” culture of the South was reserved only for white people, and that black people were enslaved
I'm not sure where I said anything like that.
Certain parts of this Onion piece haven't aged well for me, but after having lived in Virginia for many years well, the general idea is spot on
https://theonion.com/south-postpones-rising-again-for-yet-another-year-1819565548/
And my time in Virginia also taught me that there's always been opposition to the Dixie plutocracy. This book was a revelation:
Artemis
The Duke of Fall 
disorderlyf
Mallory's Musings & Mischief
mosspiglet
Adrian Riskin 
