Northern states, Canada share values
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| Fri, 12-12-2003 - 2:38pm |
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/152194_canadapoll12.html
Northern states, Canada share values
Poll says split is actually within U.S.
Friday, December 12, 2003
By SHAWN MCCARTHY
THE (TORONTO) GLOBE AND MAIL
NEW YORK -- Americans from the northern states often have more values in common with their Canadian neighbors than they do with their cousins from southern states, according to a leading U.S. pollster.
Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center, rejected assertions by many of his colleagues that Canada and the United States are on divergent paths leading to a widening values gap.
"When we look deeper into the data, we find the gap between Americans and Canadians is not a national gap, it's a regional one," Kohut told the Canadian Society of New York this week.
For example, the United States is both more religious and more secular than Canada, with religious intensity on the rise in the South and Southwest and church adherence on the decline in the Northeast and on the West Coast, he said.
Americans from the North, particularly New England, are less religious, more tolerant of homosexuality and less likely to regard a husband as the dominant head of the family than their counterparts in southern states.
On such issues, northerners' views are strikingly close to the norms in adjoining areas of Canada, although Kohut said that in some regions of Canada -- notably Southern Alberta -- moral and social views are more in tune with those of the Southern United States.
A number of analyses have mentioned a growing social divide between the United States and Canada, highlighted by the power of the evangelical right in the White House and the Liberal government's move to decriminalize marijuana and allow same-sex marriages.
Last week, The New York Times carried a front-page story describing a "chasm that has opened up on social issues that go to the heart of fundamental values." But Kohut said that chasm is as pronounced within the two countries as it is across the border. The Pew Center conducted a series of polls last month, testing U.S. attitudes toward homosexuality and other social issues.
On gay rights, there is a "general liberalizing trend" in the United States, he said, adding that regions with large evangelical populations are lagging the more secular areas.
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Why the South changed from Dem. to Rep..............
The Republican Party and racism: from the "southern strategy" to Bush.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/dec2002/race-d24.shtml
It was Richard Nixon who, after the landslide defeat of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964, sought to reorient the Republican Party to the white racist elements in the southern states. Nixon’s “southern strategy” involved an appeal to those former Democrats in the South who were disaffected by the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act by a Democratic Congress, and the enforcement of these laws by the Johnson administration.
The southern states—where blacks had been virtually barred from voting since the end of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period in 1876—began to break with the Democratic Party in 1948. Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrat campaign carried South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, winning margins of up to 80 percent in the all-white electorate. In the next three presidential elections, the southern states largely returned in the Democratic camp, as the two major bourgeois parties vacillated over the civil rights question.
In 1956, for instance, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower won a landslide reelection, but six southern states, including the four that had voted for Thurmond, backed Democrat Adlai Stevenson, who was considered more sympathetic to the maintenance of Jim Crow. Eisenhower had nominated Earl Warren, a liberal Republican from California, as chief justice of the Supreme Court, and Warren was the principal author of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregated schools.
In the 1964 election, with Johnson as president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Republican presidential nominee Goldwater came out openly against the passage of the Civil Rights Act, which a majority of his own party in Congress had supported. Goldwater’s far-right campaign was overwhelmingly rejected at the polls, but he carried five states in the Deep South: the four carried by Thurmond in 1948, plus Georgia.
In 1968 Alabama’s segregationist governor George Wallace mounted an independent presidential campaign, which carried four of the five Goldwater states—Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia—as well as Arkansas. But in a sign of things to come, South Carolina followed the lead of Senator Strom Thurmond, who abandoned the Democratic Party, switched to the Republicans, and held the state for Nixon.
The Republican Party took up the long-time political methods of the southern Democrats, using racial demagogy to tie impoverished white workers and small farmers to the ruling aristocracy. In many cases—Thurmond was the forerunner for hundreds—Democratic politicians simply changed party labels while maintaining the same political orientation.
Lott followed a slightly different career path. He began as an aide to a notorious segregationist Democratic congressman, William Colmer. When Colmer retired in 1972, Lott sought to fill the vacancy, but ran as a Republican, not a Democrat, aligning himself with Nixon’s victorious presidential reelection campaign.
In the aftermath of the mass movement for civil rights, which mobilized millions of black workers and youth with the support of substantial layers of the working class and middle class nationally, it was less and less possible to gain political office through open appeals to segregationism. Instead, the Republican Party evolved a sort of political code, in which opposition to welfare programs and advocacy of “states’ rights” took the place of overt defense of white supremacy.
The political meaning of this language was clear to all involved. One incident demonstrates the method: Ronald Reagan’s decision to launch his 1980 general election campaign with an appearance at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the most notorious crime of the civil rights era, the murder of three young civil rights workers in 1964. When Reagan delivered a speech in which he declared, “I believe in states’ rights,” he was giving his tacit support to the maintenance of the social and economic oppression of the black population, even while the outward forms of legalized racism had been eliminated.
From then on, the Republican Party cemented its domination of the South, and especially of the states of the Deep South, which were the poorest and most backward in terms of social conditions, and where segregation and racial terror were practiced in the harshest form. By 1994, when the Republican Party won control of the House of Representatives and the Senate for the first time in 40 years, it controlled the bulk of the congressional delegation from the southern states, and its congressional leadership was nearly all from that region: Newt Gingrich of Georgia, Richard Armey and Tom DeLay of Texas, and Trent Lott of Mississippi.
cl-Libraone
Americans from the North, particularly New England, are less religious, more tolerant of homosexuality and less likely to regard a husband as the dominant head of the family than their counterparts in southern states.
An observation.......Isn't it interesting that the territories that seem to be more "liberal" and vote Democratic are the ones that are more secular, while the southern states seem to be more "conservative" and vote Republican, are more religious.
I wonder why that is. (and I am not bein sarcastic, as it would be very interesting to have a study done to find out exactly why this is so) What makes one part of the country more devout in their religion compared to another, and does this have an effect on their overall thinking?
1. Does anyone speaking on this issue live or ever lived in the south?
2. If the south is so ignorant, lagging, racist, whatever...then why is that so many northerns are moving to the south?
I have MANY friends that left NY city, Long Island, New Jersey, etc. to move to my home state of NC. They absolutely LOVE it here. Raising a family here is wonderful, the communities are safe, and the cost of living is lower. I have family in NY, and my husbands family is from Chicago. These two states are probably the most segregated states I have EVER seen in my life. My friends from the north openly discuss how weird it is to be living in communities with black, and hispanic families. Many have said that they don't like it. I have ALWAYS lived in NC, and have always had black families in our neighborhoods. So unless you have lived in the south making comments like I have read here only show ignorance.
3. If we Americans are so ignorant then why do we live in the best country in the world?
4. I don't think it is saying much when you say the northern states agree with Canada is some great thing. It is fact that most northern states have high crime, cost of living is outrageous, and most of the states are in financial trouble. So I am wondering what the point is?
1. Does anyone speaking on this issue live or ever lived in the south?
Me...no.
I agree. Here are a few articles about the large number of blacks who are moving south and make many of the points about race relations that you do:
Going Home to the South
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/06/12/60minutes/main558375.shtml
The new great migration to the south.
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m1077/n11_v53/21080614/p1/article.jhtml?term=
statistics
http://washingtontimes.com/national/20031030-105954-4136r.htm
Good charts & graphs
http://www.prb.org/Content/NavigationMenu/PT_articles/April-June_2001/Migration_to_the_South_Brings_U_S__Blacks_Full_Circle.htm
<>
We've obviously got a great deal going for us.
Renee
I think you are right about the regional thing effecting one's outlook. One very important factor about coastal regions being more liberal (as opposed to the more hard to reach central areas) is the much longer history of diverse cultures and people coming to settle from abroad. This gives a more cosmopolitain and tolerant outlook on divergant views. As for Alberta being the most conservative area of Canada, it is smack dab in the middle of the country, separated by mountains on one side, and vast prairies on the other. They have been relativley hisotrically isolated until the 20th century. There must also be something to be said about that combination of oil and cattle that Alberta (and Texas) is so famous for - it would be tough to give up the earning power of that province.
Hey, I know! Perhaps the profound need for central heating MUST play some sort of role. LOL! In Canada, if you are too poor to pay for a roof over your head or your heat, you die. Plain and simple. I think everyone here shudders at the thought of suddenly losing ones livelihood and being cut off from central heating due to a lack of decent social programs. Guess we could all move South. Wouldn't want to live on the streets in minus 40 temperatures! ;o)
I also agree. It is only a matter of opinion on whether or not the USA is the best country in the world. I could probably name about 4 or 5 off the top of my head that are equally good if not better in some respects.
Ok..I am going to ask this one AGAIN....PLEASE define GAY RIGHTS?? I have yet to get a definition on that term. I see it a lot, but it makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever.
>"One very important factor about coastal regions being more liberal (as opposed to the more hard to reach central areas) is the much longer history of diverse cultures and people coming to settle from abroad. This gives a more cosmopolitain and tolerant outlook on divergant views."<
Excellent point.
cl-Libraone
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