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This is the kind of post that makes so many good, and big, observations that it's hard to respond to usefully, almost.
But at any rate, I've grown to be really, really interested in this topic, specifically on an internal-to-the-USA level. And part of that is that I grew up in the New South in the 80s and 90s, and then I moved to the Midwest, got to know more of the country, and have ended up in a Rust Belt city now, where I'm raising kids. But I still have family down in the New South, so I'm down there fairly often, and (because I grew up there, but only some of my family was from there) I only briefly had a burst of hicklib anti-southern idiocy in my late 20s before reality caught up with me.
But the reality, right now, is that where I am now, it absolutely feels old and gray and like its best days are well behind it, because that is clearly true. The rustbelt part of the country I'm in clearly once had a lot of money, and youth, and immigration, and energy. And now it's like a donut - a small hole of well educated tech and medical workers, and a much larger donut of older, less skilled workers who are kind of decaying in place (in very broad strokes - there are random suburb and exurb professionals too). And that's been roughly true when visiting my family in the Northeast. But where I'm from in the New South is clearly going from strength to strength right now. There are still the general problems that new money has - it still punches under its weight in broader cultural projection and influence on the academy and literary cultural and all the sorts of things that old money tends to be heavily over represented in. But when I go back down to visit my family, there is a sense of confidence, like everything is working right, and most people's best days are ahead of them, not behind them. I mean, this is a huge part of what makes the New South the New South - the older South saw its best days as long, long behind them. Where I live now, the school district has had a stable population for decades and is really strong, but many neighboring districts, if they are less shiny, have been dwindling for a while now. Meanwhile, the county I grew up in in the New South had two high schools when I was there in the early 90s. Now it has 5.
I saw some article a few days ago mentioning that in 2030, at current rates, New South states (and intermountain West) will, combined, get 10 more house seats, and New York, California, and other older Midwest blue states will collectively lose 10 house seats. Or, elsewhere - and this, I think, might be the most important set of statistics in the country - if you look at the enrollment statistics for American public schools by region of the country from the Department of Education, you can literally see the future of the country being written. Fully 40% of American public school children are in the South at this point. Only 15% are in the North East, with the remainder being 20% in the Midwest and 24% in the West. That entire table is worth poring over, because it does capture the slow but steady shift of where people are having kids at this point - there are a lot of regional micro-stories there. As a practical matter, this means that the fact American university systems are saturated with a very specific North East (and later California) derived progress narrative in which Southerners are the ultimate evil, the local Hitler, probably has a limited shelf life - as the economic and demographic reality of the South rising again becomes more and more unavoidable, and as tolerance to "Hide your strength, bide your time" gets exhausted, there's probably just going to have to be a reckoning with this tension, or so I suspect, and the process might not be pretty. I'm convinced this is an important undercurrent of current politics, in fact - just as the economic, industrial rise of China has proven to be an existential problem in a Thucydides trap kind of way for the existing Yankee built system, the rise of the South is likely not a process that can be easily absorbed by the existing power arrangements because of some deep assumptions in those power structures about the moral role of the South, and the tensions between those assumptions and reality.
Thanks for your kind words at the top! I appreciate it.
Your post is really interesting to me too. I've never encountered the term "New South" before and I tried googling it and only really found this wiki page about the Old South. So I assume the New South would be the states from Texas to Florida, excluding most of the East Coast states? Or is "New South" more of a cultural designation that encompasses rising areas of the entire south as contrasting with more stagnant areas of the entire south?
The population and enrollment statistics you call out are really interesting too. I knew there has been a migration into "the sun belt" out of the northeast but didn't realize it was so influential as to constitute 10 house seats switching hands. Only 15% of school children being in the north east is fascinating but makes sense.
This is really true and so crazy... I am from the midwest but let me try to empathize. I tried watching the movie Sarah Plain and Tall recently (we read the book in third or fourth grade) and was pretty shocked by how the entire plot is that an arrogant East Coast woman comes to the countryside and just tells everybody what to do like she's god's gift to the poor rural people. If she was doing it to Native American people the book would have been canceled a hundred years ago but the woman from the east can correct the behaviors of the poor white middle americans all she wants. I can imagine the arrogance toward the south from these people to be about a hundred times worse than this. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)
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And it’s notable that southern culture gets more and more popular every year. Country tops the charts now. Southern food is popular in the north(often brought by black chefs). BBQ is everywhere. Pickup trucks outsell sedans these days.
Southern food being introduced into the north by blacks is nothing new, the only new thing is it being considered Southern instead of Black. Take the stereotype that black people like fried chicken. This is almost entirely a yankee stereotype. Rednecks love fried chicken, why would a group of people who all insist no one else's fried chicken is as good as what their momma used to make think it was a black thing? Same with collard greens, its a poor southern food not a black one.
But after the great migration of black people north in the early 20th century the only people yankees knew who ate fried chicken were black people so they considered it black culture, but it was really just that the blacks were the only southerners they knew so they coded southern culture as black.
There are stereotypically different dishes between white and black southerners and while actual deep redneck food like frog is not becoming popular(nor is actual black specific soul food like chitterlings or pokeweed), more white-coded foods like biscuits and gravy or flavored iced tea definitely are.
A lot of this is just historical class differences but some of it is definitely racial.
My poor white grandparents ate chitterlings (god what a spelling) but my parents used to make fun of them (the chitlins, not the grandparents). Who's eating the pickled pig's feet? I think that's deep country, and maybe also to a degree black-coded. Ironically my Japanese wife, herself brought up in the Kyushu countryside, really likes them, called here tonsoku /豚足.
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Also watermelon is incredibly popular across the South. My (white) family, especially the older generations, really enjoy it in-season.
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There are surprisingly few "sedan" models on the market regardless. Everyone wants hatchbacks, crossovers, or full SUV/trucks.
Obama-era regulation makes small cars almost important to sell on the market (due to sky-high efficiency requirements, relaxed for larger vehicles). The manufacturers are only offering hatchbacks etc.
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