REPAYING CONTEMPT WITH DEFIANCE?

From time to time, I note the popularity of transgressive flags at county fairs and threshing bees.  Variations on the Gadsden rattlesnake and Trump flags have been popular of late, but from time to time you'll still see the Confederate battle flag on offer.

That's a flag and tee shirt stand at the Walworth County Fair, Labor Day weekend.

Will Wilkinson attempts to draw Serious Political Generalizations about the Deplorableness of the Country Class.

I didn’t understand this when I was a kid, but the lived experience of growing up halfway between Branson and Lake Woebegone gave me my cultural bearings — supplied the contrasts that defined a distinct and salient Iowan identity. As those contrasts have faded, so have these distinct regional, rural identities. Everywhere it’s the same cloying pop country, the same aggressively oversized Ford F-150s, the same tumbledown Wal-Marts and Dollar Generals, the same eagle-heavy fashion, the same confused, aggrieved air of relentless material decline. Even the accents are more and more the same, trending toward a generalized Larry the Cable Guy twang. (Larry the Cable Guy is from Nebraska, FWIW.)

The material decline is real, nudged along by improvements in information technologies, and poisoned by painkillers and booze.  It doesn't do much good to sneer, though.

Before it could be successfully organized politically, America’s increasingly ethnocentric non-urban white population needed to be consolidated first through the adoption of a relatively uniform ethnocentric white culture.

What I’m still groping for is solid empirical confirmation that the Southernification of white rural America did happen and, if so, how it happened. Now, I have few doubts that it did happen and is still happening. Indeed, it’s hard to think of better impressionistic evidence than the spread of Confederate flags far from the South into all parts of white rural America. But that doesn’t seem like quite enough.

It might be as simple as "you wear your X, I'll wear mine."  Or, perhaps, it's about owning the libs.  Outside the Beltway's James Joyner suggests there might be something to Wilkinson's hypothesis, although getting solid empirical evidence is another matter.  "Proving that this has happened, beyond anecdotal observations about accents and flags, is difficult."