A Review of Kirkpatrick Sale, Power Shift: The Rise of the Southern Rim and Its Challenge to the Eastern Establishment (Random House, 1976)
Editor’s note: Many Abbeville readers and supporters are familiar with Kirk Sale, a well-known advocate of decentralization and secessionism, and certainly a friend of the South. In asking him to review a book he penned in 1976, we departed from our usual protocol, thinking that a retrospective look at a theme that is still highly relevant today might be an illuminating exercise. For those who might be interested in acquiring a copy of Power Shift, there are still a few copies floating around on the Internet. It remains in many ways a compelling examination of the dramatic transformation of the South (and Southwest) in the years following World War II, especially in its analysis of the economic and demographic forces that have eroded the region’s traditional loyalties.
It was more than 50 years ago that I wrote an article for The New York Review of Books on the friends around Richard Nixon. The article began: “Politics doesn’t make strange bedfellows to those who have watched the courtship.” It was an analysis of what some in the New Left just then were calling “the Yankee-Cowboy war,” meant to show that the kinds of people the Republican President picked as allies—Bebe Rebozo, H.L. Hunt, Howard Hughes, Robert Finch, H.R. Haldeman, Herbert Klein, et al.—were all from outside the Beltway. They were mostly from the South and West and were pitted against the Eastern Establishment types for the first time in a big way. And it looked as if the dramatic Watergate break-in was about to provide the dueling ground for the two sides to have it out.
That was the subject of the book I wrote 50 years ago, Power Shift, describing Watergate as the counterattack by the Yankee Establishment at the insurgent Cowboys, but showing that the Cowboys would not be easily thwarted as they in fact were by then the new holders of the economic and political centers of power in America. Aerospace, technology, agribusiness, oil, real estate were centered in what I called the Southern Rim—from Southern California through the Southwest and on down to Florida—and population shifts were putting political and increasingly cultural power in their hands as well. Cities of the Northeast were in sad decline, but Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas, Atlanta, Miami were thriving.
The book, to my surprise, was well-received, getting a front-page review in the Establishment’s New York Times Book Review, where it warned of a “turbulent change in the American political economy” and “a genuine power shift.” Most other publications accorded it the honor of respectful reviews, although I have to say Jeane Kirkpatrick, just beginning to establish her credentials as a neoconservative realist, wrote that I was wrong to reject “the whole sick society” because I had little respect for the Yankee power structure, and regretted that the attention paid to such a book “reflects the extent to which that public has lost confidence in the legitimacy of American experience”—as if she hadn’t noticed the sorry spectacle of Watergate spreading the entrails of a corrupt society before us all.
When I go back to look at the book, I have to say I think it holds up pretty well just on the basics—the economic and political development of the Southern Rim—though I maybe needn’t have dumped so many individual cases and statistics into its pages. It is worth noting that after Nixon came Carter (Georgia), Reagan (California), the Bushes (Texas), Clinton (Arkansas)—Rimsters all. Obama was hardly of either power locus but it was Wall Street money that transformed him into the darling of the Democrat Party, and most of those around him (including Hillary) were Easterners; Biden, to the extent that he was anything but an extension of Obama, allowed traditional Beltwayites to run him. And the New Yorker Trump has shown his true colors by a move to Florida and a decidedly Cowboy style.
On the economic side, the Rim has certainly risen to challenge Wall Street and the banksters, while the movement of the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos into Trump’s orbit is only the latest eidence of how Silicon Valley’s Magnificent Seven (all but Microsoft are Rimsters, even Zuckerberg now) have dominated the market, the earnings, and the headlines. And given the dominance of AI in the California tech companies, the aerospace industry in Texas and Florida, and an automotive industry no longer controlled by the Detroit troika, it is apparent that the Southern Rim is today the locus of American economic and political power.
For an audience such as this, I should confront the question of what role the Southern tradition plays in this 50-year-long ascendency of the Southern Rim.
As to that, I think that now, no less than in the 1970s, the movers and shakers from the Rim are generally morally compromised in their pursuit of power. I quote literary critic Alfred Kazin on Nixon’s character, and that is substantially what I found in his friends and supporters:
The drives, the “battle” that Nixon proudly says is “always with me,” the necessity to obliterate an opponent rather than to persuade him, the computerized, militarized football-stadium language that vindictively brings all loyalties down to the “team” as the corporate ego in which a man may find his necessary virility, the lack of any cultural ties outside the overwhelming monoliths of American power—these are the “operabilities” behind Nixon’s Mein Kampf, born of mid-century American toughness and drive and planetary megalomania fascinated by and envious of Soviet ruthlessness. Bit by bit our old scruples have been eroded by a new value system that recognizes no truth that is not part of what is “operable.”
Now these words are those of a Yankee, and an old-school one at that, so this is a bit harsher than what I felt, but it conveys the idea. Thus I was picturing not the old, traditional Southerners but rather the rash newcomers who had been less steeped in Southern civility and manners, and whose new riches closed their ears to the soft sweetness of the Southern way of speaking. Bebe Rebozo was not of true Southern upbringing, nor Howard Hughes, not even evangelist Billy Graham, and it is likely that the whole lot of them would have admired Lincoln. This ascendency was not of those like the Agrarians, or of men like Mel Bradford or Clyde Wilson and their followers, and not, I would say, particularly Southern, as we would use that term, and so did not mean a resurgence of true Southern traditionalism.
Still, the protracted struggle between the Yankees and Cowboys has defined the nation for these 50 years since Power Shift was published. I would say Trump, from his found-at-last home at Mar-a-Lago, is a true Cowboy by style and attitude, and my book could provide a useful idea of what he’s likely to bring this time around.
Trump, the consummate yankee, has finally realized the fedgov the yankees gave us was a fedgov capable of forcing the Income Tax, IRS and Covidscams down our throats. The fact he is using his election to dismantle much of the democrat agenda is ironic, considering the democrat party is the direct descendant of the radical republican, commie atheist lincolonites who attacked the South for refusing to remain a northern colony.
Remember, it was the yankees who changed their military officers’ oath of allegiance to “support and defend the Constitution of the US” in an admission the previous oath required allegiance to a Republic of Sovereign States…and those yankees were the radical republican 48ers who first brought the communist revolution to the US.
pretty much.
I think little about political parties (and I have thought so for a long time) as loyal Americans promoting their “platform” as what’s best for AMERICA in the nature of “loyal opposition” to one another.
I have seen them as ill-read hacks who are either fooling themselves or just as likely, simply lying. The closest I have ever come to some belief in them is via George Wallace and/or Barry Goldwater (check each’s party affiliation) insofar of having clean thoughts.
Although Donald Trump (I did vote for him) has been brash enough (with enough money it is easier to fight) to spit in the face of these hacks, Democrats or Republicans, my concern at this point is who will replace him. He has a very short time to, relatively speaking, perform miracles. A big hill to climb in under 4 years.
At the time of Ronald Reagan the so-called conservatives seemed to excitedly believe that his election was second in righteousness only to Christ’s second coming.
But at the end of his 8 years, and mostly due to his own foolish methods, for example “Thou shall not speak ill of another Republican”—-HA!, we got George H.W. Bush. A better choice would have been James Carville.
The real hope for Trump et al is to explain the concept of sovereignty and the difference between “Nation” and “Union.” But who will teach him? Who will even try to explain to him the “cause” of THE War?
Although the Republican hacks are a far cry from the Democrat hacks, many of the Republican hacks are biding the time of Trump’s four years until they can raise the flag back on that damn city-on-a-hill and offer another Bush from the bushes.
Wait and see. Just wait and see!
No doubt. This is a war against evil…and evil will never rest. The dims aren’t happy just killing their own children, they must also convince you to kill your own…or mutilate them, depending on the whim of the moment.
Fortunately, God designed the universe so that good does not require the presence of evil in order for good to exist…but evil must have good or it destroys itself. Dims have no good left in them…which is why they are self-destructing.