[SnacksOnAPlane]

Why are you associating those douchebags with the south? Newt I get, but aren't the rest of them in NYC?

The real divide in this country is rural vs. urban. Cities in the south are plenty progressive, and rural areas in the rest of the country are plenty conservative.

I've lived in Boston and Atlanta, and Atlanta is a much more tolerant, friendly place.

[creaghpatr]

Even Newt’s been in the DC machine for decades, he probably doesn’t even watch college football.

[CalChris]

Roy Moore and Newt Gingrich are about as South as South gets and they definitely campaigned against San Francisco values. Newt Gingrich essentially defined the modern Republican Party's approach to campaigning and governing.

[SnacksOnAPlane]

First, Roy Moore lost. It wasn't a resounding loss, but he did lose.

Second, acting like an entire region as a monoculture is stupid and unproductive. We're all very, very different, and while there are some trends that are more prevalent in a region, that doesn't mean that the people who believe those things are backwards. Perhaps it means that you just haven't tried to see things from their perspective.

The lack of empathy and the unwillingness to consider that other people have different backgrounds and codes of ethics and a dogmatic insistence that "this way is the right way" is what's killing our cohesion as a country. And, as a whole, I've seen more of the "live and let live" philosophy in Atlanta than in a whole lot of supposedly liberal places.

[CalChris]

Yes, you are all very, very different. So are we.

But it remains that really starting with Gingrich that conservatives have mounted a long media campaign against liberals which has been personified as Pelosi and codewritten as San Francisco values.

The reverse is not the case. This was one sided but it was also Gingrich and Republicans only path to power. It worked as an election strategy but not as a governing philosophy. So if you are complaining about the cohesion of the country, you really should start there.

I lived in the South. I have family in the South.

[SnacksOnAPlane]

But I feel like you're blaming the victims. It was actually people like Rupert Murdoch who set up the whole "our culture is being destroyed by PC run amok" thing, and they did it to gin up ratings for Fox News and to gain power.

We're all vulnerable to cultural brainwashing. I think that's part of what the article is complaining about. It's hard to be an iconoclast, especially when you're treated as an immoral person if you dare to think for yourself.

Again, the way to save the country is to call out all demonization of "the other". Of course I call it out when I see it, to the point where my liberal friends think I'm conservative and my conservative friends think I'm liberal.

[CalChris]

Fox News dates to 1996. Newt Gingrich (Atlanta suburbs) was already Speaker by then and had been recruiting and training candidates on his methods for close to a decade. He started as a pro-environment wonk Republican back bencher but saw this perfection of Nixon's Southern Strategy as his only path to power.

It worked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Fox_News

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

To be a real iconoclast, and I don't see Altman as any sort of iconoclast, you have to take your lumps. You have to be indifferent to your lumps.

[eli_gottlieb]

>I've lived in Boston and Atlanta, and Atlanta is a much more tolerant, friendly place.

Care to say what you experienced in Boston?

[ScottBurson]

It's been 35 years since I lived in the Boston area, so this may have changed some -- I certainly hope it has! -- but the ethnic animosities there shocked me, as someone who moved there from the DC area and had the idea that Northern cities would be more tolerant. I moved into an apartment in East Cambridge in 1982, in what was, unbeknownst to me before I got there, a Polish neighborhood, only to learn that a few weeks earlier, a Black residence on the same street had been firebombed.