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Originally Posted by Chicago103
I think you hit the irony of it all right on the head. The south is the most conservative part of the nation with people who love to talk about "rugged individualism" and yet they express it by becoming just like everyone else in an even more homogonous way than much of the rest of the country. So rugged individuality equals suburban conformity, if that isn't 1984 Orwellian brainwashing at work than I don't know what is. People sitting in a McMansion watching Fox News like everyone else in their subdivision and talking about how they love freedom and individuality when they are essentially clones of everyone else is like something out of the Night of the Living Dead, it is like we are a nation of zombies.
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What does Orwell have to do with this? Orwell was a socialist, the American South is conservative. I find it laughably ironic when conservatives use Orwell as a defense when he is inexplicably condemning their lifestyle and ideology. Furthermore, the south has no discernable connection to the term "rugged individualism" if it is properly understood.
The term, derived from a speech of the same name by Herbert Hoover during the 1928 campaign, is a uniquely 1920s Republican mantra. The Republican Party of the 1920s was based in New York and the West, not the Democrat's Solid South. Hoover himself was from a geologist from Iowa who was the first president born west of the Mississippi river. Though Hoover is associated with coining the term, perhaps the person most widely emblematic of its core philosophy was Progressive Republican Theodore Roosevelt of New York. Rugged individualism is a term to describe the rough and tumble nature of the nation at that point in history, and it wasn't even an attribute given to the south.
Please do not assume that, because the south is now dominated by the a party (Republican) which has historically been associated with completely different regions, southerners have anything in common with the term. They don't. The south, by virtue of its inherent conservatism, is antithetical to the ideals of individualism. It is instead the embodiment of conservatism: the pressure to conform to and abide by the historical and cultural norms and mores of the area.
No-one in the south actually talks about rugged individualism, they talk about liberty and freedom. Liberty and freedom subconscious cues are the last political vestiges of the southern civil war perspective. In order to have individualism you must have liberty and freedom, but in order to have liberty and freedom individualism is not necessary. Do not forsake the south's polity for using their liberty and freedom to make the logical choice - at least from their perspective - of shunning individualism.
So, obviously the south is going to be less individualist than elsewhere.
Now, let's move on. This topic really has nothing to do with the 2010 Census and is counterproductive. Let us not bash others, but instead congratulate those areas which have done well this census.