Where We Stand: Voices of Southern Dissent

Rating:
Summary: A Must Read
Review: All of the essays in "Where We Stand" were informative and thought provoking. Each essay explores a different topic but all explore Southerners' cultural and religious belief systems in an historical account of how these affect the political system and outcome of political elections as well as public policy in general. All Americans should read this as a wake-up call. I literally could not put the book down for each essay had something very important to convey. The book provides various insights on the need and urgency to look critically at ourselves politically. At the end of the book I was very proud to be a southerner and to know such powerful voices were speaking out.

Rating:
Summary: The More Things Change, . . . the more they stay the same.
Review: The twelve voices of dissent in WHERE WE STAND demand, in heartfelt prose, for an end to the domination of America by ideologically right-wing Republicans, a majority of whom are southerners, all of whom are in bed with the military-industrial-complex. WHERE WE STAND traces the rise of the modern Republican South from the entry into national politics of racist southern politician George C. Wallace, to the subtly racist "Southern Strategy" of Richard Nixon, through Ronald Reagan, who sanitized Wallace's bigotry by creating race-loaded "buzz words" that enabled Americans to be "comfortable with their prejudices." As in the antebellum period, as during Reconstruction, as in the era of segregation, the South by the 1980s was again united on the dominant theme of the South's existence-race-this time within the Republican Party.
In their historic fight to preserve the "southern way of life," southerners had always maintained that the struggle was NOT about money. But in the 1980s, when southern ideas were becoming dominant nationally, southerners changed; money became half to goal. Thus, in the last three decades of the twentieth century, southern right-wing Republican politicians and their northern Republican allies have arrogantly united with George W. Bush upon economic policies that benefit only the wealthy, and an unjustified imperialist war which will benefit the military-industrial-complex at the expense of people at the bottom of society.
Every patriotic American who is worried about the current policies our nation at home and abroad should read this enlightening book!