You’re confusing material conditions with character. Circumstances beyond our control severely limit our options. I’m living in a motel, working to support myself and my wife and struggling to escape a situation I didn’t choose. But despite my extreme hardship, I haven’t become selfish, bitter, narcissistic or entitled. I believe in personal responsibility and accountability and I refuse to use my circumstances as an excuse to mistreat people. What happens to us and how we choose to treat others are two different things. And I found that struggle and hardship always makes people more empathetic and understanding and when people have narcissistic tendencies it’s from privilege.

My situation is an anomaly, not a universal representation of American life. America is an extraordinarily privileged country by global standards, yet Americans routinely act like oppressed peasants, treating every setback as proof that the system is against them. Some people genuinely have limited options; others have choices they’re unwilling to take responsibility for. Acknowledging systemic inequality doesn’t mean pretending individual agency doesn’t exist.

I also think we need to recognize that privilege and entitlement encourage narcissistic behavior. When people become accustomed to having their needs prioritized, they develop a sense of superiority and an expectation that others should accommodate them. That kind of entitlement isn’t a symptom of oppression. It is a product of privilege itself.

I’ve encountered local communists and leftists who minimized my struggle, dismissed my circumstances and even called me privileged. I was expected to quiet down about my actual hardship because my experience complicated their preferred narrative about oppression and class. What’s the point of claiming to care about material conditions if you’re unwilling to acknowledge someone’s real circumstances because they don’t fit your ideology?

Our social programs and the language of oppression have increasingly been appropriated in ways that leave the most vulnerable people behind while accommodating people who are already privileged. Programs intended to help people in genuine need can become entangled in political priorities, eligibility categories and competing narratives about who deserves compassion. I’ve experienced extreme malnutrition and continue to suffer disabilities as a result, yet I struggle to access assistance or even receive basic empathy for what I’m going through. I’m living in a motel, working to survive and fighting to recover while being dismissed or told I’m privileged. When someone experiencing this level of hardship cannot get help or compassion, we need to question whether our systems and the people defending them are actually prioritizing those in the greatest need or simply prioritizing the people who fit their preferred narrative.

The moment I described the full extent of my own circumstances, I was expected to be quiet about certain aspects of my experience because they didn’t fit the narrative. I wasn’t simply being asked to understand structural inequality. I was being made to feel that I needed to minimize my own hardship to accommodate somebody else’s ideological framework.

Your example about the motel and the mansion actually illustrates my point. I didn’t choose to experience Katrina, lose my family and our wealth, have my vehicle break down or find myself in an area where transportation is a serious barrier.

Americans love performing the role of oppressed peasants while politicians and society placate them, creating a self-perpetuating club of privileged, enabled people who make excuses for one another, validate each other’s entitlement and then treat people experiencing genuine, devastating hardship with condescension and indifference; meanwhile, people like me are expected to endlessly extend them empathy, understanding and grace that they refuse to extend to us, even gaslighting us by insisting we’re more privileged than they are, because apparently facing extreme adversity with dignity, strength and personal accountability while having far less than they do somehow convinces them we’re doing better than they are, rather than exposing how deeply they’ve confused privilege with victimhood.

Even leftists who claim to champion the oppressed become visibly dismissive, uppity and disgusted when confronted with the reality of my suffering, revealing that their compassion often has more to do with ideological narratives and solidarity and empathy with the privileged majority than with actually standing beside people enduring extreme hardship.

My uncle’s behavior exposed the mentality of a user: he felt entitled to most of my Pepsi after asking for a sip, then went and bought himself a fresh one while leaving me with what was left of mine. But the soda was only a small glimpse of a much bigger pattern. He benefited from my father’s wealth when it served him, then abandoned and shamed my father when that wealth disappeared. That’s the real issue: being happy to enjoy the benefits of someone else’s generosity while refusing to show loyalty when that person no longer has anything to offer you. You can analyze the systemic influences behind someone’s behavior all day long but that doesn’t erase the selfishness of taking from others when it’s convenient and abandoning them when the benefits run out. There’s a difference between understanding a person’s circumstances and making excuses for a pattern of behavior that treats other people as resources to be used rather than human beings deserving of reciprocity and respect.

The irony here is that you’re accusing me of putting words in your mouth while doing exactly that to me. You took my use of “old-school Southern Democrat,” assigned your own interpretation to it and then proceeded to argue against that interpretation as though I had actually made the claims you attributed to me. That’s projection.

I brought up segregation because your entire argument about Southern Democrats was built around the assumption that the label necessarily implies segregationism. I was explaining the distinction you were refusing to make, not putting words in your mouth.

And calling me “narrow minded” is particularly ironic considering I’m literally arguing against the kind of simplistic, one-size-fits-all interpretation you’re applying to Southern history. I’m acknowledging that there were different types of Southern Democrats, that political realignment happened gradually, that generations behaved differently and that the South’s history can’t be reduced to one explanation. That’s practically the opposite of narrow-mindedness.

You can dislike the label “old-school Southern Democrat,” that’s fine. But if you’re going to criticize it, criticize what I actually mean by it rather than deciding what you think it must mean and then lecturing me about your own interpretation.

You welcome!

You’re responding to a version of my argument that I didn’t actually make. I never said there was some clean, instantaneous “party swap” in the 1960s. That’s precisely the kind of oversimplification I’m criticizing. The partisan realignment of the South was a long process that unfolded over decades, and different generations, states, counties and individuals moved in different directions at different times.

And no, it is not historically accurate to reduce the entire older Southern population to “people who were racist until the Republican Party gave them a better place to be racist.” Not every Southern person of the Greatest or Silent Generations had the same political beliefs, motives or attitudes toward Black people. Most older Southerners remained Democrats for the rest of their lives, even as the national Democratic Party changed dramatically around them. My own great-grandparents are a pretty good example: they were old-school Southern Democrats who voted for Barack Obama twice. They didn’t suddenly become Republicans because of some racial “party switch.”

You’re also doing something I see constantly in discussions about the South: turning an extremely complicated history into one giant moral explanation for everything that is wrong with the region today.

The South did have public transportation. Southern cities had streetcars, buses, rail systems and other forms of urban transit. New Orleans, Atlanta, Birmingham, Memphis, Jackson, Mobile and countless other Southern cities had substantial transit systems. Their decline involved automobiles, suburbanization, federal transportation policy, highway construction, disinvestment, changing land-use patterns and in some places, racial politics and segregation. That’s a much more complicated story than “Southern racism caused cars.”

And that’s really my objection to your entire argument: you’re taking real historical phenomena and turning them into a single moral explanation for everything. That’s not material analysis. That’s just another kind of reductionism.

There were plenty of older Southerners who were good, decent people who loved their communities, believed in public institutions, supported labor and government programs and remained Democrats their entire lives.

And frankly, I don’t need to pretend my great-grandparents were secretly villains because they were born in the South. They lived through Jim Crow, Katrina and enormous social changes and they still voted for Obama twice. That alone should tell you why I’m resistant to the idea that “old Southern Democrat” can simply be translated into “segregationist.”

You also said I “acknowledge that there was a party swap in the 1960s.” I don’t. I talk about a long-term realignment, not a magical 1960s party swap where every Southern Democrat simultaneously woke up one morning and became a Republican. Those are two very different claims.

And that’s exactly why I think your critique is too simplistic. You’re right that material conditions matter. You’re right that economic structures influence human behavior. But material conditions don’t eliminate individual agency.

Ann Richards, shortly before her death, talked about how the Republican Party’s rise in the South helped separate and ultimately draw away one particular faction of Southern Democrats, which is important because it shows there was never one monolithic “Southern Democrat” bloc to begin with. There were different strands of Southern Democrats, from segregationists and conservative traditionalists to New Deal Democrats, populists, labor Democrats and increasingly progressive Democrats and those groups did not all realign in the same way or at the same time.

Thanks for the suggestion! I didn’t know where to post it. I’m new.

Well I haven’t really focused on my influences. With my post I just talked about my beliefs and the world I come from and I laid out real policy. I don’t identify with the modern Democratic Party. I don’t even vote anymore. I’m far left but I just consider it common sense. I believe in a standard of living, restorative justice and the Common Good and I’m going to keep making posts about what matters.

I know I’m an anomaly in the modern South and that was the point of my post.

Boo.

Absolutely. And honestly, that’s a big part of what I’m talking about when I say “old-school Southern Democrat.” I don’t mean the Confederacy or the KKK. The South had a very real tradition of populism, agrarian radicalism, labor politics, anti-monopoly politics and Progressive reform that gets flattened when people treat “Southern Democrat” as synonymous with segregation.

If you want to dig into it, I’d start with C. Vann Woodward, especially The Origins of the New South and The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Woodward was particularly interested in the South’s class conflicts and the ways its political history was much more complicated than the usual Confederate-to-segregation narrative.

Populism in the South Revisited is another great starting point. It covers the Farmers’ Alliance, People’s Party, Knights of Labor and other Southern reform movements and specifically examines their economic and political radicalism.

A lot of older Southern Democrats came from a much less evangelical Southern culture. But as the South became increasingly conservative from the 1960s through the 1980s, partly influenced by Northern transplants moving into the suburbs that many white Southerners were relocating to through white flight, many politicians adapted to that changing political environment. Some politicians who had previously opposed segregation adopted segregationist rhetoric or positions to appeal to an increasingly conservative electorate. Later, some abandoned or softened those positions while retaining or embracing elements of the emerging conservative Southern culture, particularly evangelical fundamentalist Christianity. That evolution is part of what makes the old Southern Democratic tradition so complicated.

Eventually, that conservative wing of the Southern Democratic coalition was largely absorbed by the Republican Party. As the Southern realignment accelerated, many of those older conservative Democrats switched parties, while younger Southerners who inherited that increasingly conservative political culture often became Republicans from the beginning.

One thing that gets overlooked is the generational divide within the South. The older Southerners I grew up around, especially those born before roughly 1941, were actually considerably more Progressive and economically liberal than their Boomer children. My own great-grandparents voted for Obama twice, while all of their boomer children became Republicans. I even remember my great-uncle ripping an Obama bumper sticker off my great-grandfather’s truck. That kind of generational reversal is a huge part of why “Southern = conservative” doesn’t tell the whole story.

A lot of older Southerners remained loyal to the Democratic Party and retained more of the older Southern tradition of economic populism and Progressive government, even as the region around them moved rightward. Meanwhile, the remaining younger Southern Democrats and Progressive voices were increasingly squeezed out as the Southern political realignment reached its final stages. By roughly 2012–2016, much of the remaining Progressive and moderate Democratic base had either shifted into the Republican Party or been absorbed into its coalition, leaving Southern Democrats increasingly concentrated among the region’s more genuinely black and urbanite voters. That generational transition is a big part of why the old Southern Democratic identity can seem almost incomprehensible from today’s political landscape.

That generational divide itself became a source of contention and resentment because boomers and younger Southerners had absorbed a simplified, rewritten Republican version of Southern political history and couldn’t understand why their parents and grandparents still considered themselves Democrats when that identity no longer fit the political narrative they had inherited.

If your understanding of the Southern Democratic tradition begins and ends with the most reactionary people who ever carried the label, then you might want to broaden your horizons.

“Old-school Southern Democrat” does not mean “segregationist.” The South had populists, labor Democrats, Progressives, anti-monopoly Democrats and fiercely anti-corporate political traditions long before modern American politics collapsed everything into a simplistic left-right spectrum.

If anything, the fact that you apparently can’t imagine a Southern political tradition existing to the left of modern Democrats without calling it fake is exactly why I said people here should broaden their horizons.

Was looking for intellectual discussion. Was hoping to enlighten people on my tradition and also hoping to find others who already knew about it.

Honestly, this list proves my point more than yours. You’re treating every person I’ve mentioned as a package deal and then judging me based on the worst interpretation of each one. That’s not how intellectual influence works.

I can admire or find value in particular ideas from people while rejecting other things they believed or did. And there actually is a coherent thread running through my interests: human liberation, opposition to concentrated power, populism, anti-capitalism, individual autonomy and a fascination with people who challenged the political order of their time.

I’m a Creole Gulf Coast Southerner with a very eclectic, old-school intellectual worldview. Of course my influences aren’t going to look like a contemporary ideological reading list.

You see contradictions. I see a political worldview with a history behind it.

Also “give me free money”? I was reaching out to my fellow leftists because I’m going through hell.

The funny thing is that the people I mentioned actually are coherent. Each of them was concerned with human liberation, social transformation and breaking people out of systems they believed were holding humanity back.

That makes perfect sense to me as a Creole Gulf Coast Southerner with an old-school intellectual outlook. My influences don’t have to belong to the same modern political faction to be connected. I’m interested in the underlying ideas, not in forcing every thinker into a contemporary ideological box. I’m Creole from the Gulf Coast, where the old social and cultural world was a lot more mixed and culturally distinct than the modern American South. In some ways, parts of the Gulf Coast historically had more in common with the kind of multicultural, fluid society you’d associate with Brazil than with the rigid categories people project onto the South today.

So yes, my worldview is eclectic. It’s Southern, Creole, historically minded, populist, anti-capitalist and full of influences that don’t fit neatly into modern left/right boxes. That isn’t a contradiction. That’s the point.

I understand what you’re saying and I appreciate you clarifying where you’re coming from. I also understand the distinction you’re making about mutual aid versus charity.

That said, I don’t think the fact that I’ve made mutual-aid posts means my political beliefs or this post are some kind of attempt to manufacture sympathy. I’m genuinely in a difficult situation and I’ve asked for help because I need help. At the same time, I’m genuinely interested in politics and have been trying to explain my political tradition.

And honestly, the fact that I’m a Southern Democrat who is also strongly anti-capitalist, skeptical of concentrated wealth and power, supportive of mutual aid and sympathetic to anarchic and communist ideas shouldn’t be as contradictory as some of the responses have made it sound.

I also don’t expect everyone on Hexbear to agree with me. I just found it strange that so many people seemed more interested in deciding what category I belong in than actually discussing what I was saying.

I’m real.

My beliefs are pretty communistic and anarchic in the broad sense. I believe ordinary people should have far more control over their communities and their own lives. I’m also pretty skeptical of rigid hierarchies and institutions that exist primarily to preserve power for themselves.

I’m actually pretty strongly anti-capitalist myself. I oppose the concentration of wealth and power, inherited economic privilege, exploitation of workers and the idea that basic necessities should be treated purely as commodities.

That’s why it’s funny to see me automatically characterized as right-wing just because I identify as a Southern Democrat. There’s a lot more overlap between my beliefs and socialist, communist and anarchist traditions than people seem to realize.

No, I’m talking about my own political beliefs and my experience as a Southern Democrat in the modern era. You’re welcome to disagree with me, but reducing everything I said to a 19th-century historical reference instead of actually engaging with the substance kind of proves the point I was making.

Honestly, I was pretty disappointed when I opened this website and started reading the responses to my post. I came here expecting a Progressive space where people could engage with different perspectives in good faith and I was hoping for some positive, constructive engagement.

Instead, a lot of the comments seemed more interested in telling me that my beliefs somehow cannot exist or lumping me in with Dixiecrats than actually engaging with what I wrote. I’m a Southern Democrat and my political outlook comes from my own experiences, history and understanding. You don’t have to agree with me but dismissing the entire perspective as impossible or contradictory isn’t meaningful engagement.

I was hoping for a conversation, not a pile-on. I still believe there is room for different kinds of progressive and Democratic traditions, including Southern ones and I would have much rather had a thoughtful discussion about that.

He was a Republican. I don’t like him or Dixiecrats. The South has a Progressive tradition that has been erased.

No. I’m against capitalism.