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Americans as a result of the neglect or contempt of the white culture of
the South are reflected in the political, economic, and cultural agenda
that he describes as having descended from John
C.
Calhoun and other
highly educated antebellum Southern writers and thinkers, to the Van–
derbilt Agrarians - John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Allen Tate
- and thence to the latter-day disciples of the Agrarians, notably Richard
Weaver and M. E. Bradford. This agenda includes
opposition to finance capitalism, and more broadly, to the attempt
to substitute the market for society itself; opposition to the radical
individualism that is today sweeping America; [support] for broad
property ownership, and a market economy subject to socially de–
termined moral restraints; adherence to a Christian individualism that
condemns personal license and demands submission to a moral con–
sensus rooted in elementary piety; and an insistence that every people
must develop its own genius, and must reject siren calls to an interna–
tionalism - or rather, a cosmopolitanism - that would eradicate local
and national cultures and standards of personal conduct by reducing
morals and all else to commodities.
But even as he appeals to the hope that "the deep anticapitalism of
twentieth-century southern conservatives" indicates the possibility that
the ideals of the "conservatism that has, from its origins, constituted
America's most impressive native-born critique of our national develop–
ment, of liberalism, and of the more disquieting features of the modern
world" may once again become comprehensible, Genovese is haunted by
the doubt that in reality effective opposition to capitalism in the South
did not survive the defeat of the Confederacy, the "end of slavery" hav–
ing destroyed the social relations that nurtured [the] critique of capital–
ism" in the South. As warmly as he endorses the best aspects of the anti–
capitalism of Tate, Weaver, and Bradford, especially its emphasis on the
principle that genuine individual freedom is possible only in a society that
values family, religion, and hierarchy, Genovese cannot say that this has
done anything to prevent Southern conservatives in general from joining
with conservatives elsewhere in the nation in subscribing to a "free-mar–
ket liberalism the ideal of which shares much with the radical Left's ver–
sion of egalitarianism," and, in professing to believe "in a level playing
field and an attendant doctrine of equality," projects "hopes that are no
less an invitation to disillusionment and despair than their counterparts in
the Left's chimera of equality of outcome and ultimate condition."
Genovese draws a vivid historical analogy:
