I was in a coffee shop in a small town in Georgia listening to live folk-country music when I received the news alert from The Wall Street Journal that Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene had decided to resign. Later that night I watched Greene’s video announcement and was struck by how clear, straight-forward, and sincere she came across. While her announcement was a surprise, her rhetorical approach was not. That’s because I recognized it as quintessentially Southern. No, not the fancy Whiskeypalian cadences of movies. This was more working class, Evangelical, straight-forward, well-crafted and strategic, but without embellishment.
Three years ago, when I first started spending a lot a time in the South, the very musician I had come to listen to last Friday night taught me to see the region’s supposed cultural limitations as its strengths. Whatever Southern culture lacked in revolutionary thinking and innovation, he suggested, it made up for in authenticity and common sense. “The pragmatism of the South tempers the expanded mind,” he told me. In other words, don’t expect too many flights of fancy, but we’ll get to the core of things pretty quick.
And that’s what Greene pulled off that night. She wrapped herself so naturally in her conservative, “America First” beliefs that it made Trump look like a fraudulent big city national candidate who rode her down-home issues to the White House before jettisoning them in the pursuit of international acclaim. I’m not saying that there was no artifice in her speech or that most Americans share her views. But that night, Greene exposed the gaping distance between highfalutin political rhetoric and everyday Americans more than any politician I had ever seen.
