Northern Strategy and Anti-South Polemics: A Review Essay of Thomas Schaller's Whistling Past Dixie
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As the first unambiguous Southerner to be elected president since the antebellum era, Jimmy Carter was viewed at the time as a symbol that North-South reconciliation had finally come to pass. A quarter-century later, there are growing signs that the intersectional peace may be ending. This article shows that as Southerners, regardless of party, have steadily gained political power since the 1960s, various commentators have argued that the regional power shift presents serious negative consequences for the parties and the country and must be stopped. Thomas Schaller's widely cited, much heralded book Whistling Past Dixie is but the latest example. More than arguing that Democrats need to find an alternative, non-southern route to victory, Schaller suggests that Democrats must have the guts to run against the South, portraying it as the enemy once more of all that is good and right with America. It is a book that combines sectional strategy and sectional substance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".