Southern Partisan - Critics and Commentary

Critics and Commentary

Due to its conservative political leaning and advocacy of the southern side in the American Civil War, Southern Partisan has been the subject of controversy. The New York Times described Southern Partisan as "one of the (southern) region's most right-wing magazines," notes its disapproval of Abraham Lincoln and the Union during the Civil War, and tendency to "venerate the rebel soldiers who fought to secede from the United States." According to the Times, it is also socially conservative as evidenced by a 1999 editorial denouncing the Miami Herald's coverage of gay issues. Though critical of these beliefs, the Times nevertheless notes that "Many of (Southern Partisan's) articles, however, are more high-minded historical reviews in the tradition of the Southern agrarian movement, which glorified the South's slow-paced traditions of farms and small towns."

Several sources on the political left have openly accused the magazine of racism. Ed Sebesta, an anti-confederate partisan based in Dallas, Texas commonly attacks the magazine, asserting that Southern Partisan, along with Chronicles, are the " major publications" of the Confederate movement. Slate online magazine has described the Southern Partisan as a "crypto-racist, pro-Confederate magazine." In 2000, the president of People for the American Way called it "racist" and pointed to columns that criticize Martin Luther King, Jr and Nelson Mandela, and alleged that it views slavery favorably. The Times report quotes a passage about the "myth that vicious white slave traders dragged Africans from their idyllic homeland to serve as chattel for arrogant white Americans." They also note that the same article describes white slave traders as being better to the blacks than the African warlords. The Times notes that "(t)he magazine rarely writes about slavery," preferring to focus on more genteel aspects of the past. According to the Times article, Southern Partisan "takes the position that the Civil War was fought not over slavery, but over the preservation of a Southern way of life that to this day is worth preserving." (2/8/2000)

The magazine rejects many of its critics' characterizations, arguing that they derive primarily from the far left wing of the political spectrum and from advocates of political correctness. Responding to critics the magazine's Christopher Sullivan charged them with taking "quotes out of context to paint a picture of racial and historical bigotry in the Partisan." (The Never Ending Struggle by Christopher Sullivan, Southern Partisan 1999 4th Quarter) As a prime example, Sullivan pointed to excerpted quotations that critics purported to speak favorably about slavery but were in fact a synopsis of statistical data from Time on the Cross, a scholarly study on slavery authored by socialist cliometrists Stanley Engerman and Nobel prize recipient Robert Fogel. Sullivan contended that other quotations had been similarly misconstrued by critics on the left and rejected their attacks as the product of a politically correct and politically motivated "feeding frenzy."

Responding to the allegations of racism, the magazine's editors are quick to point out that they regularly publish articles by African American writers such as Walter E. Williams. Sullivan dismisses these allegations as ad hominem attacks and predicts they will continue from sources in the media and on the political left as long as the magazine is published. "Will it end? As King Lear put it, 'Never, never, never, never, never.' And that's why our resistance to the assaults must also never end."