There is only one minority left in American society that can still be safely treated with disdain and mockery: the rednecks.

The gun-toting, squirrel-eating, banjo-plucking, Bible-bashing, truck-driving, stock car-racing white rural poor are a staple caricature of popular culture. The hillbilly of fighting Scots-Irish stock, brutally ignorant, steeped in moonshine, violent and possibly inbred, can be played for laughs, as Jed Clampett, or Cletus Del Roy Spuckler in The Simpsons. Or for fear, as in the murderous, toothless killers of the film Deliverance.

But suddenly the rednecks are being taken seriously. In the unique arithmetic of this year’s presidential election, the white rural working-class vote has assumed huge importance, and nowhere more than in the Appalachians, the great spine of mountains that stretch 1,000 miles from southern New York to the middle of Alabama.

The Appalachians, home to 23 million people, run through some of the most hotly contested swing states, including Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Mark Siegel, a former Democratic National Committee executive director, says: “The Appalachian voting bloc will be critical.” Rednecks lean Republican, yet the Barack Obama campaign has been making inroads among the economically hard-pressed rural poor. An entirely new political animal has emerged in these hills: the “Leftneck”, redneck by outlook, Democrat by inclination.

Yet if Barack Obama is to win Virginia, one of the biggest prizes, he will need a lot more people who see no contradiction between owning a gun, flying the Confederate flag and voting for a black man. Men, in short, like Ben “Cooter” Jones.

Mr Jones may be the most famous Redneck Democrat in America. As “Crazy Cooter Davenport”, the loveable good ol’ boy mechanic in the wildly popular television series The Dukes of Hazzard, he went on to represent Georgia for two terms in the US Congress; his political aspirations came to an end in a knockdown, unequal brawl with the Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich.

Born in a “dirt shack filled with liquor, music and madness”, he nearly drank himself to death, saw the inside of numerous jails, quit the bottle, got married four times and divorced three, found God, found politics, and has now written a book: Redneck Boy in the Promised Land.

“Some goddam sumbitch stole my Obama sign,” he says. (Hear: “Obayma saahn”) “Reckon I know who it is, too.” We are on the porch of Mr Jones’s cabin, deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, surrounded by pictures of Confederate generals, photos of the cast ofThe Dukes of Hazzard, and bits of old farm machinery. Mr Jones is drinking green tea, his tipple of choice since his divorce, 30 years ago, from Jack Daniel’s & Co. Waylon Jennings is wailing somewhere in the background. “Lovely man, Waylon,” he says, “but you never forgot he was like, armed.”

Mr Jones is also armed. The Republican Party and the National Rifle Association, he insists, have monopolised the cause of gun ownership in the United States. “You don’t gotta be Republican to own a gun. Out here, pretty much everyone has one. You live off the land, and you’re a long way from the law. There ain’t much crime: reason is, you’ll get shot.” I am beginning to feel worried for whoever stole Cooter’s sign.

For half an hour we have been watching a video in which fans of The Dukes of Hazzard drive around very fast in replicas of General Lee, the car driven by Bo and Luke Duke in the series. The Dukes of Hazzard, he says, helped to show that there was more to Southern culture than the hoary stereotype. “It showed rural Southerners as heroes, who always made the right moral choices,” he says. “You really looked up to those guys.”

Cooter Jones is a delightful character actor, a knowing caricature of himself, but he is making a valid point. The white rural poor are socially inclined towards Republicanism, principally for reasons of guns and religion, but economically, as one of the most disadvantaged groups in the United States, they are squarely in the Democratic sights.

There are self-styled “rednecks” throughout the United States (the future son-in-law of Sarah Palin describes himself thus), for the name is more a cast of mind than a geographic or demographic reality.

“The Democratic party is totally urban now,” Mr Jones says. “It’s easy to paint them as elitist and out of touch.” Barack Obama has sought to make cultural contact with the white working class, by bowling and drinking beer, yet during the primaries, in parts of the Appalachians he was defeated by Hillary Clinton by a huge margin.

It is hard to imagine Obama, urbane and sophisticated (and black) in these beautiful, strange (mostly white) mountains. Back in 1844, Edgar Allan Poe depicted the bleak, resilient people of “these ragged hills . . . the uncouth and fierce races of men who tenanted their groves and caverns”. The mountain people know their reputation, and play up to it. A roadside stall sells T-shirts, recalling the film Deliverance, with the words: “Paddle faster, I hear banjos.”

Cooter Jones likes to remark of his hell-raising redneck past: “There was a time in my life when I spent 90 per cent of my money on whiskey and women. The rest of it I just wasted.” Yet these hills are, in many ways, apart from and behind the rest of America. At Bill’s Gun Store and Ammunition Depot, just a few miles from Mr Jones’s cabin, I encountered a man who came as close as any I have met to saying he would not vote Democrat on account of Barack Obama’s skin colour. “I heard he’s a Muslim,” Carl Denbigh said, hoisting a bucket of live bait into the back of his truck. “I ain’t gonna vote for no Muslim.” Barack Obama, of course, is not a Muslim.

But Cooter Jones is confident: not that the rednecks (a title of which he is extremely proud) will mass behind the Democratic candidate, but that enough will peel off from the Republican camp to make a significant difference.

“I think we can take Virginia, I really do,” he says. “Did I tell you some sumbitch stole my sign?”

Channel Hillbilly

The Beverly Hillbillies American TV series about a hillbilly family that moved to Beverly Hills after striking oil on their land. Critically panned when it first came out, it was nonetheless a hit and ran for nine seasons, spawning a mini-genre of rural sitcoms during the 1960s. Features lots of expert shooting and dim people clashing with “sophisticated” neighbours

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) Coen brothers film about three escaped convicts travelling across Mississippi in the Great Depression of the 1930s, featuring country music, blues guitar, corrupt politics, a soothsayer and the Ku Klux Klan

My Big Redneck Wedding Series on Country Music Television in the US. Rednecks get married with all the trimmings. One couple choose a red, white and blue theme for their special day

Deliverance (1972) A group of rednecks rape a businessman out on a river trip in deepest Georgia. Toothless and dirty countrymen are given lines such as “I’m going to make you squeal like a pig”. Features banjos, inbreeding, guns, arrows and moonshine.

Source: Times Archive

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