With maps, Michael Lind writes:
Every now and then someone highlights the overlap
between today’s Republican states and the slave states of the former Confederacy.
As clichéd as the point may be, it remains indispensable to
understanding what is happening in American politics today:
The core of today’s Democratic Party consists of
the states of New England and the Great Lakes/Mid-Atlantic region that were the
heart of the Union effort during the Civil War. The core of today’s
Republican Party consists of the states that seceded from the United States and
formed the Confederate States of America.Don’t be misled by the contemporary
red state-blue state map, which makes the mostly red Prairie/Mountain states
look as important in the Republican coalition as the South. A cartogram
that shows states by population is far more accurate:
As the cartogram shows, in terms of population
and votes the South vastly outweighs the thinly populated Prairie/Mountain
states, even though the latter get disproportionate representation in the U.S.
Senate and the electoral college. The cartogram provides a pretty good
reflection of the situation perceived by conservative white Southerners,
by depicting a besieged South encircled and on the verge of being crushed by
multiracial, polyglot, immigrant-friendly, secular humanist, progressive Blue
America.
Now that they dominate the Republican Party,
Southern conservatives are using it to carry out the same strategies that they
promoted during the generations when they controlled the Democratic Party, from
the days of Andrew Jackson and Martin van Buren to the civil rights revolution
of the 1950s and 1960s. From the 19th century to the 21st, the oligarchs
of the American South have sought to defend the Southern system, what used to
be known as the Southern Way of Life.
Notwithstanding slavery, segregation and today’s
covert racism, the Southern system has always been based on economics, not
race. Its rulers have always seen the comparative advantage of the South
as arising from the South’s character as a low-wage, low-tax, low-regulation
site in the U.S. and world economy. The Southern strategy of attracting
foreign investment from New York, London and other centers of capital depends
on having a local Southern workforce that is forced to work at low wages by the
absence of bargaining power.
Anything that increases the bargaining power of
Southern workers vs. Southern employers must be opposed, in the interest of the
South’s regional economic development model. Unions, federal wage and
workplace regulations, and a generous, national welfare state all increase the
bargaining power of Southern workers, by reducing their economic
desperation. Anti-union right-to-work laws, state control of wages and
workplace regulations, and an inadequate welfare state all make Southern
workers more helpless, pliant and dependent on the mercy of their employers.
A weak welfare state also maximizes the dependence of ordinary Southerrners on
the tax-favored clerical allies of the local Southern ruling class, the
Protestant megachurches, whose own lucrative business model is to perform
welfare functions that are performed by public agencies elsewhere, like
childcare.
The Southern system is essentially about class
and only incidentally about race. That is why, following the abolition of
slavery, the Southern landlord elite exploited black and white tenant farmers
and child workers indifferently. Immigrant workers without rights to vote
or organize unions have always appealed to the Southern employer elite.
After the Civil War some Southern landlords experimented with bringing in
indentured servants or “coolies” from Asia, until that form of unfree
labor was banned by Congress in the 1880s. Today many business-class
conservatives from Texas and other Southern states, such as former Texas Sen.
Phil Gramm, champion “guest-worker programs,” which would bring in Mexican
nationals and others to work as indentured servants in the South, while
forbidding them to become U.S. citizens with legal and voting rights.
White supremacy was never an end in itself, but a
tactic used by the Southern oligarchs to divide white workers from nonwhite
workers. But the Southern elite can dispense with racism, because it has
never cared what color its serfs are. Indeed, in the 17th century
Southern planters initially experimented with white British and European
indentured servants as farmworkers, before trying black slaves, who were easier
to identify if they ran away. In theory, in a truly post-racist South, a
multiracial Southern oligarchy could lord it over an underpaid, vulnerable and
equally multiracial Southern regional majority.
The traditional Southern regional economic
strategy, then, depends on the control by Southern employers of a huge pool of
low-wage workers with little or no bargaining power in their dealings with
their local bosses or the foreign (that is, extra-Southern) investors and
corporations who are invited in to exploit their labor. This regional economic
strategy can succeed only if the power of the Southern employer class over
Southern urban and rural workers is protected from political and legal
interference from outside the South and within.
Protecting the prerogatives of the Southern
economic elite and the politicians it owns from external interference is the
rationale for the defense of states’ rights, in the 21st century as in the 19th
and 20th.
While they demonize “the federal government” as
though it were some external force, Southern conservatives are actually afraid
of democracy — national democracy. They are afraid of their fellow
Americans outside of the region they control. They are afraid that
national majorities will impose unwelcome reform on the South, at the expense
of their profits and privileges, as national majorities did during
Reconstruction, the New Deal and the civil rights revolution.
The Southern system is also threatened by
internal democracy. The Populist movement of the late 1800s, which in
some cases united white and black Southerners in the cause of reform, terrified
the white Southern establishment. By World War I many Southern states had
adopted variants of the “Mississippi system” of disfranchising all of the black
and up to half of the white population, by means of poll taxes, means tests and
other devices, ensuring that elections in the South would be dominated by
upper-income voters. The purpose of the “voter ID” laws pushed by today’s
Dixified Republican party is similarly to prevent lower-income citizens from
voting.
Southern conservatives are sometimes accused of
being hypocritical in denouncing the federal government even as their states
take a disproportionate amount of federal military and civilian
subsidies. But that isn’t hypocrisy; it’s cunning. As long as the
local Southern oligarchs control how the federal money is spent in their
region, they have no objection to massive restribution from Yankeeland to Dixie.
Plans like Romney’s and Ryan’s for block-granting federal subsidies support the
self-serving strategy of the Southern elite: federal funding but regional
control.
Note that throughout this essay I have used the
phrases “Southern establishment,” “Southern oligarchy” and “Southern
elite.” All too often outsiders treat the victims of the Southern
oligarchy — the majority of white and black and Latino Southerners — as though
they are to be blamed for their misfortune. Unfortunately, many northern
progressives are snobs who would rather sneer at the manners and lifestyle of
the Southern white working class than mobilize to defeat the Southern elite,
which tends to be well-educated, well-spoken and well-traveled.
What about the future? Theorists of a “new
majority” at the national level may be vindicated, if this year the Democrats
win the popular vote for the fifth times in six consecutive elections. If
Texas, the powerhouse of Southern electoral votes, shifts from red to blue in
the next generation or two because of demographic change, that would further
ghettoize Dixie conservatives. Gerrymandering can delay the inevitable
decline of influence of white Southern conservatives in the House of
Representatives, but cannot stop it. As before the Civil War, the Senate
may be the last redoubt of the Southern right, but only as long as it can find
enough allies among the low-population states of the prairie and mountain
regions.
But the former slave states could triumph even as
they went down, if the demise of the traditional South were to be accompanied
by the Southernization of the American economy and political system. It
is all too easy to imagine a United States that combines anti-racist, feminist
and pro-gay attitudes with an economic strategy based on luring foreign
investment with the help of low voter turnout, low wages, weak unions and
foreign guest-worker programs, together with an inadequate welfare state
dominated by state governments, private vouchers and tax-favored religious
charities. A nationalized Confederacy with progressive trappings would be
all too reminiscent of today’s America.
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