Before I had gone over the wall,
both
John
at EifD and
David
Lindsay linked a
very
interesting article from Hamiltonian historian Michael Lind at Salon on the
real dimensions and aims of the ‘Southern strategy’, an economic arrangement
devised by that region’s elites which emphasises wage slavery, low corporate
tax rates and little to no regulation on big business. Read the article in its entirety;
it is a good one. Most people are familiar with the election maps which
demonstrate a complete role reversal of the Democrats and the Republicans
between the 1920’s and the 1960’s in terms of which regions and which
ideologies they represented; Mr Lind shows that the states which comprised the
erstwhile Confederacy are essential to the Republican constituency. As such, it
is to be expected that the Republican platform will reflect the political will
of the elites in the region.
There are some notable exceptions
to the rule, of course: Lind’s map shows that the ‘tidewater states’ of
Maryland, Delaware, Virginia and North Carolina are becoming ‘bluer’ rather
than ‘redder’. Possibly this is because they retain an Anglican character from
the days when they were settled by Jacobite exiles, and though they do tend to
have a more aristocratic mindset, they also value classical education: in my
experience many Virginians and other highly-educated near-Southerners are
appalled by the anti-intellectualism that defines the modern American
‘conservative’ movement.
For many of the same reasons, the
soft spot that many of my fellow palaeoconservatives harbour for the antebellum
South still utterly baffles me. I take them at their word that they value an
organic order and natural hierarchies; that they prefer the local over the
global; and that they prefer the logic of the community over the logic of the
market. But the actual structure of the antebellum South (and the proposed
structure the current Republicans champion), flies in the face of every one
of these things. Yes, the Old South was hierarchical. But it was a total
mockery of the natural hierarchy, as it involved the destruction and rape of
organic communities in Africa, the soul-harrowing and culture-destroying Middle
Passage forced upon them by early capitalists, and ultimately the wholesale
commodification of human beings. And far from being an idyll of rural life, the
plantation was every bit as much a soulless mechanical monstrosity, a part of
the global capitalist system of the time, as any Northern factory or sweatshop:
it consumed human lives for the sake of a raw material (cotton) which was then
exported around the globe. Not only that, but the South didn’t ‘just want to be
left alone’, as all too many of its apologists claim: they actively sought
the exportation of their economic system to the American West, to the Caribbean
and to South America (where, as slavery was still practised in Brazil, they
hoped to be ‘greeted with open arms’), and they deliberately forced their
political will upon a North which was all too reticent to return escaped
slaves. So much for ‘states’ rights’, I guess.
On close inspection, the
economics of the pre-war South were startlingly close to what would now be
considered neoliberalism. Indeed, why else would so many libertarians (like Ron
Paul, like the Ludwig von Mises Institute and so forth) so readily embrace the
so-called Lost Cause? Even more troublingly from a palaeoconservative point of
view, why would openly neoliberal politicians like Bill Clinton
actively
patronise the
neo-Confederate cause by
laying
wreaths at the Confederate Memorial in the Arlington Cemetery and
sending
supportive letters to neo-Confederate organisations like the United
Daughters of the Confederacy? Hmmm...
Indeed, if one looks for
assertive expressions of local culture and community in the United States, I
have long had the sneaking suspicion one is as likely (if not more) to find
them in small-town petty-bourgeois New England, in the farming and mining
communities of the Midwest, and (of course) on the Native American reservations
of the American West as one is to find them in the South (the birthplace of
Walmart and the strip mall). So why is palaeoconservatism so readily drawn to
the prima facie conservative (but actually neoliberal) obsequies of
neo-Confederate politics?
Possibly it is because of the
coalition politics that arose out of reaction to the New Left in the 1960’s
which aligned the economic left with social liberalism, and conversely the
economic right with social conservatism. Indeed, you are likely to find as much
of culture-warrior politics in the popular defences of the Confederate legacy
as anything else. But those coalition politics are in the process of dying a
long, drawn-out and likely very messy death. The Democrats are rediscovering a
politics which aligns economic populism with everything the palaeoconservatives
claim to value: respect for life, respect for locality and respect for a
transcendent order. Meanwhile, the neoliberals and libertarians amongst the
Republicans are winning (with the
faux
pro-life Romney and the Ayn Rand-worshipping Paul Ryan heading their
presidential ticket), and their socially-conservative supporters are being
rather blind about the writing on the wall.
A real, effective
palaeoconservative politic has to take a careful account of its basic
priorities before entering into such alliances. As, it probably goes without
saying, should a real, effective left-wing politic. As Michael Lind states, the
working class of the South, black, white and Hispanic, may be very responsive
to either sort of politics, but first we have to mount an effective opposition
to the opportunistic elites who wish to take advantage of anti-union, low-wage,
low-corporate tax, low-regulation neoliberal economics whilst pretending to be
conservative.
On which John comments:
The Southern states also feature
high divorce rates and a high level of dependence on Federal subsidies, whether
we are talking about welfare or spending on military bases, many of which are
located in the South. The Southern elites don’t really care about their own
people, nor do they care about using Federal power when it suits them. As you
point out, the Southern oligarchy tried to use national power to expand slavery
into the West and campaigned for wars in Latin America to add more slave states
to the Union.
I remember a few years ago there
was a very heated debate on Taki’s website between libertarians and Tom Piatak
over the auto bailout. Piatak is from Cleveland, and he discussed how the
collapse of Detroit would devastate already weakened communities in the Midwest
and supported the bailout as a necessary evil. The libertarians of course would
have none of it.
I think paleocons tend to fall
into two broad categories on economics. On the one hand you have the
neo-Confederate/libertarian conservative faction, and on the other you have the
protectionists/national conservatives (Pat Buchanan being a good example).
I suppose you can add
distributists to the mix, but they seem to have many differences with typical
paleocons. Distributists seem to swing more to the Left. Distributism does not
seem too different from libertarian socialism.
