BY MICHAEL
LIND
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:
Confederate (red) and Union (blue) states
Republican (red) and Democratic (blue) states, 2008
election
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:
Red and blue states, 2008, with states proportional to
their number of electoral votes
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.
Michael Lind is the author of Land
of Promise: An Economic History of the United
States and co-founder of the New America
Foundation.
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/10/slave_states_vs_free_states_2012/