Rise of the Southern Aristocracy
From Sara Robinson at AlterNet:
Like an English lord unfettered from the Magna Carta, nobody had the authority to tell a Southern gentleman what to do with resources under his control. In this model, that’s what liberty is. If you don’t have the freedom to rape, beat, torture, kill, enslave, or exploit your underlings (including your wife and children) with impunity — or abuse the land, or enforce rules on others that you will never have to answer to yourself — then you can’t really call yourself a free man…
Anything that gives more freedom and rights to lower-status people can’t help but put serious limits on the freedom of the upper classes to use those people as they please. It cannot be any other way. So they find Yankee-style rights expansions absolutely intolerable, to the point where they’re willing to fight and die to preserve their divine right to rule…
[T]he New Deal — and, especially, the post-war interstate highways, dams, power grids, and other infrastructure investments that gave rise to the Sun Belt — fatally loosened the Yankees’ stranglehold on national power. The gleaming new cities of the South and West shifted the American population centers westward, unleashing new political and economic forces with real power to challenge the Yankee consensus. And because a vast number of these westward migrants came out of the South, the elites that rose along with these cities tended to hew to the old Southern code, and either tacitly or openly resist the moral imperatives of the Yankee canon. The soaring postwar fortunes of cities like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta fed that ancient Barbadian slaveholder model of power with plenty of room and resources to launch a fresh and unexpected 20th-century revival…
It’s not an overstatement to say that we’re now living in Plantation America. As Lind points out: to the horror of his Yankee father, George W. Bush proceeded to run the country exactly like Woodard’s description of a Barbadian slavelord. And Barack Obama has done almost nothing to roll this victory back. We’re now living in an America where rampant inequality is accepted, and even celebrated…
The Yankees thought that government’s job was to better the lot of the lower classes. The Southern aristocrats know that its real purpose is to deprive them of all possible means of rising up against their betters.
I see the points the author is trying to make but I’m not sure if I’m sold on the whole North vs South argument she makes. History is full of examples of northerners who acted in the same ways as she rightly accuses southerners. The slaver fleets and American pirate fleets were for the most part, based out of Boston. The textile mills moved south to break northern unions which only came to exist because of impossible working conditions. Sweatshops first began in the north and Wall Street was front and center of the Gilded Age when Southern, Midwestern and Western farmers were robbed of their crops by Wall Street speculators to the point that a second civil war almost broke out that promised to have more Succession states than Union states by 2 to 1. Even farmers in western New York State considered joining. I think there’s a lot of truth in what she writes but she seems to want to put too much of the blame in one place. But she is right is saying that too many of these men have no interest in leaving a legacy.
This movement didn’t re emerge in America until the early 1980′s. After fourty years of FDRs social democratic American experiment it was a movement that has such profound advocates that they haven’t really tried to fool anyone with their agenda. While the lineage of this movement is an interesting historical debate, how do we get a handle on it? I was living in South America during its emergence and it is terrifying to behold. If American citizens had any idea of what could be coming there would be no more debate. There is going to be some hard times in this country that really could be avoided. I weep for my country.
I like to think I’ve identified the enemy, sallied forth and engaged them to an obsession.
Yeah, too bad you obsessively exclude your “enemy” from commenting…
I would not revel in sallying fourth to engage an “enemy” upon a stage first emptied of them.