Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 30: Antebellum Southern Political Economy

Michael Lind always has provocative and interesting ideas about the politics of the South and how the heritage and interpreted history of slavery and the Civil War and Reconstruction shape them.

In Democracy And Political Economy TPM Cafe 02/26/09, he offers the following observations:

Our own history as a nation has provided a prolonged and sometimes bloody experiment showing the importance of economic and social structure to constitutional politics. Both the North and the South were heirs to the British tradition of constitutionalism, individual liberty, and the rule of law. But notwithstanding a common Protestant, Lockean liberal, Anglo-American culture, the South developed a political culture resembling that of Latin American banana republics more than that of the North and Midwest.

The reason was the plantation economy, which endured beyond the abolition of slavery (and exists in some form in parts of the South today). The plantation system created a society divided between a small oligarchy of wealthy landowners, a weak and subservient class of professionals like lawyers and professors working for them, a tiny and weak urban working class, a large number of poor farmers and a large population of slaves, sharecroppers or campesinos. It didn't matter whether the local cultural legacy was that of constitutional, liberal Britain or despotic, Counter-Reformation Spain. In both Anglo-America and Latin America, similar economic structures produced similar results: perpetual political war between the propertied oligarchs and populist demagogues, with each side--not only the demagogues--resorting to lawlessness and sometimes terrorism in the struggle. [my emphasis]

And he draws this lesson:

The lesson of the American South, for us as well as others, is that it is not enough to have a culture of constitutionalism in a society with the economy and class and caste system of a banana republic.

It's always easy, and often tempting, for political commentators to float away in historical generalities. But what Lind is pointing out is that their are ways in which the distinctive history of the South affects national politics still today that are important to understand. The ideology and pseudohistory of the Lost Cause being one of them.

Lind is one writer who has made a conscientious attempt to understand some of the ways these historical traditions have worked themselves out and continue to do so today. While I find myself disagreeing with him on some of his points in this regard, he is looking at some important trends and pulling useful insights from them.

He does this at length in his 2003 book Made In Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics. For instance, he points to how the particular of Southern conservatism influenced the Cheney-Bush unilateralism foreign policy, or more specifically how it provided a voter base supportive of those policies:

Throughout the twentieth century, many white Southerners were hostile to the League of Nations, the United Nations, and other international organizations, for two reasons - one racial, one religious. The racial reason, important in the decades before the Civil Rights Revolution, was the fear that international human rights treaties might be interpreted to require the abolition of racial segregation in the South. While the civil rights reforms of the 1960s eliminated the rationale for this kind of rejectionism, the legacy persisted in the efforts of North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms for decades afterward to prevent the ratification by the Senate of various international human rights covenants.

More important than vestigial racism today is the religious motive for hostility to international organization: the sincere belief on the part of many Southern Protestant fundamentalists that the United Nations, the European Union, or some other international organization or multinational bloc is under the control of Satan. Most Americans, as well as most foreigners, find it difficult to believe that anyone in an advanced industrial society can believe this. But millions of Americans, particularly in the Deep South, have grown up listening to local pastors or television or radio preachers explain that the European Union is one of the horns of the multiple-headed dragon of the Book of Revelation, or that the UN is the "Beast" described in the same book.

Lind has also addressed the theme in articles like The economic Civil War Salon 12/18/08, in which he argues for a third Reconstruction in the Deep South:

The alternative to the Southernization of the U.S. is the Americanization of the South -- a process that was not completed by Reconstruction and the New Deal and the Civil Rights era, which can be thought of as the Second Reconstruction. The non-Southern states, through their representatives in Congress and the executive branch, and with the help of enlightened Southerners, need to use the power of the federal government to put a stop to the Southern conservative race-to-the-bottom strategy once and for all.

Call it the Third Reconstruction. The first step is to end the race to the bottom in wages and regulation, by national action. The national minimum wage should be gradually raised until it is a living wage, of $10 to $12 an hour, and it should be adjusted for inflation. At the same time, federal regulations should set a higher floor with respect to worker safety regulations, environmental regulations, and others, preventing America's own internal rogue states from gaining any advantages by flouting national standards. Most Southern politicians and business leaders will howl that this will bankrupt the South. That's what they said about the abolition of slavery, child labor, and the convict lease system, too. The South was a better place to live after those reforms, and it will be a better place to live when there is a living wage throughout the South. [my emphasis]

Another is Jesse Helms is not dead Salon 07/11/08:

Where Jesse Helms came from was the Third World, the American South between World War I and the civil rights revolution. In the generation before Helms was born the son of a police chief in 1921, the Southern oligarchy had been terrified by Populism. The greatest threat to the white elite was the revolt of white workers and farmers. To forestall that possibility, the Southern state governments, in the decade before World War I, used literacy tests, poll taxes and other measures to eliminate not only all blacks but half of the white Southern population from the electorate. In the election of 1936, voter turnout in Georgia was 16.1 percent, 13 percent in Mississippi, and only 10.7 percent in South Carolina. (It was higher, 42.7 percent, in Helms' North Carolina, where populists had abolished the poll tax.)

Having crushed the Republican and Populist parties, the oligarchs imposed a one-party dictatorship on the region, with secret state surveillance units and occasional collaboration between the police and the Ku Klux Klan. In its economy, the South was a banana republic, a commodity-exporting resource colony in which a "comprador bourgeoisie" of local landowners and local businessmen collaborated with investors in New York and elsewhere in fleecing the region.

To serve their interests, the old latifundist families and corporate elites hired "Dixie demagogues," who were to genuine populists like William Jennings Bryan what a Disney pirate is to a pirate. All of them were entertaining. Some began as entertainers, like musician-slash-flour miller W. Lee "Pass the Biscuits, Pappy" O'Daniel, who went from hosting the "Hillbilly Flour" radio show to the Texas governor's mansion in 1939. The "Dixie demagogues" denounced various supposed enemies of the white tribe, but with two exceptions -- Huey Long and George Wallace -- they never threatened the rule of the country clubs and courthouse gangs. Jesse Helms was one of these theatrical quasi-populists, an uncomplicated establishment conservative who parlayed a liberal-baiting radio show into a political career. Like other faux-homespun Southern conservatives, he employed rhetorical populism against blacks, homosexuals, liberals, professors, modern artists and "common-ists" in the service of his business backers, most noticeably North Carolina's tobacco industry. [my emphasis]

Today's Republican Party not only depends on the votes of conservative white Southerners as its most important voting base. The national Party's conception of itself, of the proper role of government, of how political and social authority should function, of foreign policy, owe far more to Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond than to Dwight Eisenhower or Wendell Willkie.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2009,michael lind, us south