I want to continue the discussion which began with the reaction to Janeane Garofolo's labeling of Teabagging as a racist dog whistle, and was continued by NCrissieB's response that racism is just one component of a Southern insecurity complex. This brought further responses of "kneejerk South bashing". (To suggest this, IMHO, is to have massive amnesia about the last forty years of history.)
There is an overarching framework that encompasses all these points of view, and that includes Wall St into the frame as well. Namely, the idea that the plantation model (which uses racism for political support, and which historically did start in the South - or in Britain, if you will) has now been rolled out as a global model for corporate control. Not for nothing did Kurt Vonnegut label Yale University as "Plantation Owner's Tech".
The framework is below the fold.
The writer who has expressed this framework most clearly is the complicated, and often-times frustrating Michael Lind. Lind is a Texan who started out as a neoconservative, but broke with them in the early 1990s - at first over Pat Robertson's anti-semitism. He has since been completely opposed to the current Republican party; although one would make a mistake to assume he is a liberal. He is his own man, hard to describe.
Nevertheless, he has written two excellent books on the subject of the South and current American politics - his 1996 "Up from Conservatism" (UFC) and his 2003 "Made in Texas" (MIT). As a Texan, he pulls no punches about what is wrong with the political leadership of the South - which he labeled "an oligarchy", six years before Simon Johnson came to the same conclusion about Wall Street.
The bulk of this diary will lay out the "plantation owner' framework by excerpting from Lind's books. At the end, I will propose a strategy for progressives that uses the framework to position themselves to fight both the plantation owners and Wall St.
1. Racism as a major component of the Southern Strategy
When I read the "prove it" comments addressed to those defending Ms. Garafolo, I felt like I was on some right wing talk show. This is supposedly a politically-aware board, yet no one accepts that the right has used racism for forty years to claw its way to total power? Someone has to prove that a lily-white rally full of skinheads, that is blatantly using a lie about tax cuts as a "dog whistle" for "I hate Obama" is racist? Here are three extended quotes from Mr. Lind for those who require "evidence":
The Republican culture war, originating in Richard Nixon's "southern strategy" of coopting the supporters of George Wallace, and perfected by Republican strategists like Lee Atwater and William Kristol, is nothing more than an updated version of the political demagogy which the oligarchic Bourbon Democrats of the New South in the first half of the twentieth century used to divide low- and middle-income southern whites from their potential allies - poor blacks and northern liberals and moderates...It is no coincidence that the Republican politicians who have risen to the top in the age of culture-war politics are southern politicans, like Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, and Phil Gramm... (UFC, p 264.)
Appealing to the racial anxieties of white voters has become a central element of the strategy of the Republican elite for gaining and maintaining political power, as it was for the conservative Bourbon Democrats who lorded it over the South in the first half of the twentieth century. In most cases, the racist appeals are coded, like Nixon's support for "school choice" (intended to give white southerners a way to escape the integration of public schools), Ronald Reagan's attack on "welfare queens," and Phil Gramm's sneering, pseudo-folksy references to those who want to ride in the wagon and not pull. In the 1990s, even the circumlocutions began to be abandoned in favor of unapologetic racialist theorizing - not by elected politicians, but by highly esteemed members of the conservative intelligentsia, like Charles Murray (The Bell Curve), Dinseh D'Souza (The End of Racism), and Peter Brimelow (Alien Nation). (UFC, pp 188-9)
Both race-baiting and the politics of family values are part of the same Republican culture-war strategy of diverting the anger of the white working class from the owners and operators of the Republican party - the corporate elite and the hereditary rich - and focusing wrath on unpopular minorities": blacks, Jews, secular Americans, homosexuals, immigrants (UFC, p 137.)
Finally, people might make these connections sooner if they realized that Limbaugh and his ilk did not invent their shtick. They just picked up what was already there.
The present-day national conservative media network was anticipated, in many of its details, by the far-right media empire of the late Dallas oilman H.L. Hunt...The Limbaugh show has more in common with Hunt's Facts Forum than with (William F.) Buckley's "Firing Line". (UFC, p 131.)
2. The South as a resource colony; the U.S. as a resource colony
Throughout this diary, I want people to distinguish between the tiny ruling class of the South and the ordinary people. I have no quarrel with the people of the South; but I have a serious quarrel with the unrepentant, seditious bums who have led the South through war and peace for the entire life of our Republic. No one has ever dethroned them and their vile, aristocratic grip on the nation.
(After the Civil War, the South) became a resource colony of New York. The terms that were negotiated in the 1870s were unfavorable to the Southern white and black majority, but very favorable to the Southern rich, who were given a free hand by the Northeastern elite in crushing dissent within their region... (MIT, p40.)
For all the opportunism and inconsistency that characterizes conservative constitutional thought, present-day conservatives do tend to share a distinct and identifiable theory of the Constitution. The constitutional theory of the Republican right is not Republican in its origins; it is inherited, like so much else in today's Republican party, from the conservative Democrats of the South. The tradition that informs modern conservative thinking is the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian tradition of the southern and western states. The basic theme in this tradition are animus against government at all levels, states' rights, a cult of firearms linked to a supposed right of armed insurrection, and support for a variety of gimmicks like term limits that give the illusion, though not the reality, of popular democracy.
The Republican right, then, does have a venerable and consistent theory of the constitution. It just happens to be the Confederate theory. (UFC, p209.)
And, unfortunately, the Confederate theory has now been extended to cover the entire, de-industrialized, pauperized United States, from coast to coast and border to porous border. We are now a resource colony for the slave-wage, sweatshop, low-tech industry of China - owned by our crony capitalist masters, both Waltons from Arkansas and Paulsons from Wall Street. So, its hardly surprising that the racism angle has "gone nationwide".
3. Wall Street "yankees" become urban "cowboys"
I need to use some "shorthand' here; but I am afraid of inadvertently being accused of CT. I want to use the "yankees vs cowboys" language that was invented by Bill Clinton's Georgetown professor, Carroll Quigley. However, this shorthand was long ago picked up by every CTer in town to talk about various crackpot theories. I just want to use the language to label two factions in American politics: northern industrialists (yankees) and southern/western plantationists (cowboys). Without digging too deeply, I offer an article on the website of former Democratic Congressman Martin Frost as a (hopefully non-controversial) reference [UPDATE: this is way too long. Skip to section 7, refs 148-9 to see about Quigley. Sorry, I was in a hurry.]
First, allow Mr. Lind to make a key distinction about the Southern oligarchy: they are PRE-industrial.
The members of the Anglo-Southern "chivalry"...were not pretentious frauds...They were...a hereditary ruling class with a pre-modern mentality whose power rested in ownership of land and domination of politics and the military....They were usually better at spending money than at making it. They were not bourgeois....The typical Texan oligarch is not a hillbilly who struck oil...but someone who inherited family wealth, which usually originated in land a generation or two back. (MIT p 45-6.)
Once the pre-bourgeois, aristocratic mentality of the Texan/Southern oligarchy is understood, the legendary flamboyance of the Texan rich can be viewed in a new light...The flamboyance of many rich Texans is that of an upper class that feels no guilt about its wealth and privileges. It is that of an aristocrat from a British-American culture that was untouched by bourgeois and Puritan influences...before the mid-Victorian rise in public piety and gentility, British aristocrats had been flamboyant, hard-drinking, whoring, shooting, hunting, dueling, "barbarians" - that is the term that Matthew Arnold used for the British upper classes. (MIT pp 49-50.)
This pre-industrial mentality gave rise to the Southern plantation. The plantation owners fought the industrialists in the Civil War, and they lost. But they won the peace over the next century by repealing Reconstruction, implementing Jim Crow, and accepting the TVA and other Federal largess without compromising their principles - right up until the beginnings of the GOP Southern Strategy in 1968. During that time, the business ethic of the southern oligarchs was nothing but exploitation and extraction. Their products were commodities: cotton and then oil. Their methods were primitive and corrupt.
The mentality of the traditional Texan businessman is that of the premodern "seignurial" elite...It is not an industrial capitalist mind-set at all, but the mentality of the Spanish conquistador, who dreamed of quickly acquiring fabulous wealth by plundering precious metals... (MIT p 47.)
What might be called "Southernomics" is based, like pre-industrial agrarian economics, on extensive development...Growth results from the employment of the same primitive, wasteful techniques...on additional resources...The free-market law of supply and demand, according to which reductions in the supply of land and labor should stimulate an increase in the demand for efficient technology , can be evaded, according to Southernomics, by the addition of more land or the enlargement of the workforce by immigration or the expatriation of industries to new countries. (MIT pp 94-5)
The confusion of capitalism with gambling on the part of the Texan oligarchs...produces titanic bankruptcies and business failures. (Enron, Worldcom)... (MIT p 48.)
The problem facing America today, IMHO, is that the yankees of Wall Street have joined the cowboys of Texas in crony capitalism.
the critique of crony capitalism should not be confused with the familiar critique of the corruption of democratic politics by special interests...Crony capitalism refers to something else: the creation, by politically connected individuals, of a simulacrum of a corporation or a facsimile of an entire business sector...in a regime of crony capitalism, the distinction between the private sector and the public secotr all but disappears...Crony capitalism is the only kind familiar to Southern oligarchs, descendants of planters who could not balance their books and knights who despised mere trade. The lesson of the Enron scandal is not that capitalism is inherently unworkable. It is that capitalism only works where there are capitalists. (MIT pp 104-5)
But, today, Wall Street is just as bent on union-busting, de-industrialization via outsourcing, and phony paper entrepreneurialism as any crooked Texas businessman. Wall Street doesn't invest in industry, because (as Simon Johnson points out) all the profits are in usury. Wall Street has been revealed to be one giant "facsimile of an entire business sector". And, the corporate media played no small part in this sea change in yankee-dom.
As America has been de-industrialized, the entire country has come to resemble the post-bellum South - a decrepit place with little work, little industry, and lots of resentment. As darkness crept over the middle class over the last thirty years, the corporate media promoted the Culture War and its codeword, dog-whistle racism. Now the entire country has been conditioned to have the reflexes of poor whites in the Bourbon Democrat south.
Given that the problem is the new yankee/cowboy oligarchy, the argument about racism that started this diary IS sort of second order. Racism is the tactic; oligarchy and serfdom is the strategy.
4. Components of religion and militarism
Racism is only one leg of the plantationist stool of control. And, while racism could explode into a resurgence of KKK-like vigilanteism if Obama fumbles the economy, the really dangerous weapon still in the hands of the oligarchs is the military. And, especially, the creeping fundamentalist takeover of the military. This month's Harper's has a good article on this, "Jesus Killed Mohammed - The Crusade for a Christian Military". (Unfortunately, its subscribers only.)
Mr. Lind was well aware of this problem, and predicted the result of the Iraq War before it started. It is really sad to see how few people realize how ancient this toxic mixture of tribalism, religion, and militarism is.
The United States is now experiencing something that happened to Britain, France, Germany, and Japan several generations ago, in earlier stages of industrial civilization. In these countries, various landowning military and political castes, threatened with irrelevance and extinction by industrial progress and democracy, managed to retain political power and to enlist the new techniques of science and industry to promote pre-modern goals of plunder and martial glory - all the while enlisting the support of the mass public by appealing to ethnic bigotry and supernatural religion. The industrialists of Manchester paid for the adventures of the British upper class in Africa and Asia and the Middle East. The industrialists of the Rhineland subsidized the less-successful imperialism of the boot-clicking, monocled Prussian Junkers. The industrialists of Imperial Japan created wealth and machines, which the samurai militarists then used in an attempt to create an empire of conquest and slavery in mainland Asia. In exactly the same way, the wealth and the new technologies created by Silicon Valley and other nodes of high-tech capitalism in the United States are being put to imperial uses by a military-political elite of rich Southerners and their allies who think of world politics in pre-modern terms of foreign resource extraction (the hoped-for American conquest of Middle Eastern oil fields) or the exploitation of politically powerless foreign labor (the sweatshop approach to globalization and immigration).
...It remains to be seen (circa 2003) whether the Southern militarists of the Republican Party, by a reckless strategy of imperial over-extension, will accidentally destroy the American empire they are trying to create and suffer the unlamented fate of the British imperial officer corps, the Prussian Junkers, and the Japanese samurai (MIT pp166-7.)
5. Progressives are anti-oligarch and pro-industry
I promised that this lengthy exposition would end in a proposal for progressive strategy. Here it is.
Progressives should position themselves as the anti-oligarchy movement. They should oppose corporate outsourcing oligarchs who destroy middle class jobs. They should also oppose Wall Street crony capitalists who are robbing the savings of the middle class - savings that will never be replaced in the current de-industrialized condition of the country - in order to lock-in the serf status of Americans. Oligarchy is a powerful word, an anti-American word, a word that is already in play. It is a word that smacks of Russian gangsterism (abetted by American crony capitalists).
Since Wall Street has abandoned its traditional role of patient investor in industry and high-tech to join the crony capitalists, progressives should capture the label of "pro-industry" for themselves. This is already being done in the area of Green Tech. It should be extended across the board. Why can't rational conservatives (not teabaggers) see that it is the left which has fought against outsourcing? Of course, being pro-industry eventually involves being pro-union, even if it begins as simply as rescuing the pension funds robbed by the crony capitalists.
Ralph Nader once said there was no difference between Democrats and Republicans. Since it was made, this statement has been used as a club against any progressive criticizing the corporate wing of the Democratic Party. I would put it differently. There is no difference between Texas oligarchs and Wall Street oligarchs. Both of them are bad news for 99% of Americans. If you support the oligarchs, whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, you are working for crony capitalist America, not the American people.
Of course, now is only a time for reflection, not for action. That would be retribution.