The key to understanding the Civil War, which began 150 years ago this week, is to realize that it’s still being fought. Indeed, it’s being fought now more intensely than at any time since the 1960s.
So begins
a fascinating column in today's
Washington Post by Harold Myerson, whose title I have borrowed as my own. I call your attention to it in part because in
this diary yesterday, when I focused on slavery as the cause of the Civil War, some criticized me by saying that it was a difference in economics. Yet slavery was the very basis of the Southern economy. Today we may no longer have chattel slavery, but the differences between the economic approaches of the North and South remain starkly different, starting with the approach towards unions. As as Myerson writes,
As in 1861, we are again divided over whether Southern or Northern labor systems, and Southern or Northern versions of government, shall become the national norm.
Myerson reminds us that unions never took hold in the South, in part because the power structure was able to divide low wage workers by race, pitting one against the other. And, as he reminds us,
In the private-sector economy, the Southern labor system — in which workers are paid less and have fewer rights — has been winning for decades.
In part this has been a result of corporations moving production facilities to the South in order to lower their wage cost - although subsequently, which Myerson does not note directly, some of those same companies began to move facilities further South to Mexico, or to offshore production to Asia, where not only labor costs were lower, but environmental regulations and child labor laws might be non-existent.
Myerson also talks about the impact of Walmart - which is of course totally hostile to unions. It has expanded North. It pays its workers so little they become captive customers, unable to afford to shop anywhere else. They may not, in the words made immortal in a 50s song by Tennessee Ernie Ford, owe their souls to the company store, but they have little other economic choice. And of course Walmart is infamous for how much of what it sells is produced in China (although rising wage costs in the world's most populous nation may force production facilities there to relocate to yet another lower wage nation).
Myerson does talk about China, succinctly, in his discussion of Walmart:
When Americans could no longer be found to make products as cheaply as Wal-Mart wished, the chain turned to China, where labor was cheap and workers had no rights. Not slaves, to be sure, but not really free, either.
Myerson rightly points at the accession of Ronald Reagan to power and the ascendancy of the Republican party as key factors in expanding the Southern model of labor more broadly. If we had any doubt, and not withstanding the phenomenon of the so-called Reagan Democrats - who were often unionized industrial workers who voted against their economic interests because Republicans appealed to them on cultural grounds - Myerson reminds us of the results of Republicans, with their outright hostility to unions, gaining increasing power:
The incomes of American workers, which previously had risen as the economy grew, began to flat-line. Low-wage jobs abounded; mid-wage jobs decreased. Nationally, the South’s low-wage, no-union labor system has prevailed, though in many Northern and Western cities that remain bastions of liberalism, governments have enacted living-wage ordinances and blocked the entry of Wal-Mart into their markets.
Even the current Republican hostility towards infrastructure development, seen first in opposition to the stimulus bill (although many Congressional Republicans after voting against the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act then wanted earmarks and to claim credit for projects in their constituencies) and more recently in "negotiations" over funding the federal government, has its antecedents in the differences between North and South in the mid-19th Century. Northern Whigs (of which Lincoln had been one) were in favor of the development of canals and railroads and wanted a federal commitment, the Southerners did not. Here it is worth noting that one can point at two salutary effects of the Civil War that came about precisely because the South had seceded. The Southern states had had the votes to block certain advances for the American economy. With them no longer participating in the Federal government, the Congress authorized the building of the transcontinental railroad with legislation in 1862 and 1864 that provided federal financing through bonds. Similar, public education was encouraged through passage of the Morrill Land Grant Act in 1862.
There is no doubt that race continues to play a role in the economic disputes between North and South. Myerson reminds us that in the Deep South states of SC, GA, AL, MS and LA there is exactly one White Democrat in the House. Republican opposition to things like the Dream Act are also clearly racially based - after all, the percentage of population that is White is decreasing, and Republicans for better or worse have tied their cart to the horse of racial prejudice. North and South they are attempting to do what Southern aristocrats have always done - keep those at the bottom economically divided by race and culture, lest they come together and destroy the power structure which has enabled the Southern model to continue for a century and half since the outbreak of the Civil War.
I am a union man. I work in a public sector union. Led by Republicans, and not just in the South, we are seeing serious attacks on public sector unions. Do not doubt that if these are successful, attacks on private sector unions will follow. If you think Taft-Hartley is repressive, it would pale in comparison to what some Republicans would want, which would be a total banning of all collective bargaining. Remember that there is historical precedent - the use of the Sherman anti-trust act against unions prior to their being exempted from anti-trust legislation in 1914's Clayton Act - signed into law by a Democratic president. The Southern economic model tilts political power heavily in favor of those already controlling economic power. It discourages organizations in opposition to this coalition of economic and political power. It seeks to divide its potential opponents, and keep them from coming together on common economic grounds by roiling the waters on social grounds, including those of race and unfortunately religion.
Some of this is not exclusive to the South. After all, there were unions in the North that refused to allow Blacks to join. There are Northern Democrats who use race and religion as a means of dividing their opposition. There are also Southerners who have been progressive on matters of race and economics, and here I include especially Lyndon Johnson and to a lesser degree Bill Clinton.
In my piece yesterday I referenced the work of the great Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal and his magnificent work on race in America, An American Dilemma. We still have problems with race in this nation, and there is no doubt that having a Black man as President has brought this to something of a boil. Ironically, as Myerson notes, Republicans who view Obama as a socialist are as wrong as the Southerners who in 1861 viewed Lincoln as an abolitionist. Here I think of words of the 16th President not carved on the wall of his Memorial, because they are not from a famous speech. In 1862 Lincoln had an exchange of words with Horace Greeley (which you can read here). I want to quote from Lincoln's response to Greeley:
If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I don't believe it would help to save the Union.
Lincoln was dedicated to saving the Union. That outweighed any individual views he had on the rightness or wrongness of chattel slavery.
I do not propose to posit something parallel from Obama. Quite frankly, I am not sure of his core beliefs at this point.
I do, with Myerson, see parallels between the 1860s and our time. At the outbreak of the Civil War, there is no doubt that there were severe differences in the economic approaches of the South and the North. But one should never forget that the Southern economy was premised upon a labor system dependent upon slavery.
Today we may no longer officially have slavery. But there are parallels.
Looking at among other things the Ryan plan for the budget - with what he notes is a callous disregard for the minority poor, Myerson concludes his piece by writing that
today’s Republican right betrays a mind-set that hearkens back to the secessionists who fired on Fort Sumter. Shutting down the government isn’t comparable to shooting it down, of course, but the South’s war on egalitarian government and labor standards threatens again to diminish our country.
I find myself very much in agreement with this framing. Which is why I am pro-union. Which is why I am a liberal and a progressive. Which is why I believe in free public education (and don't forget the Morrill Land Grant Act). Which is why I support federal funding of infrastructure. Which is why, despite too little real leadership from many of its supposed leaders, I still associate myself with the Democratic party.
This morning I read the Myerson piece. I decided it was worth sharing. I wanted to add a few thoughts of my own.
Now, as part of my commitment, I will get dressed, and head to my employment, as a unionized teacher in a public school.
That's a start.
So was writing this blog post.
Peace?