In 1860, the free population of the South and Border States was around 8 million, of which 0.5% would have been considered “planters”. The rest were trapped in a permanent class structure that was dependent on the planters. There also were 4 million slaves. “Let the North free them,” the half-percent told the rest, “and you’ll lose not only your jobs but what small social elevation you have.”
There also was a deeper fear. Southerners knew the history of slave uprisings. Given the savagery of Southern slavery, even non-slaveholders would have expected retribution. Parts of the South lived in terror as it was, resembling armed camps.
Against this background, politicians steeped Southern society in an ethos of “us against them.” They were bellicose and strident, and no alternative view was available. The clergy did its part, preaching that God had ordained slavery and that the Bible endorsed it. As Gordon Rhea put it, “Religious messages from pulpit and from a growing religious press accounted in large part for the extreme, uncompromising, ideological atmosphere of the time.”
Poor whites had nothing to gain from a confederate victory, but they had everything to lose from a confederate defeat. From the safety of today, we see their self-interest in terms of absolutes. They saw it the only way they could have seen it: as the reality of their position, with no leeway for moral shadings.
That is a much harder case to make for today’s white, working class. There are, though, similarities.
Upward mobility, particularly in the South, has been static for forty years. Being born to wealth, poverty, or somewhere between is becoming destiny, and the moneyed aristocracy likes it that way. They pay to suppress workers and to destroy unions, a working man’s best hope for advancement. The best hope for the advancement of everyone, public education, also is under attack. And all the while a Republican Supreme Court has been redistributing rights from people to corporations. We are on our way to the type of permanent, under-class structure that marked the antebellum South.
The result is a growing dependence on the moneyed aristocracy, and that will mean the same for us as it did for poor Southerners. It will mean the same as it did for labor before unions. It will mean that anyone, anytime, at the whim of anyone above them, can lose what little they have been allowed to have.
Vulnerability breeds fear, fear invites “us against them” manipulation, and that manipulation has molded the siege mentality and the pretense of victim-hood that is a trademark of the extreme right. And it need not be racial. During the labor actions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, “us-against-them” metastasized to turn public fear against unions. The Red Scare and the “rugged individual,” that phantom hero of lore, were part of that. “Us against them” is a versatile tool: race, religion, nationality, philosophy, economic-stratum all work and, today, all are used. Further, while the list of “others” has expanded, the threats attributed to them are the same as those of 150 years ago: they’ll take your jobs; they’ll take your society; you’ll die at their hands.
That leaves God’s blessing. Christianity has a harder time justifying a plutocracy than it did a slave-holding aristocracy. The Bible at least alludes to the acceptability of slavery. To get around that stuff about the rich getting into heaven, about selling your stuff and giving to the poor, about the meek and the least of these my brethren, today’s clergy have had to focus on social behaviors that a backward, Iron-Age tribe considered worthy of stoning. In this country, there must be a stunning number of evangelical Christians who practice Christianity as if the New Testament never had been written, because it worked. The switch also allows aspiring plutocrats to show sometimes real and sometimes specious solidarity with evangelicals on issues for which no one else would.
In both cases, then, an oligarchy comes to own a population, whether by forcing them onto the worst land for sharecropping or by right-to-work laws. They then leverage the resultant dependency to own that population emotionally, whether by claims that Northern abolitionists or tax-and-spend liberals are out to take what little the people have. This also is misdirection to keep the people from acting on the fact that the oligarchy is why they have so little. Finally, the high priests give it a moral underpinning.
The parallels between the two cases are real and compelling. However, one difference offers hope.
Those poor Southern boys saw their best interest as accurately as they were able in their time and place. But today’s working-class whites have experienced nothing like the insecurity, nothing like the isolation, nothing like the desperation and the looming societal disruption that defined the old South. (And they have experienced none of that mainly because of the safety-net programs they hate). Today’s working-class families have access to education and to numerous media by which to broaden their world view. They are dependent on their aristocracy to a far lesser extent than were poor Southerners on theirs. By whatever method the white working-class has come to perceive its self-interest, it was not by the forced acceptance of a tragic reality, as it was with antebellum Southerners. So why do they behave as if it were?
We evolved in tribes: small, competing bands of hominids some of which became small competing bands of Cro-Magnons. But those ancient hominids still haunt us. When threats arise, we impulsively retreat upon the tribe. Unfortunately, the tribes are defined by those same ancient impulses. Were we a better adapted species, tribal associations would be set by our frontal lobes. We just are not that far along, and that makes us vulnerable to the worst among us, to the practitioners of tribal politics.
This is conjecture. What is fact is that a large number of working-class whites have decided that their natural allies are rich, powerful whites. Tribal or not, this is a delusion. We can’t rid ourselves of “us against them,” but we may be able to redefine tribes, at least a little.
The first and critical step is to put ourselves in a position to redefine tribes. We have to reverse the Democratic Party’s abandonment of its heart and soul. That abandonment is laid out in Thomas Frank’s 2004 book, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”
“The Democratic Leadership Council, the organization that produced such figures as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman and Terry McAuliffe, has long been pushing the party to forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues. The larger interests that the DLC wants desperately to court are corporations, capable of generating campaign contributions far outweighing anything raised by organized labor.”
Robert Reich detailed how far the Democratic establishment has moved to the right in pursuit of what Frank warned us was its goal. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both were complicit, according to Reich.
They pushed free trade but did nothing for the “millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs.”
They failed to press for a right to unionize with up-or-down votes and to impose real penalties on companies, despite campaign promises.
They allowed corporations to grow larger and industries to concentrate.
Obama protected Wall Street during the Great Recession but “let millions of underwater homeowners drown.”
Reich points out that Democrats now are dependent on their deal with the devil (recall the first step in any oligarch’s plan). The way out? The Democratic Party must walk away from its “financial dependence on big corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy.”
That means re-embracing and rebuilding unions. That is a strategic imperative and a moral one. But the current tribal alignments were created by and are perpetuated by emotional appeals: Old Testament morality, rugged individualism, and race – “us against them” all. Emotional appeals are not easy to reverse.
Fortunately, words of hope have come out of Bernie Sanders’ speech at Liberty University, Jerry Falwell’s monument to higher non-enlightenment. Sanders’ speech laid out the progressive counter to evangelical fundamentalism: however much Jesus values your vigilance at keeping homosexuals from marrying, it may not be enough to overcome his disappointment at your unfaltering opposition to a safety net for the poor that are all around you. Sanders’ words are more diplomatic, of course. He even drew applause from his evangelical audience when he summed up progressivism: “Money and wealth should serve the people. The people should not have to serve money and wealth.”
Democrats need to follow his lead, to reach out, to make the argument. We need to offer that alternative narrative that poor Southerners never heard in 1860. Remind evangelicals of their own canon, invite them to prioritize the teachings of their own Christ, and show them that progressives are far closer than are Republicans to sharing the goals implicit in their Christ’s teachings.
The same applies to “rugged individualism,” the political red-herring that differs, sometimes subtly but always substantively, from the philosophic forms of individualism. It bears a closer resemblance to that bastardization of science called “Social Darwinism”. “Rugged individualism” once might have been descriptive of early plains farmers and mountain men. Today, it is best associated with old Marlboro Man commercials. Today, its most ardent proponent is remembered by the shanti towns that bore his name: Hoovervilles. Today, it is code for envy, spite, resentment, jealousy, and racial hatred. So strongly felt are these emotions that working-class whites willingly subjugate human rights – freedom of speech, freedom of assembly – to property rights. Meanwhile, those who are most anxious to prevent workers from coming together for their betterment are fine with corporate syndicates, from the Chamber of Commerce to ALEC.
Here, again, there may be opportunity. Donald Trump’s appeal, in large part, is to white, blue-collar voters who are starting to figure out that the real “takers” are not those below them but those above. We have to seize this opportunity. Reach out to the white working-class (this might be even harder than with evangelicals since it means breaching the Fox bubble – the one sense in which today’s white working-class is as isolated as antebellum Southerners). Show them that unions are “our” best hope for creating better lives. Convince them that the working classes of any color are their natural allies and not rich, powerful whites. Convince them that we share their goal of a better life while Republicans offer only lip service with the exact opposite in mind.
The Democratic debate in Milwaukee was heartening. Bernie Sanders talked of the need to appeal not only to blue-color workers but to all those, the poor, the young, and the disillusioned, who have walked away from the process. Hillary Clinton gave a stirring call to support unions and made a progressive proposal to help those who are hurting because of an economy that is evolving and suffering upheavals. (Given that she was present when the Wall-Street wing ripped the beating heart out of our Party, this is a welcome development. It might not have happened without Bernie Sanders’ challenge, but it has happened.)
It comes not a moment too soon. Most of us have always known that Supreme Court nominations gave this election a special urgency. Now, everyone knows it. But there are other sources of urgency, and they add up to a frightening sum: Republican gerrymandering, a forced decline in union membership, a forced use of mandatory arbitration, decades of hate-based, fear-inspiring Republican rhetoric, enough dark money to choke the world’s horses, and Republican efforts to suppress the vote (the most un-American, anti-democratic act imaginable, and being perpetrated without even a passingly plausible excuse).
This will require a sustained, political ground game. Democrats have to come together and start now, in this election. Republicans have learned how to steal power if they cannot win it and how to keep it by extra-legal means if necessary. Wait, and we might have no choice but to see our best interest with the same brutal realism as did antebellum Southerners.
Democrats must reject Wall Street now, return to their base now, come together now, no matter who wins the primary, and reach out now, urgently and insistently. Otherwise, Republicans will continue to laugh as working-class whites denounce “socialism” when the real threat to them is unrestrained, predatory capitalism. Republicans will continue to laugh as working-class whites spout epithets against government regulation when such oversight is their only protection against exploitation. Republicans will continue to laugh as the Slave Power must have laughed when poor, white boys took canister and Minie balls for it.
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