The idea has been slowly coalescing in my mind that there is a way of thinking in this country -- one that I do not share -- that guides a lot of political attitudes, particularly among conservatives. This will almost of necessity be an arrogant, patronizing diary, but I hope that readers will resist seizing upon that and instead consider whether or not the underlying thinking adds predictive accuracy to how and why people hold particular political views in America.
Anyway, having made up the term "Slavery Mindset," let me define it:
Slavery Mindset is the attitude that the interests of certain classes of people are correctly subservient to the interests of other classes of people.
First of all, let me state that my moral thinking starts with Kant's Categorical Imperative, or the dictate that one should "act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law." The simplified version of this is, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," which is sometimes stated negatively ("Do not do ...").
Anyway, I think the Categorical Imperative requires some clarification: can we craft our "universal laws" in ways that distinguish between types of agents? Can we begin our laws with, "If you are a human being, then ..., but if you are a sheep, then ...?" Or, more to the point, "If you are white-skinned, then ..., but if you are black-skinned then ...?"
The clarification I make is that generally, no, you cannot make such distinctions. You can presume no moral authority, and your laws can presume no moral authority, over agents that you distinguish from yourself. So if you do not accord sheep the same protections under your "universal law" as you do human beings (presumably including yourself), then you cannot deem any action by sheep to be immoral.
Among human groups, this essentially would require defining different groups as being adversarial or at least discordant with your own: if Nazi Germans don't extend the rights and dignities that they demand for Germans to Jews, then they should implicitly accept that there is no moral reason that Jews should not be their enemies.
So far I've been using race, one way or another, as my distinction line, but I don't think this is the only one. I think now it is more common to think of types of people as being more or less deserving of moral consideration: "productive" people, for example, possibly as measured by wealth (although how this segues into opposition to estate tax gets a little muddy ...).
Getting back to "Slavery Mindset," though, I think "Slavery Mindset" completely rejects this sort of moratorium on these sorts of distinctions. When our country was openly slave-holding, I don't think there was much notion that maybe slave-owners should not presume to dictate what was and was not moral behavior for their slaves: the slave who resisted his proper place in society was in the wrong, pure and simple.
We are no longer openly slave-holding, of course. But as a matter of history, slavery was not ended by appeals to morality and logic; it was ended by war. And this is probably important: "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still."
So we had a ubiquitous "peculiar institution" in this country of overwhelming economic importance, with millions of people not just accepting it but living it, and it was only ever abandoned by force: how dead can the mindset behind it be, even 140 years later?
And if it does persist, what does it mean today?
An important aspect of American slavery was that there were not that many slaveholders. Even in the South, I think slaveholders were a relatively small minority, but non-slaveholder whites still overwhelmingly bought into the mindset, presumably with a "Joe the Plumber"-type notion that even if they didn't belong to the club, they at least benefited from not being categorically excluded from membership ... unlike so many others. And this attitude I think describes most economic "conservatives'" reason for holding their views today: if it were only the people who directly benefited from low tax rates on the rich that supported them, there would not be low tax rates on the rich.
But I think the attitude, which I have found in my poking around just now was very well articulated by pro-slavery Senator John Henry Hammond in 1858, that it is necessary to sacrifice the interests of one class of humanity in order to achieve "progress, civilization, and refinement" underlies a lot of conservative thinking. The moral appeal for universal health care finds no purchase with conservatives, for example, because they accept that those who should be cared for when ill will have the means to provide it for themselves, and those who do not have the means are in essence chattel for whom society should not bear the expense of repair once they are no longer useful.