By Marc Jampole
In rereading Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution recently, I ran
across an interesting description of the contrast in the society and economy between
pre-Civil War North and South. Foner references the important insight of
another historian, James L. Acorn, that slavery had sharply curtailed the scope
of public authority in the pre-Civil War South because it produced a society of
“patriarchal groupings” in which large numbers of people—all of African
descent—remained under the authority of the private sector—their owners—and not
subject to the government. “With
planters enjoying a disproportionate share of political power, taxes and social
welfare expenditures remained low,” as did spending on public education. Paved roads, water systems, public hospitals—all
were nonexistent or much less developed than in the North before the Civil War.
Small government. Low taxes on the wealthy. Little public
spending on education, infrastructure or health care. Little regulation of the
economy, including none of the relationship between owners and workers. These aspects
of the pre-Civil War South have come to define red state politics, which in
recent years has been called Tea Party politics. In fact, the core of red state America lies
in the 11 slave-holding states that tried to secede from the United States in 1861.
Many on the left have described the Tea Party and the rest
of the right wing as inherently racist, pointing to the racial code words and
phrases used by Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Michelle
Bachman, Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum and practically every other politician
with Republican and Tea Party ties. Progressives also note the disparate impact
on minorities of low taxes on the wealthy, privatization and the current
shredding of the social net.
The right denies a racist intent or tinge to the policies it
supports, but let’s take a look at history.
The ideas and words of the current right are very similar to what
southerners said before and during the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era.
The differences between red and blue state economic, political and social
beliefs today largely mirror the differences between the South and North before
the Civil War: Small versus large
government. Low versus high taxes. Lots of social services versus very few. All
these differences developed primarily because the South had large slave-owning
plantations and the North relied on free, wage-earning labor.
In other words, while the right can make their weak protests
that their views are not racially based, history demonstrates that the primary
reason why these views developed in these particular parts of the United States
was that the economy was based on slavery. And slavery in the United States was
always intimately tied to racism.
Slave-owners and their defenders believed those of African descent were
inherently lesser beings than whites by virtue of their skin color and
origin. Slave owners justified their
cruelty towards slaves—the whippings, the suppression of education, the rapes,
the splitting of families—by racist arguments that Africans were an inferior
breed. Slave owners asserted that
Africans liked their fate and would be lost in the real world without the
guiding hand of their owners. All racist beliefs and all justifications for the
southern economic and political system.
Apologists like George Will may reference Edmund Burke,
Montesquieu and the so-called conservative nature of agrarian politics and
rural values all they like. That won’t change the fact that the economy and
society that developed today’s right-wing ideology was racist. Racism was the rational engine that fueled
the pre-Civil War South, and it still fuels the ideology associated with its
reincarnation into red states.
In many ways, we still have a civil war in the United
States.
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