How a Brutal Strain of American Aristocrats Rule

[yathrib]

AlterNet
Conservative Southern Values Revived: How a Brutal Strain of American Aristocrats Have Come to Rule America
By Sara Robinson, AlterNet
Posted on June 28, 2012, Printed on June 29, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/156071/co ... le_america

It's been said that the rich are different than you and me. What most Americans don't know is that they're also quite different from each other, and that which faction is currently running the show ultimately makes a vast difference in the kind of country we are.

Right now, a lot of our problems stem directly from the fact that the wrong sort has finally gotten the upper hand; a particularly brutal and anti-democratic strain of American aristocrat that the other elites have mostly managed to keep away from the levers of power since the Revolution. Worse: this bunch has set a very ugly tone that's corrupted how people with power and money behave in every corner of our culture. Here's what happened, and how it happened, and what it means for America now.

North versus South: Two Definitions of Liberty

Michael Lind first called out the existence of this conflict in his 2006 book, Made In Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics. He argued that much of American history has been characterized by a struggle between two historical factions among the American elite -- and that the election of George W. Bush was a definitive sign that the wrong side was winning.

For most of our history, American economics, culture and politics have been dominated by a New England-based Yankee aristocracy that was rooted in Puritan communitarian values, educated at the Ivies and marinated in an ethic of noblesse oblige (the conviction that those who possess wealth and power are morally bound to use it for the betterment of society). While they've done their share of damage to the notion of democracy in the name of profit (as all financial elites inevitably do), this group has, for the most part, tempered its predatory instincts with a code that valued mass education and human rights; held up public service as both a duty and an honor; and imbued them with the belief that once you made your nut, you had a moral duty to do something positive with it for the betterment of mankind. Your own legacy depended on this.

Among the presidents, this strain gave us both Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy, and Poppy Bush -- nerdy, wonky intellectuals who, for all their faults, at least took the business of good government seriously. Among financial elites, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet still both partake strongly of this traditional view of wealth as power to be used for good. Even if we don't like their specific choices, the core impulse to improve the world is a good one -- and one that's been conspicuously absent in other aristocratic cultures.

Which brings us to that other great historical American nobility -- the plantation aristocracy of the lowland South, which has been notable throughout its 400-year history for its utter lack of civic interest, its hostility to the very ideas of democracy and human rights, its love of hierarchy, its fear of technology and progress, its reliance on brutality and violence to maintain “order,” and its outright celebration of inequality as an order divinely ordained by God.

As described by Colin Woodard in American Nations: The Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, the elites of the Deep South are descended mainly from the owners of sugar, rum and cotton plantations from Barbados -- the younger sons of the British nobility who'd farmed up the Caribbean islands, and then came ashore to the southern coasts seeking more land. Woodward described the culture they created in the crescent stretching from Charleston, SC around to New Orleans this way:

It was a near-carbon copy of the West Indian slave state these Barbadians had left behind, a place notorious even then for its inhumanity....From the outset, Deep Southern culture was based on radical disparities in wealth and power, with a tiny elite commanding total obedience and enforcing it with state-sponsored terror. Its expansionist ambitions would put it on a collision course with its Yankee rivals, triggering military, social, and political conflicts that continue to plague the United States to this day.

David Hackett Fischer, whose Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways In America informs both Lind's and Woodard's work, described just how deeply undemocratic the Southern aristocracy was, and still is. He documents how these elites have always feared and opposed universal literacy, public schools and libraries, and a free press. (Lind adds that they have historically been profoundly anti-technology as well, far preferring solutions that involve finding more serfs and throwing them at a problem whenever possible. Why buy a bulldozer when 150 convicts on a chain gang can grade your road instead?) Unlike the Puritan elites, who wore their wealth modestly and dedicated themselves to the common good, Southern elites sank their money into ostentatious homes and clothing and the pursuit of pleasure -- including lavish parties, games of fortune, predatory sexual conquests, and blood sports involving ritualized animal abuse spectacles.

But perhaps the most destructive piece of the Southern elites' worldview is the extremely anti-democratic way it defined the very idea of liberty. In Yankee Puritan culture, both liberty and authority resided mostly with the community, and not so much with individuals. Communities had both the freedom and the duty to govern themselves as they wished (through town meetings and so on), to invest in their collective good, and to favor or punish individuals whose behavior enhanced or threatened the whole (historically, through community rewards such as elevation to positions of public authority and trust; or community punishments like shaming, shunning or banishing).

Individuals were expected to balance their personal needs and desires against the greater good of the collective -- and, occasionally, to make sacrifices for the betterment of everyone. (This is why the Puritan wealthy tended to dutifully pay their taxes, tithe in their churches and donate generously to create hospitals, parks and universities.) In return, the community had a solemn and inescapable moral duty to care for its sick, educate its young and provide for its needy -- the kind of support that maximizes each person's liberty to live in dignity and achieve his or her potential. A Yankee community that failed to provide such support brought shame upon itself. To this day, our progressive politics are deeply informed by this Puritan view of ordered liberty.

In the old South, on the other hand, the degree of liberty you enjoyed was a direct function of your God-given place in the social hierarchy. The higher your status, the more authority you had, and the more "liberty" you could exercise -- which meant, in practical terms, that you had the right to take more "liberties" with the lives, rights and property of other people. Like an English lord unfettered from the Magna Carta, nobody had the authority to tell a Southern gentleman what to do with resources under his control. In this model, that's what liberty is. If you don't have the freedom to rape, beat, torture, kill, enslave, or exploit your underlings (including your wife and children) with impunity -- or abuse the land, or enforce rules on others that you will never have to answer to yourself -- then you can't really call yourself a free man.

When a Southern conservative talks about "losing his liberty," the loss of this absolute domination over the people and property under his control -- and, worse, the loss of status and the resulting risk of being held accountable for laws that he was once exempt from -- is what he's really talking about. In this view, freedom is a zero-sum game. Anything that gives more freedom and rights to lower-status people can't help but put serious limits on the freedom of the upper classes to use those people as they please. It cannot be any other way. So they find Yankee-style rights expansions absolutely intolerable, to the point where they're willing to fight and die to preserve their divine right to rule.

Once we understand the two different definitions of "liberty" at work here, a lot of other things suddenly make much more sense. We can understand the traditional Southern antipathy to education, progress, public investment, unionization, equal opportunity, and civil rights. The fervent belief among these elites that they should completely escape any legal or social accountability for any harm they cause. Their obsessive attention to where they fall in the status hierarchies. And, most of all -- the unremitting and unapologetic brutality with which they've defended these "liberties" across the length of their history.

When Southerners quote Patrick Henry -- "Give me liberty or give me death" -- what they're really demanding is the unquestioned, unrestrained right to turn their fellow citizens into supplicants and subjects. The Yankee elites have always known this -- and feared what would happen if that kind of aristocracy took control of the country. And that tension between these two very different views of what it means to be "elite" has inflected our history for over 400 years.

The Battle Between the Elites

Since shortly after the Revolution, the Yankee elites have worked hard to keep the upper hand on America's culture, economy and politics -- and much of our success as a nation rests on their success at keeping plantation culture sequestered in the South, and its scions largely away from the levers of power. If we have to have an elite -- and there's never been a society as complex as ours that didn't have some kind of upper class maintaining social order -- we're far better off in the hands of one that's essentially meritocratic, civic-minded and generally believes that it will do better when everybody else does better, too.

The Civil War was, at its core, a military battle between these two elites for the soul of the country. It pitted the more communalist, democratic and industrialized Northern vision of the American future against the hierarchical, aristocratic, agrarian Southern one. Though the Union won the war, the fundamental conflict at its root still hasn't been resolved to this day. (The current conservative culture war is the Civil War still being re-fought by other means.) After the war, the rise of Northern industrialists and the dominance of Northern universities and media ensured that subsequent generations of the American power elite continued to subscribe to the Northern worldview -- even when the individual leaders came from other parts of the country.

Ironically, though: it was that old Yankee commitment to national betterment that ultimately gave the Southern aristocracy its big chance to break out and go national. According to Lind, it was easy for the Northeast to hold onto cultural, political and economic power as long as all the country's major banks, businesses, universities, and industries were headquartered there. But the New Deal -- and, especially, the post-war interstate highways, dams, power grids, and other infrastructure investments that gave rise to the Sun Belt -- fatally loosened the Yankees' stranglehold on national power. The gleaming new cities of the South and West shifted the American population centers westward, unleashing new political and economic forces with real power to challenge the Yankee consensus. And because a vast number of these westward migrants came out of the South, the elites that rose along with these cities tended to hew to the old Southern code, and either tacitly or openly resist the moral imperatives of the Yankee canon. The soaring postwar fortunes of cities like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta fed that ancient Barbadian slaveholder model of power with plenty of room and resources to launch a fresh and unexpected 20th-century revival.

According to historian Darren Dochuk, the author of From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism, these post-war Southerners and Westerners drew their power from the new wealth provided by the defense, energy, real estate, and other economic booms in their regions. They also had a profound evangelical conviction, brought with them out of the South, that God wanted them to take America back from the Yankee liberals -- a conviction that expressed itself simultaneously in both the formation of the vast post-war evangelical churches (which were major disseminators of Southern culture around the country); and in their takeover of the GOP, starting with Barry Goldwater's campaign in 1964 and culminating with Ronald Reagan's election in 1980.

They countered Yankee hegemony by building their own universities, grooming their own leaders and creating their own media. By the 1990s, they were staging the RINO hunts that drove the last Republican moderates (almost all of them Yankees, by either geography or cultural background) and the meritocratic order they represented to total extinction within the GOP. A decade later, the Tea Party became the voice of the unleashed id of the old Southern order, bringing it forward into the 21st century with its full measure of selfishness, racism, superstition, and brutality intact.

Plantation America

From its origins in the fever swamps of the lowland south, the worldview of the old Southern aristocracy can now be found nationwide. Buttressed by the arguments of Ayn Rand -- who updated the ancient slaveholder ethic for the modern age -- it has been exported to every corner of the culture, infected most of our other elite communities and killed off all but the very last vestiges of noblesse oblige.

It's not an overstatement to say that we're now living in Plantation America. As Lind points out: to the horror of his Yankee father, George W. Bush proceeded to run the country exactly like Woodard's description of a Barbadian slavelord. And Barack Obama has done almost nothing to roll this victory back. We're now living in an America where rampant inequality is accepted, and even celebrated.

Torture and extrajudicial killing have been reinstated, with no due process required.

The wealthy and powerful are free to abuse employees, break laws, destroy the commons, and crash the economy -- without ever being held to account.

The rich flaunt their ostentatious wealth without even the pretense of humility, modesty, generosity, or gratitude.

The military -- always a Southern-dominated institution -- sucks down 60% of our federal discretionary spending, and is undergoing a rapid evangelical takeover as well.

Our police are being given paramilitary training and powers that are completely out of line with their duty to serve and protect, but much more in keeping with a mission to subdue and suppress. Even liberal cities like Seattle are now home to the kind of local justice that used to be the hallmark of small-town Alabama sheriffs.

Segregation is increasing everywhere. The rights of women and people of color are under assault. Violence against leaders who agitate for progressive change is up. Racist organizations are undergoing a renaissance nationwide.

We are withdrawing government investments in public education, libraries, infrastructure, health care, and technological innovation -- in many areas, to the point where we are falling behind the standards that prevail in every other developed country.

Elites who dare to argue for increased investment in the common good, and believe that we should lay the groundwork for a better future, are regarded as not just silly and soft-headed, but also inviting underclass revolt. The Yankees thought that government's job was to better the lot of the lower classes. The Southern aristocrats know that its real purpose is to deprive them of all possible means of rising up against their betters.

The rich are different now because the elites who spent four centuries sucking the South dry and turning it into an economic and political backwater have now vanquished the more forward-thinking, democratic Northern elites. Their attitudes towards freedom, authority, community, government, and the social contract aren't just confined to the country clubs of the Gulf Coast; they can now be found on the ground from Hollywood and Silicon Valley to Wall Street. And because of that quiet coup, the entire US is now turning into the global equivalent of a Deep South state.

As long as America runs according to the rules of Southern politics, economics and culture, we're no longer free citizens exercising our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as we've always understood them. Instead, we're being treated like serfs on Massa's plantation -- and increasingly, we're being granted our liberties only at Massa's pleasure. Welcome to Plantation America.

Sara Robinson, MS, APF is a social futurist and the editor of AlterNet's Vision page. Follow her on Twitter, or subscribe to AlterNet's Vision newsletter for weekly updates.
© 2012 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/156071/

[seemslikeadream]

The Righteous Road to Ruin

Posted on Jun 28, 2012

By Chris Hedges

“The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion”
A book by Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion” trumpets yet another grand theory of evolution, this time in the form of evolutionary psychology, which purports to unravel the mystery of moral behavior. Such theories, whether in the form of dialectical materialism, Social Darwinism, biblical inherency or its more bizarre subsets of phrenology or eugenics, never hold up against the vast complexity of history, the inner workings of economic and political systems, and the intricacies of the human psyche. But simplicity has a strong appeal for those who seek order in the chaos of existence.

Haidt, although he has a refreshing disdain for the Enlightenment dream of a rational world, fares no better than other systematizers before him. He too repeatedly departs from legitimate science, including social science, into the simplification and corruption of science and scientific terms to promote a unified theory of human behavior that has no empirical basis. He is stunningly naive about power, especially corporate power, and often exhibits a disturbing indifference to the weak and oppressed. He is, in short, a Social Darwinian in analyst’s clothing. Haidt ignores the wisdom of all the great moral and religious writings on the ethical life, from the biblical prophets to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, to the Sermon on the Mount, to the Quran and the Bhagavad Gita, which understand that moral behavior is determined by our treatment of the weakest and most vulnerable among us. It is easy to be decent to your peers and those within your tribe. It is difficult to be decent to the oppressed and those who are branded as the enemy.

Haidt, who is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, is an heir of Herbert Spencer, who coined the term “survival of the fittest” and who also attempted to use evolution to explain human behavior, sociology, politics and ethics. Haidt, like Spencer, is dismissive of those he refers to as “slackers,” “leeches,” “free riders,” “cheaters” or “anyone else who ‘drinks the water’ rather than carries it for the group.” They are parasites who should be denied social assistance in the name of fair play. The failure of liberals, Haidt writes, to embrace this elemental form of justice, which he says we are hard-wired to adopt, leaves them despised by those who are more advanced as moral human beings. He chastises liberals, whom he sees as morally underdeveloped, for going “beyond the equality of rights to pursue equality of outcomes, which cannot be obtained in a capitalist system.”

To see long excerpts from “The Righteous Mind” at Google Books, click here.

“People should reap what they sow,” he writes. “People who work hard should get to keep the fruits of their labor. People who are lazy and irresponsible should suffer the consequences.”

Haidt lists six primary concerns of those he considers morally whole—care, liberty, fairness, loyalty, authority and sanctity. He believes liberals, because they do not sufficiently value fairness, loyalty, authority and sanctity, are morally deficient. The attributes he champions, however, when practiced among social conservatives, often mask a rapacious cruelty to the weak and oppressed. Slaveholders in the antebellum South, courteous and chivalrous to their own class, church going, fiercely loyal to the Confederacy, in short morally whole in Haidt’s thesis, created a hell on earth for African-Americans. One could say the same about many German Nazis and members of most cults. Haidt, although he acknowledges this dilemma in his moral constructions, would do well to ask himself whether there is something deeply flawed in a model of moral behavior that a slaveholder, a member of a cult or a fascist could attain.

He concedes that “even though many conservatives opposed some of the great liberations of the twentieth century—of women, sweatshop workers, African Americans, and gay people—they have applauded others, such as the liberation of Eastern Europe from communist oppression.”

This is a remarkable passage. It apologizes for bigotry and repression by social conservatives at home because these conservatives had an abstract enthusiasm for liberation movements 3,000 miles away in countries most of them had never visited. Not that liberals are immune from this specious morality. They can shed tears over Darfur and never mention the carnage in Iraq. The definition of the moral life, as the Bible points out, is how we treat our neighbor, not our concern with moral abstractions or the sanctity of our tribe. Charles Dickens got this in “Bleak House” with his great parody of the liberal crusader Mrs. Jellyby, who ignores the welfare of her children for her causes in Africa.

Haidt holds up what he believes are military virtues, writing that “in a real army, which sacralizes honor, loyalty, and country, the coward is not the most likely to make it home and father children. He’s more likely to get beaten up, left behind, or shot in the back for committing sacrilege. And if he does make it home alive, his reputation will repel women and potential employers.”

One can write such a passage only if he has never been on a battlefield. Those who are most detested in combat are the “heroes,” whose pathological love of glory and violence get other soldiers or Marines killed. The upper echelons of the military are top heavy with self-serving careerists and cowards who gleefully send out their troops in an effort to burnish their unit’s combat record and get promoted, while they remain safely in the rear or a fortified compound. Many combat veterans, from Erich Maria Remarque to James Jones to Anthony Swofford, have recounted how this works. It is estimated that as much as 25 percent of the junior officer class in Vietnam was fragged or killed by its own troops. War is not a John Wayne movie. Carrying out violence is a dirty, venal and horrible job. And the tragedy of post-traumatic stress disorder is that, however much Haidt might want to label someone who has spent a lot of time in combat as a hero, it becomes very hard and sometimes impossible for that “hero” to feel love again. Haidt mistakes the myth of war for war.

His transformation from a liberal to a conservative, he writes, took place on 9/11 when “the attacks turned me into a team player, with a powerful and unexpected urge to display my team’s flag and then do things to support the team, such as giving blood, donating money, and yes, supporting the leader.” In short, Haidt became a lover of conservatism and nationalism when he became afraid. He embraced an irrational, not to mention illegal, pre-emptive war against a country, Iraq, that had nothing to do with 9/11. And if there was ever a case for reason to conquer fear and the emotionalism of the crowd, the Iraq War was it. But Haidt, rather than acknowledge that fear had turned him into a member of an unthinking, frightened herd, holds this experience up as a form of enlightenment.

Haidt repeatedly reduces social, historical, moral and political complexities to easily digestible clichés. He argues that the human mind is divided, “like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning—the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes—the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior.” This peculiar metaphor, which in short posits that reason is in the service of intuition or passion, dominates his thesis.

Haidt like E.O. Wilson, whom Haidt calls “a prophet of moral psychology,” believes that evolution has constructed us to be selfish. We rationalize selfish behavior, he writes, as moral. He asks whether moral reasoning wasn’t “shaped, tuned, and crafted to help us pursue socially strategic goals, such as guarding our reputations and convincing other people to support us, or our team, in disputes?” The moral glue that holds us together, Haidt writes, is concern for our reputations. But in a world like Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia the primacy of reputation means, at best, silence and often complicity with repression and murder. Those who make moral choices, who defy the crowd, even in open societies, are always outcasts. Their reputations are shredded by those in power. They find their worth in an unheralded and unrewarded virtue. And they grasp that the collective emotions of the crowd are the enemy of moral choice.

In a very revealing anecdote—which he titles “How I became a pluralist”—Haidt writes of his three months in the Indian city of Bhubaneswar. He has servants. He visits the homes of male colleagues and is waited on by their wives. He writes that “rather than automatically rejecting the men as sexist oppressors and pitying the women, children, and servants as helpless victims, I began to see a moral world in which families, not individuals, are the basic unit of society, and the members of each extended family (including its servants) are intensely interdependent.”

His embrace of rigid social hierarchy and oppression, which makes him sound like the apologists for racial segregation, is a window into the entire book. He does not speak Oriya, the local language, and so is dependent on an educated, wealthy elite. He, by the standards of India, is rich. He makes no effort to explore the lives of the underclass. He celebrates what he calls “a moral code that emphasizes duty, respect for one’s elders, service to the group, and negation of the self’s desires.”

If there is karma—a concept Haidt mistakenly equates with Social Darwinism to argue that the poor, or “slackers” and “cheaters,” get what they deserve—Haidt will return in another life to the streets of Bhubaneswar as an “Untouchable.” He might think a bit differently about what constitutes the moral life if he has to survive in Bhubaneswar on the bottom rung rather than the top.

Haidt approvingly quotes Phil Tetlock who argues that “conscious reasoning is carried out for the purpose of persuasion, rather than discovery.” Tetlock adds, Haidt notes, that we are also trying to persuade ourselves. “We want to believe the things we are saying to others,” Haidt writes. And he adds, “Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth.”

The supposition that moral creeds are excuses for self-interest, ironically, defines Haidt’s stunning moral blindness in India. This does not hold true for the oppressed. The oppressed—Haidt’s “slackers”—are forced because of their powerlessness to confront the mendacity of conventional morality. It does not mean the oppressed hold a higher morality. There are many examples of yesterday’s victims becoming today’s victimizers. But while Haidt correctly excoriates conventional morality as largely a form of self-justification, his solution is not to seek a moral code that benefits our neighbor but to ask us to surrender to this self-interest and become part of human “hives,” including corporations.

Haidt holds up the collective euphoria of college football games—which he says are religious rites—as an example of the positive benefits of collective emotions. He links school and team spirit to Emerson’s and Thoreau’s transcendentalism, which is, to say the least, a gross distortion of transcendental thought. He says football games also lead us to reverence. The crowd in a football stadium allows us to experience, he writes, awe and the sacred. It turns us, he writes approvingly, into a human hive. “It flips the hive switch and makes people feel, for a few hours, that they are ‘simply a part of a whole,’ ” he writes of corporate or crowd experiences. He calls on us to surrender to these collectives. He writes that “a nation that is full of hives is a nation of happy and satisfied people.”

Happiness, then, comes with conformity. If we are unhappy it is not because there is something wrong with the world around us. It is because we have failed to integrate into the hive. This, of course, is the central thesis of positive psychology, which Haidt is closely associated with. And it is an ideology promoted by corporations and the U.S. military to keep people disempowered.

Moral behavior is, to some extent, probably the result of natural selection. But there is little doubt there are human inclinations, which also appear to have their roots in natural selection, that must be curtailed, repressed or even punished if human civilization is to function. Sigmund Freud makes this point in “Civilization and Its Discontents”:

“The instinct of work in common would not hold [civilized society] together; instinctual passions are stronger than reasonable interests. Civilization has to use its utmost efforts in order to set limits to man’s aggressive instincts and to hold the manifestations of them in check by psychical reaction-formations.”

Haidt recognizes these biological passions, but unlike Freud he encourages us to give in to them. Reducing the moral life to this retreat into collective emotions, as Hannah Arendt has pointed out, is the central attraction of totalitarianism. It offers us an escape from the anxiety and responsibility of moral choice and abrogates to those in control the power to determine the moral and the immoral. Fear, the primary emotion that conquered Haidt, is the emotion skillfully manipulated by totalitarian systems to enforce conformity. Once we surrender our instincts to the crowd, once we are made afraid, we no longer think. This surrender elevates demagogues and charlatans, as well as corporate crooks, which perhaps is why Haidt lauds Dale Carnegie as “a brilliant moral psychologist.”

Haidt mistakes the immoral as moral. Totalitarian structures, including corporate structures, call for us to sublimate our individual conscience into the collective. When we conform, we become, in the eyes of the state, or the corporation, moral and righteous. Haidt would do well to remember historian Claudia Koonz’s observation that “the road to Auschwitz was paved with righteousness.” This is a book that, perhaps unwittingly, sanctifies obedience to the corporate state and totalitarian power. It puts forth an argument that obliterates the possibility of the moral life. Submission, if you follow Haidt, becomes the highest good.

The moral life is achieved only by fostering a radical individualism with altruism. The Christian Gospels call on us to love our neighbor, not our tribe. Immanuel Kant says much the same thing when he tells us to “always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as mere means to your ends.” Morality is never the domain of crowds. And if you follow Haidt’s advice on how to become righteous you will, like so many of the self-deluded in history, end up a slave.

[kafor]

Yathrib, thanks for posting this excellent piece. I've sometimes wondered how the southern diaspora, after WWII, looking for work, created enclaves of extreme supporters of southern social norms. And, the music industry has fed deeply at this buffet. "Last night I went to sleep in Detroit City, and I dreamed about the cotton fields at home". The ironic thing is, that quite a few of those who relocated, did so because of the lack of opportunity that their social norms produce.
Ya know, exploring this any further could be depressing. Why go there?
kafor

[kafor]

slad, thanks to you, also. jeezus, Haidt teaches ethics in business, that explains alot. Herbert Spencer was wrong. Cooperation is the key, not the red in tooth and claw. What a rationalization of anti -social behavior.
I was right, I am more depressed, and angry, too. Oh well, "The Best things in life are free", wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
Kafor

[Luther Blissett]

Yankee elites were no less brutal than any other variety, they were only more secretive about it. The constitution only legitimized the suppression of the middle and lower classes, people of color, and women. They never had any notion of making society better by making all better – they only want to make us believe that we are.

What we experience right now is the most ideal situation for the elites – we are distracted and fooled by the yankee strain who give us Facebook, Real Housewives, and iPhones, while we are overtly oppressed by the slave master strain who give us Xe, The Family, and The Fellowship.

[brekin]

yathrib I agree the Conservative Southern Values Revived article is an amazing piece.
Thank you for posting it. Here is something related.

How presidential elections are impacted by a 100 million year old coastline

http://deepseanews.com/2012/06/how-pres ... coastline/
(cool maps are found at the link.)

Hale County in west central Alabama and Bamberg County in southern South Carolina are 450 miles apart. Both counties have a population of 16,000 of which around 60% are African American. The median households and per capita incomes are well below their respective state’s median, in Hale nearly $10,000 less. Both were named after confederate officers–Stephen Fowler Hale and Francis Marion Bamberg. And although Hale’s county seat is the self-proclaimed Catfish Capitol, pulling catfish out of the Edisto River in Bamberg County is a favorite past time. These two counties share another unique feature. Amidst a blanket of Republican red both Hale and Bamberg voted primarily Democratic in the 2000, 2004, and again in the 2008 presidential elections. Indeed, Hale and Bamberg belong to a belt of counties cutting through the deep south–Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina–that have voted over 50% Democratic in recent presidential elections. Why? A 100 million year old coastline.

During the Cretaceous, 139-65 million years ago, shallow seas covered much of the southern United States. These tropical waters were productive–giving rise to tiny marine plankton with carbonate skeletons which overtime accumulated into massive chalk formations. The chalk, both alkaline and porous, lead to fertile and well-drained soils in a band, mirroring that ancient coastline and stretching across the now much drier South. This arc of rich and dark soils in Alabama has long been known as the Black Belt. But many, including Booker T. Washington, coopted the term to refer to the entire Southern band. Washington wrote in his 1901 autobiography, Up from Slavery, “The term was first used to designate a part of the country which was distinguished by the color of the soil. The part of the country possessing this thick, dark, and naturally rich soil…”

Over time this rich soil produced an amazingly productive agricultural region, especially for cotton. In 1859 alone a harvest of over 4,000 cotton bales was not uncommon within the belt. And yet, just tens of miles north or south this harvest was rare. Of course this level of cotton production required extensive labor.

As Washington notes further in his autobiography, “The part of the country possessing this thick, dark, and naturally rich soil was, of course, the part of the South where the slaves were most profitable, and consequently they were taken there in the largest numbers. Later and especially since the war, the term seems to be used wholly in a political sense—that is, to designate the counties where the black people outnumber the white.”

The legacy of ancient coastlines, chalk, soil, cotton, and slavery can still be seen today. African Americans make up over 50%, in some cases over 85%, of the population in Black Belt counties. As expected this has and continues to deeply influence the culture of the Black Belt. J. Sullivan Gibson writing in 1941 on the geology of the Black Belt noted, “The long-conceded regional identity of the Black Belts roots no more deeply its physical fundament of rolling prairie soil than in its cultural, social, and economic individuality.” And so this plays out in politics.

This Black Belt with its predominantly African American population consistently votes overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates in presidential elections. The pattern is especially pronounced on maps when a Republican candidate has secured the presidency as Bush did in 2000 and 2004. In Southern states where a Republican secures the nomination, almost the entirety of Black Belt counties still lean Democratic. This leads to a Blue Belt of Democratic counties across the South. Even when Clinton, a Democrat, overwhelmingly took most Southern states, the percentages of those voting Democrat was still highest in the Black Belt counties.

But the Black Belt has not always been visible on maps during elections. The Voting Rights Act, outlawing discriminatory voting practices, was passed in 1965. As result, a year earlier in the 1964 elections larger numbers of African Americans were excluded from the polls in Southern states. And, in turn, the blue band we see today was not visible.

Long heralded as the Black Belt for rich dark soils and later for the rich African American culture and population, it may equally be referred to as the Blue Belt to reflect both its oceanic geology and the political leanings that resulted from it.

[DrVolin]

The article does a good job of describing the symptoms, but I don't think it comes close to accurate diagnosis of the cause. Yes, collectivist views are an endangered species in the West. The shift from education and health care as social investments to education and health care as personal investment is but one dramatic example. But no, the cause is not that one set of bad southern oppressors has replaced our former benevolent northern dictators. That argument, and explicitely the article, demands that we accept that the genteel Connecticut Republicans of yesteryear, namely Prescott and GHW Bush, are fundamentally different from their Southern successor, GW Bush. That argument artificially breaks up the dynastic continuity of the ruling families, whether Yankee, Dixie, Tejano, or Old Californian.

What the author sees as traditional Puritan and Yankee values is a class consciousness that favoured, at one time, sustainable extortion from the masses. The very same dynastic families now don't see much of a need for sustainability. They are more openly predatory and focus on maximization of short term gain rather than husbanding of resources, human and natural, for growth. This is typically what happens before a collapse. When the elite see the end of their dominance looming, they gut the country, leaving a hollow shell for the their successors, and try to save their loot by any means necessary.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Good read, but the nit-picking asshole I am is compelled to take umbrage with the notion some cat named Michael fucking Lind "first called out" the Yankee and Cowboy War.

Aside from that, prime rib slices, thanks for the brainfood.

[StarmanSkye]

DrVolin -- Thanks for that insight, the dynastic discontinuity of the Bush clan argued by the Yankee vs Southern Plantation political paradigm really bothered me -- as does the undefined gray-area re: the major role of corporations and their alliance with defacto ruling elites in helping to shape sociopolitical-economic policy & ideals. Although I like the simplified clarity of the Yankee/Plantation polarity, I think its a bit too idealized and constrained, thereby overlysimplistic. I need to think more about the oldskool Republican putz which saw the faux conservatives, rightwing zealots, Moral Majority religous extremists, MIC anti-commie interests and Dixie Souherners take-over and transform the party -- how did it happen, why and to what extent did they align with Wall Street & multinational corporations and organized crime?

It does provide a fascinatingly different 'fresh' framework to test the fit of various pieces in tho.

[Luther Blissett]

There's always been a tiny elite ruling class (traditionally of New England and European provenance) manipulating, rewarding, disaccording, and sowing dissent amongst the various factions differently. I would think English, French, German, Swiss, Saudi, Israeli, Swedish, and Italian elites have more oversight power than sons of slaveholders.

[Hugo Farnsworth]

I don't know how many ways there are to deconstruct this article point by point, but it's a lot. I come from the southern US, so there is a cultural bias on my part. But let's see, off the top of my head, in no particular order of importance:

1. Many of the biggest and most egregious of slaveholders in the southern US were northerners who moved to the south to get more rich quicker with daddy's money. Educated, some of them wrote apologies for the institution of slavery.

2. The north had much to do with slavery. Until the second year of the Civil War, one of the biggest slave auctions in the US was in Washington, DC. It was so disturbing to people's sensibilities that it was finally shut down by order of Congress. Or the story of the Russell family, which made most of its money prior to the Revolutionary War smuggling rum and shipping slaves, is "old money" in the uber elite 1% to this day.

3. The Civil War (no rich people were harmed during the production of this war), fought by the poorest of people on both sides, was basically "Bad Guys One" versus "Bad Guys Two". Wage slavery or slavery slavery? Revisionist American historians (Blight, for example) try to couch the war as some sort of moral struggle. It was all about the money. The people held in bondage in the south represented the largest single asset in the US at the time. Zinn was amazed that poor whites and poor blacks in the south never put together a political coalition, and he cites many reasons why. Barbara Fields states that the Civil War is still going on. I think we are losing.

4. I would say the descent and decline of the American empire was generational more than geographical or cultural. Contrast John D Rockefeller Jr. with his sons, Nelson and David. And as the money got bad and debased, and the debts grew larger, the ruling class just got more and more brutal, just as in imperial Rome. War and more war.

5. The article was only about America, but the oppression of poor people by the 1% is global. "Surviving Progress" was a real eye-opener, and i recommend it heartily.

[DrVolin]

Agree entirely.

As for the coaltion of the southern poor, it was made impossible by the idea of race, cultivated by the elite, as they cultivate national rivalries and doctrinal differences between religious denominations.

[jcivil]

What Hugo said

and

Philanthropy

Think about it

Users

Scam

Got us scrambled

need to

organize love chaos

now

[undead]

For most of our history, American economics, culture and politics have been dominated by a New England-based Yankee aristocracy that was rooted in Puritan communitarian values, educated at the Ivies and marinated in an ethic of noblesse oblige (the conviction that those who possess wealth and power are morally bound to use it for the betterment of society). While they've done their share of damage to the notion of democracy in the name of profit (as all financial elites inevitably do), this group has, for the most part, tempered its predatory instincts with a code that valued mass education and human rights; held up public service as both a duty and an honor; and imbued them with the belief that once you made your nut, you had a moral duty to do something positive with it for the betterment of mankind. Your own legacy depended on this.

Among the presidents, this strain gave us both Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy, and Poppy Bush -- nerdy, wonky intellectuals who, for all their faults, at least took the business of good government seriously.

I'm not even going to read the rest of the article after seeing that - how absurd. Because the first Bush was so much better than the second Bush. That must be why Obama likes him so much and takes direct instructions from him and all the other ex-CIA directors.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Dude you should keep reading it. So far its given me this goodness:


JFK was a nerdy wonk.

Progressives are the new puritans.

Rich people used to be good capitalists who really cared for the working people and looked after them.

WE do need the Yankee 1% cos they're our betters.

The US never tortured or engaged in extrajudicial killing in the old days.

Rich people used to be good capitalists who really cared for the working people and looked after them.

And they weren't ostentatious about owning 90% of everything.

Seattle cops used to be cool man.


Lots of what else she says is true. The fascists are more open and bastardry is more rife. But the reasons she gives are wrong and so is the trajectory of those reasons.