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.
Michael Lind first called out the existence of this conflict in his 2006
book,
.
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
(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 Americainforms 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.
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.
This photo provided by the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles
shows the design of a proposed Sons of the Confederacy license plate. (AP/Texas
Department of Motor Vehicles)
No comments:
Post a Comment