The Confederacy Has Won The Civil War

POLITICO has a very good article today about how the Republicans have managed to break our democracy.

The American people have, for over a decade, been saying they are sick and tired of government that doesn’t work.

Which is why they have elected the party that made government stop working.

It is a Southern revolt, Southern-driven, a revolt led by men with Southern accents and Southern roots and values. A barely disguised racism plays a key part. Racism seems to work for the Republican Party. The Republican Party is the Old Confederacy reborn.

If you dig a little you’ll find some racism in most white Americans, not a basic or an overriding racism but a small tumor of racism that you can cultivate and prod into metastasizing if you work at it. The Republican Party has become very good at cultivating this tumor in a lot of people.

John Dean famously said “There is a cancer on the presidency.” He was trying to warn Richard Nixon that his problems were fatal. Now you could say cancer has won the presidency. The Republican Party, which most of this past year seemed in the final stages of collapse has regained its vigor. They have done this by realizing they are the cancer.

Cancer is practically unstoppable without very unpleasant side effects. Nobody likes cancer. Everybody is deathly afraid of cancer. This explains its power, and maybe it explains the power of the Republican Party right now. They are the party of failing government and a degraded working class and racism and the theft of our American Dream by Wall Street billionaires and banking billionaires and healthcare billionaires. Why have we voted to empower the same people who have degraded our lives?

This election has played out like the Chris Rock joke: “I’m really angry that Obama hasn’t cured cancer. So you know what? I’m gonna vote for cancer!”

It makes no sense, that’s why it’s a good joke. It makes no sense but it is exactly what has happened. Reality doesn’t have to make sense. People behave stupidly. Large groups of people are especially prone to stupidity. Which is why the Founding Fathers invented the Electoral College, which tomorrow will finalize the election of a stupid, corrupt, ignorant, treasonous man to the presidency over the objections of a majority of the voters.

The Electoral College isn’t a perfect thing. It isn’t just a safeguard against mob rule. It’s also a relic of America’s slave past, designed to safeguard the less populous states (The South) from having their slaves freed.

It’s as if the Civil War hadn’t ended in 1865 with the defeat of Lee. It’s as if the assassination of Lincoln was the more important event, the continuation of war that led to Jim Crow and the murders and lynchings of many thousands of black citizens.

It seems like the dominant rump of our Congress is itself a recidivist remnant of the old Confederacy. The American flag pins in their lapels are only a disguise. The South never forgot the Civil War cause. They never really surrendered as a people, never accepted the values Lincoln set out for us, never relinquished the comfortable idea that whiteness is superior. And they have been an invading army long after Meade turned Lee back at Gettysburg. They have invaded, infiltrated and infected the northern states with their bigotry. Bigotry isn’t the goal, though, it is simply a tool.

Of course all white Americans have bigotry in them. It just needs bringing out. The racism in northern cities is different from the racism of the South. In some cases it seems more virulent.

The material that helps breed racism and division is what Republicanism has been manufacturing for decades: the careful degradation of working lives, the careful degradation of public sector protections of working people, the careful degradation of our democratic institutions which guarantee our rights.

The Republican goal has been to break the whole American democracy so people feel powerless, because powerlessness makes people angry, and anger makes them more easily divided and defeated.

In a way these unreconstructed Confederates have taken the Union strategy that defeated them in 1865 and turned it upon the North itself. Grant and most memorably Sherman took the war directly to the Southern infrastructure and broke it down. Sherman’s march to the sea burned a wide path of destruction from Atlanta to the sea, cutting the Confederacy in two.

Look at the Republican strategy unfolding this weekend in North Carolina. (Described here at MEDIUM) The defeated Republican governor is hurriedly destroying the power of his office before he surrenders it to the Democrat who defeated him.

Look at what Republican rule has done in Kansas (reported by USNews) and in Michigan (...Yo––Flint? Poisoned drinking water?) or what Scott Walker has done to Wisconsin, or just go read Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann's books about the march of Republican dysfunction from DC to the states

The modern Republican Confederates have brought their industrial and infrastructure and political destruction north to Michigan, to Ohio, to Wisconsin, to western Pennsylvania. Those places now feel like the old South––poorer working people, jobs gone, water systems broken, universities in decline (the Southern universities––not all of them certainly but many––have long been a great example of poorer education and superior football), bridges decaying, social fabric frayed, systems dysfunctional––and the dysfunction has been carefully achieved under strict Republican principles. Principles very unlike the ones that shaped the party under Lincoln, principles directly opposed to the founding ones, just as the designs of the modern “conservative” Republicans directly contradict the pocket Constitutions they carry around in their pockets and the flag pins they wear on their lapels.

Helter Skelter?

"3 Dallas Cops killed, 7 wounded. This is now war. Watch out Obama. Watch out black lives matter punks. Real America is coming after you.” Tweeted last night by former Republican congressman Joe Walsh, who's now a right-wing talk show host. This is the kind of embarrassing ugly comment that used to remain between friends. Now it goes viral immediately. Going viral is the whole idea for a talk show host, but Walsh took the crude comment down shortly after his thousands of followers got the message.

We are all miked. I’m sure each time an innocent black man is shot and killed by police there are similar thoughts expressed by African Americans who’ve had enough. Senseless violence makes people angry. But you don’t hear incitement among the leaders of the black community. The marches have been peaceful. The organizers have called for peaceful protest. It is a volatile moment. And again we have white radio hosts calling for vengeance against the President of the United States, because he is black. There are a lot of Americans out there eager to hear that. That audience has been carefully and expensively cultivated.

This idea of “race war” is not new. The Charles Manson "Helter Skelter" murder spree was supposed to foment race war. The plan was shaped by Manson’s bizarre interpretation of the Beatles’ White Album.

But it goes back much further. Back to the mass murder of blacks in their neighborhood in Oklahoma City, and similar violent white rampages elsewhere. The cheerful, boastful, well attended, proudly photographed lynchings of black citizens in the years following Emancipation. Towns used postcards of the lynch mob and their victim as a form of advertising.

It goes back to our nation’s founding. What is this “well-regulated militia” the 2nd Amendment speaks of? The militia was a very serious institution in the South, when all white plantation owners and their white employees were required by law to belong to the militia, whose job it was to routinely inspect slave quarters to remove firearms and whip the slaves found to own the firearms. The “well-regulated militias” were slave patrols. As were the first organized police forces across the South. So the animus has deep roots.

(Thom Hartmann writes a clear history of the well regulated militia here.)

After slavery was abolished the tradition of oppressing black citizens persisted through Jim Crow. In some respects the situation of blacks worsened. When they were slaves they had value. Being free they had no value and were more casually killed or worked to death. Worked to death? This was routine under the Southern penal system. On a regular calendar basis large industries like lumbering and mining and large scale agriculture informed the local police and sheriffs that workers were needed, and those lawmen would round up black men where they knew they would be, often walking home from their jobs or gathering where black citizens regularly met. Charges of vagrancy sufficed to imprison the black citizen for whatever term of work the industry owner asked. Free labor, essentially slave labor. Except the black man convicted in this way was also assessed fines which placed him in an endless round of peonage and debt, often till the was worked to death.

(PBS produced a great documentary about the abuses of the Jim Crow period, which you can watch online.)

So the recent hatred directed at black Americans has a backstory. It has a deep history, but it isn’t just “history”. It’s still around. The resentment over the casual contempt shown to our black president by white Americans. The ignorant questioning of his legitimacy and his religion and his citizenship, much of it led by Donald Trump. The resentment black citizens feel over these routine indignities and systematic racist targeting is not “history”, it’s now. It’s grown worse since Obama was inaugurated. It would be naive to say it doesn’t amount to an orchestrated backlash against the “uppity black man.”

(VOX summarizes several academic studies of the sources and the stubborn persistence of white racism in America.)

Black Lives Matter, you say. The predominantly, overwhelmingly, white right wing in this country responds with All Lives Matter. It’s a cynical response, surely, but what’s wrong with it? These few paragraphs found on Reddit explain what’s wrong with it. Besides the cynicism and insincerity, I mean.

Certainly all lives matter. Right now, though, the way this country has turned more divided and insecure and poorer for most people ever since Reagan was president, a few lives matter a hell of a lot more than the majority of others. The 1% are obscenely rich, the broad middle class is under stress, and over on the other end are the unemployed and the unemployable, who are split between poor whites and people of color.

For fifty or so years, following FDR’s New Deal and further advanced by LBJ’s civil rights and Great Society legislation, America’s working classes did very well. There were still a lot of racial tensions, though, because the New Deal, when it was enacted, was shaped very carefully to put people of color at the back of the line. Not because FDR was a racist, but because a very powerful and senior block of progressives came from the South, where they hated Lincoln and black people in equal measure. That was why they were not Republican.

When Hubert Humphrey spoke boldly for civil rights at the 1948 Democratic convention, the South began pulling away from the Democratic Party. Nixon’s Southern Strategy finalized this by wrapping its loving arms around the racist voter. “Join us! We understand! We agree with you!” The Republican Party became the welcoming refuge of all racists and white identity types, to the deep embarrassment of millions of Republicans who believed in civil rights, and the Republican politicians who’d helped LBJ put it into law.

Sure all lives matter. But whose lives have been shortchanged the most and the longest? African Americans were slaves for several centuries, bred and driven and sold like cattle. Native Americans were driven off their lands and systematically cheated by federal treaty and exterminated by federal troops and state militias. The treatment of American workers ought to create a stronger fellow feeling, a reason to unify instead of resenting each other. Part of the Republicans’ Southern Strategy was pushed nationwide: the clever and manipulative dividing of people, setting them against each other, and then robbing them both by enacting policies that favored the very rich.

The people looted and victimized by the Reagan Revolution ought to come together to win back a prosperous, financially secure middle class. But keeping them fighting serves the 1%. And millions of white Americans seem happy to go along with this.

The Civil War Never Ended

I came across this NYTimes essay today, which says the Civil War persists to this day. It's less simple than you think. The Civil War changed more than the slave issue; it recast our nation as an economy in which larger players dominated. Those who lost out economically were instructed to blame the freedom of the black man for their reduced status. The old hatred was recast and became very useful. The battlefield was still in the South.

The pleasure of old hatreds explains a lot about our present dysfunction. Hatred is a great business model; consider FoxNews. Disinformation is another wonderful profit engine, and Fox knows that too.

Here’s an example of how people’s ignorance and easy gullibility can be shaped into an eager and militant constituency.

A Union Soldier's grave allegedly predicted the disaster of having a black president.

What this dead Union Soldier and Republican did not know (and this ignorant readership would rather not know) is that the Democratic Party that favored slavery in the 19th century would repudiate racism in the 20th and that his and Lincoln’s beloved Republican Party would seize the opportunity to invite those white racists to become Republicans. Nixon’s White House would formally devise The Southern Strategy, which adopted all those unhappy worshippers of the Old Confederacy and made them diehard Republicans, who would vote down their own economic interests for the pure joy of suppressing black and brown people (…and women… and foreigners… and non-Evangelical Christians… and Muslims… etc.) “I may be poor and ignorant but I still get to feel superior to somebody!”

That is the legacy of the perpetual Civil War. Today’s Republicans are actually the New Confederacy. As a recent Washington Post essay pointed out.

It’s worth noting that Nixon, whose minions came up with the Southern Strategy also invented FoxNews.

The Washington Post reports on the invention of FoxNews by Nixon's backroom boys.

Bloomberg on the invention of the Southern Strategy.

A New Birth of Racism

Every day brings another uptick in the continued renaissance of racism in this country.

Question:

When will news media and commentators begin putting this in historic context? How does it fit into the long history of racism in America, and where has that racist belief system gravitated? Where does it find its home today? Who are today’s racists and who is cultivating them?

Another question:

If today’s congressional Republicans were transported back to 1861 would they support Abraham Lincoln or would they support the Confederacy?

I’ve come to believe Lincoln was lucky to have the South secede. Today’s racists and states’ rights fanatics control Congress and the Supreme Court. Today’s Confederacy has the full muscular support of Wall Street. If the Civil War were to be refought today (and in many ways it is) the Confederacy would win handily.

If today’s Republicans were opposing Lincoln (and they would) they would call him a pathetic failure because half the nation seceded in response to his inauguration.

But nobody in the opinion business seems inclined to write about this curious similarity between today’s GOP and the old Confederacy.

How Racist Is This Rabid Hatred Of Obama?

Is it all about race? Being so angry there's a black president that you'd just as soon shut the whole thing down?

Shucks, we're way yonder past racism in this here country, aren't we?

It's gotten worse in the past five years, but the recent mutation of race hatred goes back to Lee Atwater's Willie Horton dog whistle ad in 1988. (The Nation has some interesting recorded conversations in which Atwater lays it all out.)

It goes back to Nixon's infamous Southern Strategy to win the racist white southerners who abandoned the Democratic Party after the Civil Rights Amendment. The voters who'd gone for George Wallace twice. (The New York Times archive spells out the Southern Strategy in its wonderful cynical detail.)

But if anyone wants to discuss the unspoken racial content in Republican hatred for this president they are accused of "playing the race card." Because Southerners are much much too polite to ever ever get racial about anything. Never have, never will.

Slate ran a very good piece about this Southern complexion, pure white Southern, in the new Republican Party.

The dog whistle of racist politics has just added another veneer on top of the old Southern gentility, which was a mask to begin with. That mask came off whenever a neatly dressed black student tried to go to a white's only school, but otherwise was as sweet as molasses, as polite and inoffensive as a pure white woman at a cotillion.

Want to know the code words? The secret handshakes and secret signals? The New Statesman listed them in a recent story.

The South and the Republican Party it dominates have learned to change the tone of their message without changing the message. The dog whistle alerts the party faithful the way it alerts hound dogs, by going directly to the lizard part of the brain that responds reflexively to fear and loathing.

A good explanation for the five year long fever of race hatred that's causing this, from Joan Walsh at Salon. (She followed up with a piece describing the angry Republican responses she got.)

To explain why this is happening now, when we finally managed to elect and re-elect our first black president, we almost have to go back to the Civil War, which certain states never recognized they lost, and certainly never recognized they were wrong about.

So it is about race. Still. Stubbornly and ignorantly.

And the Republican Party would just as soon take the whole country down as give in. In their slow, patient way they are trying to take our country back to the old Southern ways. A small aristocracy and white trash and blacks with no rights. Low wages and a small comfortable elite. Bad roads, bad water, bad sanitation, worn out soil, poor education, poor public health. That is the ideal model. What are the standards in the Reddest of the Red Republican districts? They look like the South in the 19th Century. Mostly white, mostly rural, mostly poor. Mostly taking far more in federal aid than they pay in federal taxes. We are being led backward by a backward set of backwater politicians and their extremist (but dependent) voters.

For 148 years since 1865, white southerners have done everything they could to keep African Americans down. Prevented them from voting. Stolen their property. Lynched them. Rounded them up routinely to use as free labor. Prevented them from owning homes, getting educated, getting loans, being tried fairly or being able to press charges against a white person, prevented them from using a drinking fountain designed for white people, prevented them from using the same bathroom facilities. The list is endless and the nasty unChristian southern habit of racial hatred is unending. The aim is to humiliate and degrade the other race so they are lower than you are, which is pretty low considering the ugliness of the mindset.

This ugly and difficult and expensive experiment in social engineering has been paid for by a small set of white folks who'd rather not pay enough for their white social inferiors to live decently so instead of fair pay they promise the lower class whites to make sure the black population is inferior to their own unpleasant inferiority. And they deputize the white lowlifes to enforce this.

So it's no coincidence that they believe (and persist in saying despite evidence that any normal sane intelligent person would understand) that the first black president is A. Kenyan. B. Muslim C. a communist D. a Nazi E. part of a nefarious foreign plot F. the antichrist. Whatever he is, he's got to be illegitimate because of what they've been told all these years. There can't be a black president because they all know that any dumb poor white no account is always and in every way better than a black man. Because everybody has told southern whites that every white person is superior to every black person regardless of achievements or abilities or college degrees. What gave Obama that ticket to Harvard which was rightfully meant for some proper white person?

It's hard to channel this race-hating stupidity without becoming physically sick. And it makes a person mad to think racists and racist-abetters of this sort of stupidity are in control of a whole political party. That they have enough power to shut down our democracy. But I guess that makes it easier to understand how the bigots feel. Something is wrong. Sadly, the ones who are causing the problem are too dumb and hateful to understand what it is.

The Confederate States of America still exist and are now Republican

From Ron Paul's favorite website comes this frank declaration that Lincoln was a murdering Yankee meddler who violated the sacred rights of Southern planters to keep human beings as slaves. An idea that is still prevalent in the states which dominate the Republican Party.

Here's a map of this "New Confederacy". (Thanks to the well-known and rational conservative writer Andrew Sullivan for the map.) These members of Congress are willing to derail the US economy in order to humiliate the black guy who got into the White House by mistake.

The rationale is usually that the federal government is spending too much of their god-given money on people and places that don't deserve it (other liberal states with lots of poor people or foreign countries), but it's interesting to look at decades of tax data and see that the states with the stingiest attitudes towards taxation tend to get more in tax dollars than they pay in. Here's the data, state by state, published by the Tax Foundation.

These Red States get more than they pay because they tend to be poorer and more dysfunctional, meaning they need federal help. Notice also that these legislators (mostly Republican) are also the ones who loudly refuse to vote aid for areas hit by devastating hurricanes, but they immediately demand aid when their districts are hit by tornadoes and floods. (They also tend to claim that these more devastating storms and floods and droughts are not caused by high levels of fossil fuel use as scientists say is happening but are caused by homosexuality in the US.)

There have been a lot of website postings of how Red and Blue States compare in terms of various problems like divorce rates, teen pregnancy, gun deaths, low education rates, low life expectancy, infant death rates, etc.

The red states tend to have more of these problems, which might be directly correlated to their stubborn refusal to deal with those problems. But if they have these problems they should stop preaching reform to the rest of us, or they should at least stop taking our money. Of course their most vulnerable people would be the ones to suffer. And those are the citizens they work hard to prevent from voting. If those people were allowed to vote and their votes were counted honestly, there would be fewer Red States.

The Supreme Court ruling on Citizen's United gave the Republicans the 2010 elections, which allowed them to redraw the congressional districts across the country into safe seats for dangerously insane right wing radicals whose sole aim in life is to make sure the black guy isn't allowed to fulfill his campaign promises. It's worth noting that the Republicans held the House of Representatives in 2012 despite Republican congressmen receiving more than a million fewer votes nationally. The Dems got more votes and fewer seats in the House.

This is a what happens when the Republican strategy of suppressing voting takes hold. They don't like democracy. They don't want to do what the people would like them to do. They have other clients who pay their bills for them. They are the representatives of big money, the representatives of corporations foreign and domestic. Suppressing the vote is a timeworn Republican strategy. Because they dislike democracy. Just listen to Paul Weyrich speaking in the 1980s. He helped get Ronald Reagan elected. He also helped found the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank which is helping take the democracy out of our political system, the think tank which helped the Supreme Court reach the conclusion that corporations are people and money is speech.

The Heritage Foundation is also where the system of private insurance exchanges was invented. The system now called ObamaCare. The system they are willing to derail the US economy to prevent from being put in place, because they hate anything enacted by the current black president.

Or, in the immortal words of Quincy Adams Wagstaff (Groucho Marx):

"I don't know what they have to say
It makes no difference anyway
Whatever it is, I'm against it!
No matter what it is
Or who commenced it
I'm against it!

Your proposition may be good
But let's have one thing understood
Whatever it is, I'm against it!
And even when you've changed it
Or condensed it
I'm against it!"

(Harry Ruby, Bert Kalmar, from the Marx Brothers film Horsefeathers)

The Long Game

Before he hooked up with Murdoch's money, Roger Ailes was a GOP dirty trickster and propagandist. Many of the top Republican ops learned how it was done while working for Nixon.

The "Southern Strategy" for scooping up the angry white South angry about civil rights was conceived under Nixon. The South that never forgave Lincoln for freeing the slaves had voted Democratic for a hundred years but Nixon saw an opportunity to appeal to the region's racism (and juice it a bit) and the South has been solid Republican ever since.

Papers recently discovered in the Nixon Library show that Roger Ailes came up with the concept for FoxNews while working for Nixon. Eisenhower Republicanism died during the Nixon years and was replaced with something nastier, something that appealed to hatreds and fears rather than hopes and dreams. If news organizations delivered inconvenient truths, Ailes had the idea of controlling the news by owning it. Cynical? Yes. Successful? That too.