Category Archives: History

The Song of the South

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What is it that makes the American South so special? A journalist named Hamilton Nolan answers that and other questions at How Things Work, where he writes about labor, politics and power.

Since the Covid pandemic struck in 2020, more than two million people have migrated to the six fastest growing states in the South, bringing with them $100 billion in new income. This population shift is held up by Southern governors as proof of the success of their policies—and as a herald of an ongoing shift in the balance of economic power that is bound to continue due to the South’s inherent advantages. What spurred this grand relocation? Traditional wisdom will tell you that it was the more relaxed and open posture of Southern states like Florida during the Covid pandemic, along with the perpetual allures of warmer weather, lower taxes, and more affordable housing prices.

In reality, though, this current sloshing of America towards its drain is not the start of anything new at all. It is spurred not by any new economic paradigm, nor by any Texan or Floridian governor’s new ideas about unleashing the power of free enterprise under the nation’s sunniest skies. It is, instead, a normal reaction to a … rise in the appeal of something that the South has been offering for more than 200 years. Politicians will tell you that the South is attractive because it offers greater freedom. Actually, it offers cannibalism: it is willing to kill and eat its own to fuel a marginal improvement in your lifestyle. Don’t let this deal pass you by!

Ron Desantis is running (unsuccessfully) for president on the premise that he can do for America what he has done for Florida in the past three years. One way to look at his record during those crucial Covid years is: he kept stuff open and got rid of pandemic restrictions, which caused the Florida economy to flourish. Another, more accurate way to look at it is: he kept stuff open and got rid of pandemic restrictions because he fundamentally does not care whether his citizens live or die, as long as his state could get a temporary economic boost that he could use for self-promotional purposes. In this, Desantis was the perfect combination of the classic Southern socioeconomic strategy with a global pandemic.

Ever since being forced to give up formal slavery at gunpoint, the South has pursued a formula of attraction only one step removed from it. The region’s offer to businesses and wealthy people in the rest of America is, and has always been, this: “Come to the South. Do whatever you want. We won’t regulate you. We won’t tax you. We’ll crush any unions that dare to come here. We’ll provide a pool of dirt-cheap labor for you. Because we don’t tax you, our public services will be awful. Our public schools will be inadequate. But don’t worry, because we will build graceful private schools for the people with money, and we will build private country clubs and gated communities to shield you from the poverty, and racist cops to police the borders of the neighborhoods, and you can live here in a private island of bliss. The inadequacy of our public services and our outright racial oppression guarantee that that cheap labor force will continue forever. You can profit from that cheap labor force without ever having to interact with the people who compose it, except as various forms of servants. The oppression, sequestered away from you and walled off from impacting your life except to enhance it, is what makes the system work.”

That’s it. That’s the South’s sales pitch. It is the poorest and most backwards region of America by traditional socioeconomic measurements, but it’s great place to be when you exclude all of the poor people from your measurements. Which they do, because “not caring about all the poor people” is the key to the South’s ability to imagine itself as a place with a political system that works. This is the slavery mentality dragged cleanly into the present day, modified just enough to fit the letter of the law.

In the plantation era, the South was great, as long as you were a plantation owner. If you add all the slaves (and poor whites) into the calculation… ugh, you mess up the numbers. Despite the fact that the South’s failure to industrialize properly due to slavery was one of the things that lost it the Civil War, the region remains stubbornly addicted to cheap labor today. It is, at heart, an inferiority complex. The South’s leaders don’t really believe that they have anything to offer to lure people in other than a work force that will show up for rock bottom wages. If the South really believed in itself, it would be busily investing in public education and health care and a strong social safety net and all the other things that build a healthy and thriving society that ultimately attracts people and businesses. Instead, they do the opposite—because empowering the existing residents of the South would undermine its cheap labor pool.

When you see Southern governors doing seemingly irrational things like rejecting federal government Medicaid funding for their state’s residents, you must understand that the people who would be helped by that funding simply do not count in the minds of those states’ leaders. Their states are modern plantations, and they calculate the success of their governance based on the living standards of the plantation owners, not the workers. Even worse, doing things that help the workers live better could harm the project of maintaining a maximally desperate labor pool. The South doesn’t want their entire population to be healthy and well-educated. They want white people and business owners to be healthy, thanks to private doctors, and well-educated, due to private schools, and to have access to a limitless low-wage work force that, thanks to the failure of the state to invest in their welfare, has no choice but to acquiesce to being exploited. The more desperate they are, the better.

When you see Texas Republicans eliminate laws that grant workers water breaks, that is not some momentary outbreak of callousness; that is the point. …

Embracing the South’s toxic sales pitch pollutes the soul. “I am moving to Florida because the total lack of public health measures is nice and easy for me, as a rich person, even though I know it will cost a calculable number of Floridians their lives.” You are a bad person. “I am moving to Texas to save on my personal income taxes, even though I know that the cost of that is poor schools and oppression for vast swaths of this state’s neediest residents.” You are a bad person. “I am relocating my company’s factory to South Carolina because labor costs there are lower, even though I know that those low wages are a result of systematic oppression and union-busting designed to keep millions of poor people powerless over their own lives.” You are a bad person.

The bliss of ignorance is a critical part of this whole process. Move only between your air conditioned home on a golf course and your air conditioned office and your kids’ private school and the nice strip malls around your nice neighborhood and don’t ask any questions of the people who build the houses and serve the food and fill the factories and it is possible to cling to the illusion that this whole system works. But as soon as you begin to think about the aggregate welfare of everyone in the South—as soon as you place an equal value on the lives of the poor—it becomes devastatingly clear that all the nice enticements that tempted you down here require you to stand, at all times, on the necks of your fellow citizens. If you know that and continue to tolerate it, the South has poisoned you.

Unquote.

“The South has poisoned you”. It’s also how the South has poisoned American politics since the 18th century.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment Should Matter

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No person shall … hold any office, civil or military, under the United States … who, having previously taken an oath … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. 

The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868. Section 3 was designed to stop anyone who had rebelled against the United States from ever having a role in the government again. It’s not commonly applied (we don’t have that many insurrections or rebellions), but it’s still in the Constitution. The New York Times reports that legal experts are paying attention:

Two prominent conservative law professors have concluded that [the Orange Menace] is ineligible to be president under a provision of the Constitution that bars people who have engaged in an insurrection from holding government office. The professors are active members of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group, and proponents of originalism, the method of interpretation that seeks to determine the Constitution’s original meaning.

“Originalism” is bullshit, but others have reached the same conclusion, including a University of Virginia professor and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). What’s interesting about these two professors is that they would ordinarily be expected to bend over backwards to support the Orange Menace, like so many other Federalist Society members have done.

The Times article suggests the likelihood of lawsuits:

The scope and depth of the article may encourage and undergird lawsuits from other candidates and ordinary voters arguing that the Constitution makes him ineligible for office.

“There are many ways that this could become a lawsuit presenting a vital constitutional issue that potentially the Supreme Court would want to hear and decide,” [one of the authors] said.

Of course, the Supreme Court deciding that the 14th Amendment applies to the former president would require two of the Court’s right-wing, so-called “originalist” Justices to accept the Constitution’s plain language, not something they’re used to doing.

Nevertheless, here’s the authors’ summary of the article:

Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment forbids holding office by former office holders who then participate in insurrection or rebellion. Because of a range of misperceptions and mistaken assumptions, Section Three’s full legal consequences have not been appreciated or enforced. This article corrects those mistakes by setting forth the full sweep and force of Section Three.

First, Section Three remains an enforceable part of the Constitution, not limited to the Civil War, and not effectively repealed by nineteenth century amnesty legislation.

Second, Section Three is self-executing, operating as an immediate disqualification from office, without the need for additional action by Congress. It can and should be enforced by every official, state or federal, who judges qualifications.

Third, to the extent of any conflict with prior constitutional rules, Section Three repeals, supersedes, or simply satisfies them. This includes the rules against bills of attainder or ex post facto laws, the Due Process Clause, and even the free speech principles of the First Amendment.

Fourth, Section Three covers a broad range of conduct against the authority of the constitutional order, including many instances of indirect participation or support as “aid or comfort.”

[Section Three] covers a broad range of former offices, including the Presidency. And in particular, it disqualifies [the former president], and potentially many others, because of their participation in the attempted overthrow of the 2020 presidential election.

“A Mystery for the Ages”

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In under 3 minutes, Tennessee comedian Trae Crowder explains the overriding reality confronting the Republican Party and the party’s response.

The History Behind the Crisis

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Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism is the latest book by the lawyer and author Jeffrey Toobin. The New York Review of Books has a long review by Sean Wilentz, a Yale history professor, that provides historical context for our current political crisis. The following 1,800 words are most of the review. I think they (or the whole review) are worth reading:

Ronald Reagan’s pronouncement, in his first inaugural address in 1981, that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem” marked a signal moment in what has become the most successful political counterrevolution in modern American history. Having won a smashing electoral victory, Reagan acted as if he were the latter-day inverse of his long-ago political hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Summoning the American people to “a rendezvous with destiny”—a line he had shamelessly filched from FDR in the 1964 speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign that established him as the Republican right wing’s future leader—and pretending that the stubborn stagflation of the 1970s was a crisis of the same magnitude as the Great Depression, Reagan channeled Roosevelt’s optimistic rhetoric to attack the instrument of Roosevelt’s great reforms: the federal government.

He aimed, above all, to revive the laissez-faire economic and social policies that the Depression had discredited, that Roosevelt had supplanted, and that even Richard Nixon had repudiated when he declared himself a Keynesian. But Reagan’s antigovernment politics and policies went much further than rolling back the New Deal.

Reagan’s Republican Party of 1981 was very different from Herbert Hoover’s of 1933: it had become the refuge of millions of formerly Democratic white conservative voters in the Solid South who resisted the civil rights reforms of the 1960s. Accordingly, behind his cheerful veneer Reagan made sure that he tapped into the fierce resentments of federal authority, dating back to the Civil War and Reconstruction, that fueled that resistance. Before they were done, the Reagan Republicans had absorbed into their coalition an array of aggrieved Americans, including quasi-theocratic white Christian nationalists, the gun-manufacturing lobby, antiabortion militants, and antigay crusaders.

The antigovernment fervor that grips the nation today is the long-term product of the right wing that Reagan called to arms (literally, in the case of the National Rifle Association) forty-odd years ago. It was his attorney general Edwin Meese, in tandem with the newly formed Federalist Society, who started packing the federal judiciary with the conservative judges who have gutted federal protections for voting rights, abortion rights, and more, while inventing, with fake history presented as “originalism,” an individual’s Second Amendment right to own and carry military-grade armaments. It was the Reagan administration that eliminated the FCC’s fairness doctrine, which mandated that broadcasters provide balanced coverage of controversial public issues, paving the way for right-wing talk radio inciters like Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy and, on cable TV, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News to amplify antigovernment paranoia.

The Reagan White House also harbored the former Nixon aide Pat Buchanan as its communications director. Buchanan’s politics were rooted in the 1930s America First isolationism of Charles A. Lindbergh and the diatribes of the right-wing “radio priest” Father Charles Coughlin, with their eccentric fixations on imaginary Jewish internationalist cabals. In the waning days of Reagan’s presidency, Buchanan remarked that “the greatest vacuum in American politics is to the right of Ronald Reagan.” He tried to fill that vacuum himself, nearly defeating President George H.W. Bush in the 1992 New Hampshire primary with his “pitchfork brigades.” His convention speech later that year laid out the culture wars to come. Then he followed up with another bid for the Republican nomination in 1996 and an independent campaign in 2000.

All those efforts failed, but their stark themes of isolationism, lost national greatness, immigrant invasion, and racial fear provided a template for T____’s MAGA campaign a quarter-century later. “American carnage” was the favored far-right image at least two decades before T____.

Meanwhile, a step away from Buchanan—how distant a step has long been subject to debate—an assortment of antisemitic and white nationalist organizations remained on the political fringes during the Reagan period. The fringiest may have been the neo-Nazi National Alliance, founded in 1974 by William Luther Pierce, the author of the widely read novel The Turner Diaries, a lurid description of—and in some respects a blueprint for—a white supremacist revolution. The conspiracy-mongering Liberty Lobby, founded in 1958 by Willis Carto, claimed in the early 1990s a membership of 20,000, supplemented by 90,000 subscribers to its weekly newspaper, The Spotlight. In 1968 the Liberty Lobby supported the segregationist hero Governor George Wallace for president. Twenty years later the splinter Populist Party, which Carto helped to organize, nominated the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke. In both 1992 and 1996 The Spotlight backed Buchanan.

A major turning point in the Republican Party’s rightward radicalization and its fitful convergence with the evolving conspiratorial and white supremacist netherworld—populated today by groups like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and QAnon—came during the fall and winter of 1994, culminating in the spring of 1995. Much to the shock of Republicans who assumed that Reagan had created a national coalition that would last for decades, a Democrat, Bill Clinton, won the presidency in 1992.

Republican strategists shifted their attention to Congress, and in November 1994, led by the firebrand Newt Gingrich of Georgia, the party captured the majority in the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years. Rewarded with the speakership, Gingrich dominated the news cycle with slash-and-burn denunciations of “sick,” “corrupt,” “anti-flag” Democrats. Advised by the political consultant Frank Luntz, he adopted his poll-tested vocabulary of demonization, published in a private memo entitled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control”: “anti-child,” “decay,” “welfare,” “traitors.”

Limbaugh, Liddy, and smaller-fry right-wing radio [hosts] added their own blend of conspiracy mongering and personal abuse. The prolonged and fatal siege in 1993 involving an armed religious sect, the Branch Davidians, and federal law enforcement in Waco, Texas, became a cause célèbre on both sides of the increasingly blurry border between the GOP hard right and the paramilitary extremists. “Go for a head shot,” the ex–Watergate plotter Liddy shouted into his radio microphone, instructing listeners on how to kill federal firearms officials. “The second violent American revolution,” Limbaugh declared around the same time, “is just about—I got my fingers about a quarter of an inch apart—is just about that far away.”

Out of this toxic mix of cultism and grifting came Timothy McVeigh, a young, decorated army veteran, subscriber to The Spotlight, gun show enthusiast, and avid fan of Limbaugh’s. He had developed a burning hatred of Bill and Hillary Clinton and studied The Turner Diaries like a field manual. In April 1995, on the second anniversary of the end of the Waco siege, McVeigh parked a Ryder rental truck crammed with barrels of fertilizer explosive, flicked his Bic lighter to fire a five-minute fuse, and blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, 19 of them children….

… Not long after high school, McVeigh obtained—via the National Rifle Association’s magazine, American Hunter—a mail-order copy of The Turner Diaries, which offered him a worldview that he never relinquished. From this book, written at the furthest reaches of antigovernment paranoia, he eventually extracted the basic instructions on how to touch off, with a spectacular act of terror, a white supremacist revolution that would overthrow the federal government…..

… He would later tell his lawyers [that reading The Spotlight] pretty much summed up “my world/my culture…the stuff I identify with…stuff I know and live.” Around the same time, McVeigh began listening to Limbaugh, who was just coming into his own as a best-selling author, television performer, and talk radio megastar…. He became an ardent fan.

… Buchanan rounded out McVeigh’s political thinking, above and beyond—but by no means in contradiction to—the crude racism of The Turner Diaries. From Buchanan, McVeigh learned of the menacing New World Order (NWO), purportedly a project of shadowy, powerful, internationalist elites to topple the America created by the Founding Fathers and replace it with a single omnipotent world government run exclusively by and for themselves. From Buchanan, he learned that a new revolutionary resistance could defeat the NWO much as the patriots of 1776 had defeated the British. And from Buchanan, perhaps most important of all, he learned that, just as the redcoats had once tried to strip the patriots of their arsenals, so the nefarious globalists and their liberal minions were out to shred the Founders’ Second Amendment and seize the guns of a God-fearing citizenry….

The author then recounts how passage of the ban on assault weapons during the Clinton administration (which Republicans allowed to lapse in 2004, despite its success in limiting the number of mass shootings) was “the last straw” for McVeigh.

… The plot that led to the bombing began on September 13, 1994, the date that Clinton signed the assault weapons bill.

The links [between the politics of the mid-1990s and those of our own times are vivid: in the assurance that sinister “globalist” forces are either about to take control of the country or already have; in … “the belief in the value and power of violence”; in an obsession with gun ownership that reduces the entire Constitution to a twisted version of the Second Amendment; in a crackpot narrative of American history that turns liberalism into tyranny on the supposed authority of Thomas Jefferson….

The largest difference between now and then … is frightening. Whereas McVeigh … found a kind of community in right-wing periodicals, talk radio call-ins, and far-flung gun shows, the Internet and social media have at once vastly enlarged that community and tightened its connections, with billions of unfiltered rants and orders and falsehoods flashing through the ether….

But while it warns about the present danger, Homegrown also illuminates and bids us to reckon with the larger history of what happened in 1995. Not only do today’s distempers date back well before T____ or the Tea Party; they originated well before the inflamed mid-1990s, taking their modern form during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who encouraged them with his denunciations of the federal government as a malevolent force.

And there is an even longer history behind that. The great revolutions in American history—from the nation’s founding through Emancipation, Reconstruction, the Progressive Era, and the New Deal—have been predicated on the idea, inscribed in the Constitution, that it is the nation, the more perfect Union striven for in 1787, that is best equipped to secure the common good and the general welfare.

Counterrevolutionaries in their various forms—nullifiers, Confederates, so-called Redeemers overthrowing Reconstruction, anti–New Deal Liberty Leaguers—have fought that idea, never more successfully than in the long counterrevolution begun under Reagan. Though resisted and even halted from time to time, that reaction, steadily radicalized, has now turned a substantial number of Americans against their own government, and they are ready and willing to use violence for their retribution. In the process, large and influential elements of the party of Abraham Lincoln—a party that fought against one such counterrevolution—have become captive to that subversive rage.

Our Former President Invites an Odious Comparison

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You’ve probably heard that the first person to mention Hitler or the Nazis automatically loses the argument. That’s not true, of course, but it does suggest that Hitler or Nazi comparisons shouldn’t be made lightly. (This adage is different from Godwin’s Law, which says “As an online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison to Hitler or Nazis approaches 1”.

Yet, these days, with America’s right wing becoming ever more extreme, it’s natural to wonder how far they’ll go. Journalist Brian Beutler names a few names:

We see all around us people clothed in immense power whom we know, to a practical certainty, would have been enthusiastic allies to George Wallace or Jefferson Davis or even Adolf Hitler, and we see many, many more who would quite evidently have made their peace with segregation, or slavery, or genocide as an acceptable moral compromise for maintaining their wealth or social sway. 

It’s a testament to the durable temptation of wickedness—to the fact that “Never Again!” without constant vigilance is a chant of delusion. But it’s also prima facie evidence that we remain insufficiently vigilant, or that a large subset of liberals is in denial about the totalitarian temptation washing over the right. The people would side with us overwhelmingly if they understood the stakes this way, but all too frequently we won’t even tell them. 

Anybody who’s paid to write or speak for a big corporation like The New York Times or a smaller one like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting needs to come across as fair and balanced. That’s a big problem if the subject they’re writing or speaking about, American politics, is no longer balanced at all. What words are appropriate when there is news like this, in this case reported by the Times:

[The former president] and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.

Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.

[He] and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.

[He] intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.

He wants to revive the practice of “impounding” funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like — a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.

He intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.”.

[He] and his advisers are making no secret of their intentions — proclaiming them in rallies and on his campaign website, describing them in white papers and openly discussing them….

“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” said Russell T. Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget [for the former president].

The Times reporters don’t draw the obvious conclusion. In response to the Times article, Ryan Cooper of the American Prospect does:

Donald Trump is plotting to make himself dictator. His plan it to make the federal government his plaything, and many Republican elites are behind him.

When Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia in 1999, he did not become dictator overnight. It took him many years to crush independent media, make the oligarch class dependent on him, and suppress organized political opposition… That process of power consolidation has accelerated since the invasion of Ukraine, as the former “hybrid regime” with some tacit limited freedoms has become a full-blown autocracy.

Trump is openly planning something similar, should he win the 2024 election…. Given [his] history, it’s clear that should he become president again, he will try to set up a dictatorship….

When [he] first came to power, he had little idea of how the federal government worked or even what he wanted to do with it, much less how to bend it to his will….

Eventually, [he] figured out how to get what he wanted. The answer was not to conform his acts to the existing system, but to break it. By issuing hundreds of executive orders, threatening those who stood in his way, and above all installing cronies throughout the executive branch and the judiciary, he could break through the procedures and norms that had constrained previous presidents (which turned out to be a lot more feeble than many assumed).

By 2020, Presidential Personnel Office head John McEntee was running a plan to install Trump stooges throughout the federal bureaucracy even over the objections of Trump’s own Cabinet members.

This process culminated in the attempted putsch on January 6, 2021, which as usual was poorly planned and led, yet got alarmingly close to success nonetheless. For the first time in American history, a fascist mob sacked the national legislature and disrupted the process of transferring power—all under the direction of the losing president, who was trying to cling to power through violence….

The Times report is characteristically stuffy about what is going on here. Yet the reporters got enough [of his] cronies on the record to make the stakes abundantly clear. The plan is called Project 2025—a transition project … with the explicit purpose of making the entire government beholden to [the president’s] every whim…. The only way to satisfy his craving for limitless money and power, and to inflict ruthless vengeance against his enemies, is to turn the presidency into a dictatorship.

[He] won’t necessarily succeed, even if he does win the election—it is unwise for a would-be autocrat to cultivate deep unpopularity among the armed forces, just for starters—but that is what he’s determined to do.

The Hitler of 1943? No. The Hitler of 1933? The evidence is clear.