A Canadian friend writes: “News from ‘south of the border’ is one way to guarantee that I will ‘tune out’ the extraordinary happenings there. It is apparent that America’s failure to definitively end the Civil War has finally come home to roost. All the inbred hate and dysfunction has been ignited by Trump. It’s all very sad.”
My Canadian friend is not the first to express this viewpoint; it’s a common refrain in the Great White North, including among the Canadian branch of my own cross-border family. I had numerous pro-American relatives in Canada, now largely deceased, who worshipped Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy in their day, but would, like their progeny, be disillusioned by contemporary developments.
The younger generation, in fact, views Uncle Sam’s Trumpist phase as akin to a politically generated mental breakdown, something they don’t want to be associated with in any way, shape, or form. The US, once the model to be emulated, is now the ultimate cautionary tale.
The notion of “civil war” as descriptive of current American politics has been around at least since the 2016 presidential election; it’s become even more widely accepted in the wake of the 2018 midterm elections, when Zack Beauchamp, writing online for Vox Media, asserted that “the midterm elections revealed that America is in a cold civil war,” pitting rural voters, white Southern voters, and low-educated voters against city dwellers, minorities, and highly educated white suburbanites — a liberal-conservative divide based largely on identity, in which the electorate breaks down according to gender, region, and education in a struggle for the nation’s soul over race and immigration marked by the “political Fort Sumter” of Trump’s 2016 victory.
Beauchamp’s cold-civil-war thesis has been widely internalized by pundits as diverse as Carl Bernstein of Watergate reporting fame and Ted Koppel, former ABC News anchor, each of whom publicly endorsed it in recent appearances on PBS’ “Amanpour & Co.” Significantly, however, interpreting the political civil war concept primarily in terms of racial identity, which Beauchamp’s analysis does, renders it incomplete, somewhat misleading, and above all ahistorical. Beauchamp undercuts his own argument with a key observation. “The South is different,” he says, noting that Republicans did better there with whites of widely divergent backgrounds than elsewhere in the country.
In point of fact, the South is different; it’s a country within a country and always has been. The region’s leadership role in the emerging violence-threatening politics of civil war should come as no surprise, being simply the latest expression of a hard-right conservatism on all sorts of issues that goes back generations.
Despite periodic attempts to integrate the post-Confederate South into the nation as a whole, from Reconstruction through the growth and development of an industrialized New South to the so-called Second Reconstruction of the 1960s, the region has never fundamentally changed. Its inbred conservatism has lain dormant just beneath the surface, ready to reassert itself at the beck and call of the right demagogue - - in this case, Trump. Race is an integral part of that regional conservatism, which has been a continual drag on the country, but it’s only one component.
Southern conservatism’s original philosopher prince, South Carolinian John C. Calhoun, saw class rule and the defense of property against radical Jeffersonian democracy (vested interests of both Southern planters and Northern capitalists) as equally important concerns. The best way to preserve the desired social inequality, he thought, was state sovereignty, which evolved into the famous doctrine of “states’ rights.” From that, all else flowed.
Besides kicking off the Civil War of 1861-65, states’ rights has come down to us as opposition to all subsequent external threats from outside the South perpetrated by the hated federal government on behalf of society’s dispossessed or underrepresented of whatever color. In the 1930s, states’ rights manifested itself in the hostility of the South’s “bourbon” power structure to the domestic policies of the New Deal.
Objects of hate included FDR’s alphabet relief agencies, particularly the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which undercut the region’s exploitive wage structure based on surplus labor. Historian Frank Freidel (“Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny,” 1990) quoted the president as saying, in 1938, that “the South represents right now the Nation’s No. 1 economic problem” because of its “feudal” political economy, a system FDR characterized as resembling fascism.
In addition to opposing the WPA, the South’s conservative Bourbon Democrats strenuously fought FDR’s Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 regulating wages and hours, and resisted the National Labor Relations Board’s efforts to support organized labor. They were aided in doing so by Southern poll taxes that disfranchised three-quarters of poor whites, whom Roosevelt considered among his best supporters. These roadblocks against the New Deal led directly to the president’s unsuccessful campaign to “purge” his party’s Southern reactionaries.
Nothing during this period generated the South’s intransigence like attempts to unionize its work force. Cotton mill strikes led by the United Textile Workers of America throughout the 1920s and 1930s all ended in failure. Southern factory owners, wrote native son W. J. Cash (“The Mind of the South,” 1941), never reconciled to labor unions, and they were substantially supported by the general population due, Cash concluded, to a misplaced adherence to extreme individualism. This exaggerated regional characteristic, he credited to an inherited “rebel” romanticism, a deference to “rightful authority” (the mill owners), and a lingering “Southern patriotism” at war with Northern-inspired ideas like unionism.
The South remains the nation’s premier anti-union section to this day. The national “right-to-work” (RTW) movement spurred on by the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act began there; seven of the first 11 RTW states, including the first two (Florida and Arkansas), were Southern. Presently, half of the 25 RTW states are Southern or border states. The same is true for the minimum wage. Only five states, all Southern, have no state minimum-wage law. Of 11 states with minimum wages under the absurdly low federal minimum ($7.25 per hour), all are Southern.
If we do have a new cold civil war, and I think we do, its origins are not hard to find. Check any good historical atlas. The leading conservative Trump states of today are the same ones where cotton was king, where slavery prevailed, where secession took place, and where the Confederacy ruled. The past, as they say, is never past.
Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.
From The Progressive Populist, March 15, 2020
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