Realizing the Aristocrat’s Dream: Universal Slavery

Following up on that last post regarding slavery and the Civil War, it’d be nice to think that now – as we deal with issues of vast inequality and as the 1% circle their wagons and start calling up their lobbyists, their political donors, and their congressmen – the idea of democracy will once again win out over America’s de facto aristocracy.  But perhaps it will go the other way.  After all, America’s aristocracy is doing great right now.  How long before they reinstate a de facto slavery too? 

Maybe not too long at all.  Marie Diamond at ThinkProgress  had a post on Tuesday catching up on what is happening in Alabama now that its “stop and show your papers, schnell!” anti-immigrant law has gone into effect and most of its farm labor has abandoned the state.  Turns out, Alabama’s got a two word solution to that little problem:  prison labor.    

 And as Diamond reports, Alabama isn’t alone:

Replacing skilled workers with virtually free (and sometimes actually free) prison laborers has become a trend in Republican-led states.  Under Gov. Scott Walker’s (R-WI) anti-collective bargaining law, at least one Wisconsin county replaced some union workers with prison labor.  And Georgia is considering replacing firefighters with prisoners to save money. (emphasis added)

So there you have it.  The Party of the 1% is destroying the unions (their political enemies) and replacing skilled workers with free prison labor.  They are driving out the immigrant work force that makes their agricultural industry so profitable and then – rather than allow free market forces to drive up labor costs and cut into that industry’s profits – they’re replacing that work force with free prison labor. 

And the next time you need to be rescued from a burning building, remember that the guy who’s supposed to run in and get you knows that he isn’t getting paid for risking his life; sure, it might impact his motivation a little, but rest assured that the money the state saves will more than make up for your subsequent death and/or severe disfigurement.

Of course, this is an old story in American history.  After slavery was legally abolished, the Confederate states created Black Codes that criminalized “vagrancy,” “loitering,” or simply being on the street without written proof of employment.  Convicted blacks were sentenced to prison, where their labor could be sold off to the same plantation owners for whom they originally had worked as slaves and for whom they now would continue to toil under slave-like conditions.

So I guess my only questions are:  (i) How long before the Republican-led states start handing down 360-day jail terms for jaywalking or for driving without a seatbelt? and (ii) Will 21^st-century America finally realize the 19^th-century South’s dream of the universal enslavement of poor people?

Progress!

Aristocracy and Slavery vs. Democracy and Freedom

In The Atlantic’s special issue commemorating the 150^th anniversary of the Civil War, Ta-Nehisi Coates has an article titled “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?”  Coates is an amateur Civil War scholar and he devotes the article in large part to refuting the convenient fiction that the Civil War was fought over anything other than the issue of slavery.  It really is very good and I highly recommend clicking over to read it. 

This passage in particular caught my attention:

The Civil War marks the first great defense of democracy and the modern West.  Its legacy lies in everything from women’s suffrage to the revolutions now sweeping the Middle East.  It was during the Civil War that the heady principles of the Enlightenment were first, and most spectacularly, called fully to account.

In our present time, to express the view of the enslaved – to say that the Civil War was a significant battle in the long war against bondage and for government by the people – is to compromise the comfortable narrative.  It is to remind us that some of our own forefathers once explicitly rejected the republic to which they’d pledged themselves, and dreamed up another country, with slavery not merely as a bug, but as its very premise.  (emphasis added)

No doubt that this resonated with me because I am still working my way through Colin Woodard’s American Nations. 

AsI mentioned when I first started reading the book, Woodard argues that from the very start the country was divided by the northern states’ Germanic idea of “Freiheit” and the southern states’ Latin idea of “libertas.”  Essentially, Freiheit (“freedom”) held that all people are born free and equal before the law, that they all possess at least certain minimal rights that have to be mutually respected, and that they are capable of self-governance.  Conversely, libertas (“liberty”) held that most people are born into bondage, that liberties are granted as a privilege, that most people are not capable of self-governance, and that only a very few, governing elite could or should enjoy the full blessings of liberty.

Woodard returns to this theme in his chapter outlining how the states subsequently split over the issue of slavery.  Woodard shows that the secessionist states most wedded to the concept of libertas had embraced it in order to justify their slaveholding, and this embrace inexorably led them to the idea that even more people should be enslaved:

There is no question that the Deep South seceded and fought the Civil War to defend slavery, and its leaders made no secret of this motive.  Slavery, they argued ad nauseum, was the foundation for a virtuous, biblically sanctioned social system superior to that of the free states.

When nineteenth-century Deep Southerners spoke of defending their “traditions,” “heritage,” and “way of life,” they proudly identified the enslavement of others as the centerpiece of all three.  Indeed, many of their leaders even argued that all lower-class people should be enslaved, regardless of race, for their own good.

. . . .  James Henry Hammond, former governor of South Carolina, published  a seminal book arguing that enslaved laborers were happier, fitter, and better looked after than their “free” counterparts in Britain and the North, who were ruthlessly exploited by industrial capitalists.  Free societies were therefore unstable, as there was always a danger that the exploited would rise up, creating “a fearful crisis in Republican institutions.”  Slaves, by contrast, were kept in their place by violent means and denied the right to vote, resist, or testify, ensuring the “foundation of every well-designed and durable” republic.  Enslavement of the white working class would be, in his words, “a most glorious act of emancipation.”

[snip]

George Fitzhugh, scion of one of Virginia’s oldest families, became the [Tidewater] region’s proslavery standard-bearer.  In his voluminous writings, Fitzhugh endorsed and expanded upon Hammond’s argument to enslave all poor people.  Aristocrats, he explained, were really “the nation’s magna carta” because they owned so much and had the “affection which all men feel for what belongs to them,” which naturally led them to protect and provide for “wives, children, and slaves.”  Fitzhugh, whose books were enormously popular, declared he was “quite as intent on abolishing Free Society as you [Northerners] are on abolishing slavery.”

Placed within this historical context, Coates’s statement that the Civil War called the very principles of the Enlightenment into account by requiring that violent action be taken against bondage and in favor of self-governance seems all the more exact.  The Civil War was the most violent conflict in the eternal political struggle between – in Jefferson’s words – “aristocrats and democrats,” and in 1865 the idea of democracy won by sheer force of arms.

America Has Defaulted Before. Sort of.

Norm Ornstein has a new article up at Foreign Policy titled: "Worst. Congress. Ever." (H/t, again, to Steve Benen at Washington Monthly) In it, Ornstein reviews how the GOP's extreme partisan ideology has hamstrung the 112th Congress so as to prevent even the simplest and most necessary acts from being accomplished:

[L]ook what we have now: a long-term debt disaster with viable bipartisan solutions on the table but ignored or cast aside in Congress; an impasse of the usually perfunctory matter of raising the statutory debt limit placing the United States in jeopardy of its first ever default . . . (emphasis added).

You see statements like this again and again when reading articles about the debt ceiling: that if the debt ceiling isn't raised the United States will default on its debt obligations for "the first time ever." Except that statement isn't really true. In fact, our country pretty much began by defaulting on its debts.

GOP and African-Americans: Is This a Joke?

UPDATED BELOW

It's no secret that Republicans have an extremely difficult time connecting with African-American voters. Probably this has to do with the fact that starting with Nixon's "Southern Strategy" in the late 1960's, continuing through George Bush I's infamous Willie Horton ad until today with Fox News suggesting that President Obama has a problem with white women, the Republicans have made a habit out of sowing racial division to scoop up more white votes.

But they want you to know that they're decent people and, as this tea partier puts it, "[T]he worst thing you can call a decent person is a racist."

That's true, and so you have to understand that if there's two things that Conservatives really, really hate it's being called a racist, and black people.

Sorry, but -- seriously -- the Republicans and the interest groups to which they kowtow certainly seem to go out of their way to make jokes like that easier.

For example, there is an evangelical group out of Iowa called Family Leader that has put together yet another pledge it is demanding all the GOP Presidential aspirants sign. The pledge largely consists of your run-of-the-mill "pro-family" language -- stay faithful to your spouse, don't divorce, affirm that sexual orientation is a choice and not genetically determined -- but there is one aspect of it that seems batshit insane: acknowledge that black people were better off being kept as slaves.

Well, okay . . . that might be a slight exaggeration. So I'll let the National Journal describe it:

In arguing that the institution of marriage is under assault, Family Leader contends that by one measure African-American families were in better shape during slavery than now: African-American children were more likely to be raised in a two-parent household in 1860 than if they were born today, as the group put it, "after the election of USA's first African-American president."

Just . . . Wow. The mind boggles. Family Leader is insisting that all Republican presidential candidates sign a pledge acknowledging that African-American children were better off being raised in two-parent households as slaves.

Needless to say, Michele Bachmann signed it immediately.

UPDATE: Well that didn't take along. Amid all the furor about this "misconstrued lanugage," Family Leader has dropped the pro-slavery language from its pledge. Michele Bachmann claims -- and this is not a joke -- that she signed the pledge without reading it. So, y'know . . . vote for her.