Conserfatives

Timothy Egan nails the head-snapping misrepresentation of poor whites by their Teapublican overlords:

Among the 254 counties where food stamp use doubled during the economic collapse, Mitt Romney won 213 of them, Bloomberg News reported. Half of Owsley County, Ky., is receiving federal food aid. Half. 

You can’t get any more Team Red than Owsley County; it is 98 percent white, 81 percent Republican, per the 2012 presidential election. And that hardscrabble region has the distinction of being the poorest in the nation, with the lowest household income of any county in the United States, the Census Bureau found in 2010. 

Since nearly half of Owsley’s residents also live below the poverty line, it would seem logical that the congressman who represents the area, Hal Rogers, a Republican, would be interested in, say, boosting income for poor working folks. But Rogers joined every single Republican in the House earlier this year in voting down a plan to raise the minimum wage over the next two years to $10.10 an hour.

Instead of voting for their pocketbooks, poor whites have succumbed to a frankly tribal and bigoted appeal that finds fear and threats in blacks, immigrants, and anyone who's different. It's not an accident that the heart of this appeal to the basest of American traditions springs from the South, where it seeks to recapitulate Jim Crow. Never mind what the majority wants, suppress enough votes to keep the aristocracy in power.

The GOP can do this because they've changed the postwar social norm. After WWII, we all knew from the battlefield that we were one nation, all in this great cause of freedom and prosperity together. This made very threatening times for the lords of the manor. They might prosper even more under Democrats than under Republicans (look it up), but they needed greater income inequality to feel better about themselves.

So they took their financial resources and put them to work changing the social norm. Now, we have an entire right-wing media apparatus built for the purpose of convincing their racist teabagger serfs of a thousand things opposite the truth.

But the main new social norm for the conserfatives is the ardent faith that the government and organized labor are the source of their problems, when in fact they are the only counterbalance that exists to the plutocracy that has gluttonously gobbled up all the economic gains of the past thirty-five years and still cannot be sated short of neo-feudalism.

What’s at work here is the poison of ideology. Underlying the food assistance fight is the idea that the poor are lazy, and deserve their fate — the Ayn Rand philosophy. You don’t see this same reasoning applied to those Red State agricultural-industrialists living high off farm subsidies, and that’s why Republicans have separated the two major recipient groups of federal food aid. Subsidized cotton growers cannot possibly be equated with someone trying to stretch macaroni into three meals.

The saddest part: Those people in Owsley County who are made hungry by Republican fealty to the wealthy will continue to blame the government and the United Mine Workers. In a way, the fucking morons deserve to live in a company town. They've failed to live up to their self-image as self-reliant, independent yeoman Scotch-Irish sonsabitches. But the rest of us don't deserve that company town. And their children don't either.

Wingnuts begetting wingnuts

Abstinence doesn't work. Even the fundies have the fire down below. They can't keep it in their pants - too much desire to get into her pants. Or his.

Almost all of the states with the most teen pregnancy are Bible Belt states. The I'm-on-top ten:

1. Mississippi
2. New Mexico
3. Arkansas
4. Texas
5. Oklahoma
6. Louisiana
7. Kentucky
8. West Virginia
9. Alabama
10. Tennessee

Almost everything Teapublicans tell you is a lie. This one is convenient to sustain the inversion of interests by which so many working class people vote as if they made $250,000 a year.

People who defer parenthood have a chance to get educated, to mature before they have to provide for an infant. This gives them a chance to escape the hidebound system of economic and religious oppression that keeps them reliably voting for plutocrats, when those plutocrats in fact despise them.

Massive resistance again

The Tea Party "movement" is yet another case of Southern sabotage of American democracy:

[T]oday's Tea Party movement ... should be called the Fort Sumter movement, after the Southern attack on the federal garrison in Fort Sumter in South Carolina on April 12-13, 1861, that began the Civil War. Today's Tea Party movement is merely the latest of a series of attacks on American democracy by the white Southern minority, which for more than two centuries has not hesitated to paralyze, sabotage or, in the case of the Civil War, destroy American democracy in order to get their way.

The Fort Sumter movement of course has adherents in all states, but mainly the Confederacy actually elects them.

Contradicting the mainstream media narrative that the Tea Party is a new populist movement that formed spontaneously in reaction to government bailouts or the Obama administration, the facts show that the Tea Party in Congress is merely the familiar old neo-Confederate Southern right under a new label.

They'll be coming for my dual citizenship

Michael Lind, whom I first read in Up from Conservatism, is always thought-provoking, even when he and I disagree.  But I can't find anything to quarrel with in this:

[T]oday's Tea Party movement ... should be called the Fort Sumter movement, after the Southern attack on the federal garrison in Fort Sumter in South Carolina on April 12-13, 1861, that began the Civil War. Today's Tea Party movement is merely the latest of a series of attacks on American democracy by the white Southern minority, which for more than two centuries has not hesitated to paralyze, sabotage or, in the case of the Civil War, destroy American democracy in order to get their way.

Nor in this:

Contradicting the mainstream media narrative that the Tea Party is a new populist movement that formed spontaneously in reaction to government bailouts or the Obama administration, the facts show that the Tea Party in Congress is merely the familiar old neo-Confederate Southern right under a new label. The threat of Southern Tea Party representatives and their sidekicks from the Midwest and elsewhere to destroy America's credit rating unless the federal government agrees to enact Dixie's economic agenda of preserving defense spending while slashing entitlements is simply the latest act of aggression by the Solid South.

We have a real national political problem that dates from the very beginning of our nation. One part of it, the part I grew up in, doesn't want to be American if that means it doesn't get its own way.

And its way is backward, reactionary, aristocratic, and often violent.

Why we should have hanged Jeff Davis

Secession was treason and should have been treated as such.

One of America’s worst traitors, a man who had committed or condoned far worse acts against his country than Benedict Arnold, was allowed to go home after his brief detainment in Virginia. But even that lenient punishment was enough to elevate [Jefferson] Davis to Southern martyrdom. Rumors were spread throughout the South about his mistreatment at Fortress Monroe, although Davis himself said the stories were untrue. Until his death in 1889, he found a stronger voice in passionately defending the right of secession and extolling the nobility of the Lost Cause. He became, like so many of his fellow Confederates, an unreconstructed rebel. As one might expect, he never believed that he had committed a single traitorous act; in fact, he boldly, even arrogantly, affirmed that every one of his actions was legal and constitutional. Unlike Lee, he never sought a pardon, which is just as well because he probably would not have gotten it (although President Johnson, who was courting the Democratic Party at the time, could have easily caved in on this issue). But he also never uttered a single word of regret or remorse for the bloody revolutionary war he had willfully led against his country.

It was and is unpatriotic to adhere to the Confederacy.

Why Jim Crow was necessary

Race-blind democracy in the vanquished South after the end of the Civil War would have completely changed the last century and a half. Mississippi and South Carolina were majority black.


Can you imagine those two states leading the civil rights movement! Louisiana and Alabama weren't far behind, either.

Jim Crow - and the Ku Klux Klan for that matter - were necessary to prevent the permanent loss of political power by the landed white aristocracy that had wanted and lost the war. Enfranchised black folks would not have voted for the bullshit that white folks voted for.

Nowadays, disenfranchisement is done by dipshits attacking ACORN and by voter intimidation efforts. These are mainstream Republican activities.

The aristocrats and oligarchs never stop fighting to own everything.

Serbs and Croats

Hard as it may be to believe, the South still harbors people who believe the Civil War ended with the wrong victor. These pro-treason neo-Confederates blame the Union for its unprovoked attack on their peaceful secession (cough, Ft. Sumter, cough). They blame a tariff that didn't pass until after they seceded.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans don't blame their forefathers for holding other humans in brutal bondage. Their ancestors were fighting for liberty! Well, liberty for the landed white male gentry, anyhow...

Defense of slavery is still - publicly - a bridge too far even for these historical revisionists. So they deny that it was an important cause of the war. The overwhelming historical record that proves otherwise? Their heads are too far up their asses to see that.

For the children

I've mocked "for the children" as a political slogan. It's just so touchy-feely.

But of course it's true that Republicans and conservatives enact policies that thin the herd. Even when those in the herd are too young to fend for themselves.

We're not talking about soft stats here, either. This is about living and dying and suffering from poverty.

The meaning of race for me

I grew up white and male in the South. In my early years, I was a Methodist. I'm not gay. In other words, demographically, I'm a natural conservative and Republican.

What made me a liberal?

Race.

I didn't live in Memphis on April 4, 1968, but I did live there as a child in the early 1960s and again in the early 1970s. It was a place where equal rights for black people were very much in doubt. "I am a man" in 1968 was completely on point as a social and political statement.

I did experience my parents distraught and appalled by the vicious and often fatal attacks of white racists on black people and on civil rights activists. How could Philadelphis, Mississippi, fail so completely to live up to its name!

Their liberalism on race was in turn rooted in their experience. My father in 1965 advocated integration of the Memphis City Schools. The federal courts would do it soon enough, he realized, but no politician would move to desegregation in a way that might be voluntary and more successful. My mother recalled the surrogate mother she had had in a domestic who had loved her and been loved in return. Her father had been instrumental in the early integration of one traditionally white state college in the South, only two generations up from a slave-owner (though my great-great-grandfather had freed his inherited slaves in the 1850s before the Civil War).

This history was dramatically different from the norm in my all-white neighborhood. It showed me that I could think differently from those around me, that I could look beyond the Jim Crow consensus, toward justice and my common humanity with all people and pointedly with black people, who then lived subservient all around me. This was my escape from the dull and static conformity of conservatism.

Today I honor Martin Luther King, Jr., for his huge part in delivering this legacy, a gift that is mine and his together.

Why is this?

There could be lots of maps like this one from the New York Times on food stamp nutritional support:

The now solidly Republican and always conservative South is anti-tax as an article of faith, but it suckles lustily at the teat of the federal government. The liberal states, which not coincidentally are the states with strong educated upper middle classes, subsidize the states whose political heroes so often call us un-American.

So what's the problem? Is it that we're willing to feed your black people?

(This graphic, by the way, is great, an example of how informative Internet journalism could actually be. Click on the thumbnail and play around with the app; there's a lot there to learn.)

Who we ah

Until I got to New England, I had no idea I had a Southern accent. My college roommates quickly disabused me of the idea that having educated parents had immunized me against regional speech. In time, I overcame my initial distaste for regional New England accents, and I now appreciate them for their distinctiveness even as they sink into the great gray homogenized mix standardized by electronic media.

Another losing issue

Long run, gay rights are yet another losing issue for the Republicans. That's what it is to be conservative: You drag your feet against progress, but it inevitably overwhelms you.

I know this because I was sitting in a car late last night talking with my Republican doubles partner, and she told me that she had been maid of honor at the marriage of two of her softball teammates. It's the one thing she'll admit we Democrats have right.

Granted the younger people I know live in Massachusetts and they're a self-selected set with some selection bias, but they all favor gay rights. As the old normal ages out into cemeteries, the new normal will be gay civil marriage. Though not for some time in Utah, Idaho, and the Deep South...

Party of senile nostalgia

Rebecca Sinderbrand, my new favorite journalist at McCNN, counter-programs her network today, nailing the Republican retro-fantasy machine. I would of course go a bit further than the nostalgia she sees in waves - these conservatives, like most conservatives I've ever known, may talk about the future, but they pine for a golden age of righteousness long past that never actually existed.

Nowadays, it's the 1980s and Ronald Reagan, but in the 1980s they pined for Eisenhower and in the 1950s for anyone before FDR, even Herbert Hoover and his problems in the housing market. Too bad the mean Democrats wouldn't let the market have enough time to sort out the Hoovervilles.

It may be this propensity for imagining a golden age is what made the Republican Party such a natural fit for white Southerners, many of whom (not me, of course) look back on race-based sovereignty with wistfulness and angry defensiveness.

Imagine the flip side

Atrios or one of his minions has probably already blogged this, but can you imagine Carl Hulse writing about what a problem the Republicans would have if they won a moderate seat, say, Christopher Shays's seat in Connecticut?

Much easier to imagine the column Hulse would have written had conservative Democrat Travis Childers lost MS-01: Tut, tut, the Democrats can't win in the old Confederacy.

Is anyone else sick and damn tired of the reflexive contrariness of the pundits toward Democrats?

Beggar the future

Public education is the lifeblood of American democracy. As the South's record in recent elections shows, an undereducated population is ripe for political manipulation, even against its own economic interest. Of course, there are cultural and social factors at work as well, and the people are not stupid, despite what Hollywood says. I still retain my dual citizenship!

Poverty tracks very closely with poor scholastic achievement, and this report paints a bleak picture that's getting bleaker.

If there's a silver lining, it's the fact that public school achievement has been improving despite the demographic slide in socio-economic status. What, that's impossible? You haven't heard that? You've heard just the opposite?

There's a more than 25-year upward trend in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) - as a whole and every major demographic.

There's good and bad news in public education. Too bad we never hear the good news.