The other half of the ‘Southern strategy’

Population cartogram of the US showing Republican and Democratic bases of popular support

Before I had gone over the wall, both John at EifD and David Lindsay linked a very interesting article from Hamiltonian historian Michael Lind at Salon on the real dimensions and aims of the ‘Southern strategy’, an economic arrangement devised by that region’s elites which emphasises wage slavery, low corporate tax rates and little to no regulation on big business. Read the article in its entirety; it is a good one. Most people are familiar with the election maps which demonstrate a complete role reversal of the Democrats and the Republicans between the 1920’s and the 1960’s in terms of which regions and which ideologies they represented; Mr Lind shows that the states which comprised the erstwhile Confederacy are essential to the Republican constituency. As such, it is to be expected that the Republican platform will reflect the political will of the elites in the region.

There are some notable exceptions to the rule, of course: Lind’s map shows that the ‘tidewater states’ of Maryland, Delaware, Virginia and North Carolina are becoming ‘bluer’ rather than ‘redder’. Possibly this is because they retain an Anglican character from the days when they were settled by Jacobite exiles, and though they do tend to have a more aristocratic mindset, they also value classical education: in my experience many Virginians and other highly-educated near-Southerners are appalled by the anti-intellectualism that defines the modern American ‘conservative’ movement.

For many of the same reasons, the soft spot that many of my fellow palaeoconservatives harbour for the antebellum South still utterly baffles me. I take them at their word that they value an organic order and natural hierarchies; that they prefer the local over the global; and that they prefer the logic of the community over the logic of the market. But the actual structure of the antebellum South (and the proposed structure the current Republicans champion), flies in the face of every one of these things. Yes, the Old South was hierarchical. But it was a total mockery of the natural hierarchy, as it involved the destruction and rape of organic communities in Africa, the soul-harrowing and culture-destroying Middle Passage forced upon them by early capitalists, and ultimately the wholesale commodification of human beings. And far from being an idyll of rural life, the plantation was every bit as much a soulless mechanical monstrosity, a part of the global capitalist system of the time, as any Northern factory or sweatshop: it consumed human lives for the sake of a raw material (cotton) which was then exported around the globe. Not only that, but the South didn’t ‘just want to be left alone’, as all too many of its apologists claim: they actively sought the exportation of their economic system to the American West, to the Caribbean and to South America (where, as slavery was still practised in Brazil, they hoped to be ‘greeted with open arms’), and they deliberately forced their political will upon a North which was all too reticent to return escaped slaves. So much for ‘states’ rights’, I guess.

On close inspection, the economics of the pre-war South were startlingly close to what would now be considered neoliberalism. Indeed, why else would so many libertarians (like Ron Paul, like the Ludwig von Mises Institute and so forth) so readily embrace the so-called Lost Cause? Even more troublingly from a palaeoconservative point of view, why would openly neoliberal politicians like Bill Clinton actively patronise the neo-Confederate cause by laying wreaths at the Confederate Memorial in the Arlington Cemetery and sending supportive letters to neo-Confederate organisations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy? Hmmm...

Indeed, if one looks for assertive expressions of local culture and community in the United States, I have long had the sneaking suspicion one is as likely (if not more) to find them in small-town petty-bourgeois New England, in the farming and mining communities of the Midwest, and (of course) on the Native American reservations of the American West as one is to find them in the South (the birthplace of Walmart and the strip mall). So why is palaeoconservatism so readily drawn to the prima facie conservative (but actually neoliberal) obsequies of neo-Confederate politics?

Possibly it is because of the coalition politics that arose out of reaction to the New Left in the 1960’s which aligned the economic left with social liberalism, and conversely the economic right with social conservatism. Indeed, you are likely to find as much of culture-warrior politics in the popular defences of the Confederate legacy as anything else. But those coalition politics are in the process of dying a long, drawn-out and likely very messy death. The Democrats are rediscovering a politics which aligns economic populism with everything the palaeoconservatives claim to value: respect for life, respect for locality and respect for a transcendent order. Meanwhile, the neoliberals and libertarians amongst the Republicans are winning (with the faux pro-life Romney and the Ayn Rand-worshipping Paul Ryan heading their presidential ticket), and their socially-conservative supporters are being rather blind about the writing on the wall.

A real, effective palaeoconservative politic has to take a careful account of its basic priorities before entering into such alliances. As, it probably goes without saying, should a real, effective left-wing politic. As Michael Lind states, the working class of the South, black, white and Hispanic, may be very responsive to either sort of politics, but first we have to mount an effective opposition to the opportunistic elites who wish to take advantage of anti-union, low-wage, low-corporate tax, low-regulation neoliberal economics whilst pretending to be conservative.