The South Gets the Last Laugh

I've been tough on the Puritans in recent posts, but I'd like to put in a good word for the historical Puritans, those Whiggish, crusty revolutionaries who had a passion to establish a country inspired by religious and republican ideals.

One could argue that the English Puritans were the first real moderns in the political sphere, and their hatred for the throne-and-altar narrative of premodern Europe led to the Puritans vs. Royalists civil war in England. The Puritan/Whigs won, beheaded the king, and ran the country under Cromwell for about a decade in the mid 1600s.  But the English weren't quite up to rejecting their premodern past so easily as that, so they figured out a way to keep someone on the throne in the great Tory/Whig compromise called the Glorious Revolution.  The Puritans in New England were watching, and said among themselves, “No way we’re gonna compromise,” and their continued resistance to the crown-and-altar narrative culminated in the American Revolution about a hundred years later.

And so the United States became the first of the genuinely modern democracies,   but there was still a problem, namely the South. Because while the oligarchs down there were OK with not having the King butting into their business anymore, they really didn't get the modernity part of the new modern American narrative, and so they continued to live out of the premodern, feudal narrative. They wanted to run their fiefs without any interference from above, whether it be the King or the federal government.  That’s the real narrative behind the “principle” of states rights promoted mainly by the southern elites--"Leave us alone so we can run our duchies the way we please." 

Jefferson was a smart guy, an intellectual infatuated with the most up-to-date modern ideas from France, but when push came to shove, he didn't walk his talk.  He remained a slaveholder aristocrat in the premodern style.  We could call him,  anachronistically, what we use to call his type in the sixties: a limousine liberal. His agriculture-centered imagination of America was very different from the Whiggish Puritan vision typical of the New Englanders, and it's a conflict of visions that eventually led to the Civil War.  Those crusty northern Puritans didn't like that the Southerners wouldn't get with the new program, so after decades of bickering about it, they finally went down there and beat them into the modern age. 

The Civil War in America was really a replay of the the Civil war in Britain two hundred years earlier.  This time the Whiggish, Puritan roundheads won the more permanent victory over their Tory Cavalier adversaries in the South.  But it still took another hundred years before the South really joined the modern world, and that's what we meant when we began to talk about the “New South” in the 1970s.  Or so it would seem.

At first glance it seemed to mean that the South would no longer be a third-world, one-party, commodities-based, plantation-centered oligarchy, but that it was finally becoming  integrated into a modern, capitalist market economy. For a moment, anyway, that's what it looked like was happening.  But really the idea that the south was morphing from a one-party system to a two-party system was a transitional illusion. 

Sure, all the black Republicans became Democrats and all the white Democrats became Republicans, or Reagan Democrats, which is the same thing (Think Zell Miller). But did anything really change at the core of the southern system?  Gradually the South morphed into what it had been before--a white dominated, one-party oligarchy. But now just about everybody aligned with the opposite party.  The party of the northern Whigs--the Republicans--gradually got hijacked by the southern plutocrats, while the party of states rights, slavery, and populism--the Democrats--became associated with the party of federal regulation, civil rights, and the northern liberal elites. 

This is an historical irony that is surprisingly only rarely commented on.  And it has a lot to do with our current political confusion, because the parties we support are intellectually muddled with regard to their historical missions and animating principles. 

The southern republicans have since then worked pretty hard to transform the historical party of the Whigs and to reshape its republican/Whig ideology into a neo-Tory ideology. And I think that this has been possible because while the Whigs won the states-rights argument with regard to the relationship between the feds and the states, it has not yet been won with regard to the feds and the corporations.  And the reason is that they, too, are profoundly implicated in the corporate system, because they invented it.  And that's the irony and the reason for the southerners last laugh.  Because the corporation is where the old southern plantation mentality still thrives--the corporations have emerged as the new duchies, and the people who run them want to be left alone, just as the old southern plutocrats did:  Let us run our duchies as we please. That's really what we mean now by the New South--the same old oligarchic mentality but  transposed from  plantation to  corporate  board room.

The corporation has morphed into something its Puritan creators would never have imagined, and it more than any other force in modern society has undermined the Puritan republicanism that was at the heart of their American experiment to become "a shining city on a hill."  The Whigs won on the battlefield in 1865, but they lost in the longer-term struggle.  Our society has evolved since then into a plutocracy not all that different from the one that those revolutionary Puritans fought against.  We're no longer dealing with a landed aristocracy, but a corporate one. 

And that's what interests me about the way that the Armstrong Ranch has come into the public spotlight in the last week.  For there you have perfectly symbolized the integration of the Old South with the New.  It's a place where republican elites can do their hunting, just like the landed aristocrats of yore, but it's also a meeting place where the folks from Halliburton and Enron can kick back and talk about their partnership with big gummint.  That's what the new southern elites have figured out:  If you can't beat them, coopt them.  Hey, the last laugh on those sanctimonious Puritan prigs with their self-righteous republican airs.  We southerners are the real Americans.

Comments

[Adrienne]

Southern good ole boy John D. Rockefeller would sure be proud at the defeat of the Northern Puritans! ;)

[Adrienne]

Jack, I've read your blog for awhile and I really enjoy your thoughts, but I'm a little confused by your characterization (in this post and in others) of oligarchy as a particularly Southern and particularly Texan phenomenon (and especially when you are discussing corporate oligarchy as opposed to agrarian oligarchy). I've never lived anywhere besides Texas and Mexico, so I may just be unable to recognize some things, but I've always seen oligarchy as something that is a more widespread phenomenon. What do you think?

[Jack Whelan]

Oligarchy means simply that political power is controlled by a relatively small group. It is not just a Texas thing, but Texans seem to be most emblematic of what I’m talking about in the U.S. They do everything on the larger scale, right? But more importantly its their oligarchy which is extending its reach to run things in DC right now.

The best books that support my basic ideas about southern oligarchy are Cash’s "Mind of the South," but even more relevant to your question is Michael Lind’s "Made in Texas."

Lind's point is that Texas was pretty much run as a commodites-based third world plantation (ranch/hacienda, same thing) economy-like Mexico, or any of the other oligarchies in Latin America. It's a democracy in name only. And he's the one that first got me thinking about how the oligarchs of the south, though the lost the Civil War, are winning the longer run struggle to dominate the U.S. power hierarchy.

I'm not sure I understand the John D. Rockefeller joke. The Rockefellers were good northern Calvinist Republicans, and Nelson, the republican governor of NY, was the classic limousine liberal. Jay, the current Democratic Senator from West Virginia, is an example of how his stock migrated from the Republican fold to the Democratic.

[forestwalker]

I suspect Adrienne means John D. Rockefeller Sr.

I share Adrienne's confusion on this one. Can you elaborate on how the new corporatism emerging from Southern culture is a different breed of oligarchs than the Gilded Age tyrants that emerged out of the industrial North?

[Jack Whelan]

Robert & Adrienne--

I guess what I'm point to is how the Armstrong Ranch symbolizes the resolution of the historic north south conflict in the South's favor. The southern oligarchs have figured out that rather than fight the Feds, coopt them. That they can run the country the way they run, for instance, Texas, that the rules of the game are determined by a form of crony capitalism which redirects the focus of the central government from the general welfare to the welfare of the elites, which is the way it always was in the South.

If your point is that the northern Robber Barons were no better, I'd agree. But they were restrained by the two Whiggish Roosevelts, the first a trust-busting Republican of the old principled school, the second a Democrat of the new school of northern big-government liberal elites. They helped to establish a new system in which the government played mainly a restraining role on the the appetites of the big corporations.

While the corporations may have chafed at the restrictions, they acquiesced for the most part, and the country was on a track similar to that taken European social democracies. Even Nixon was talking about a Guaranteed Annual Income.

All that came to a halt with Reagan, who was not a Texan, but he was a soul brother, and he paved the way for Texans and other southern elites to assert their pre-New Deal, 19th-century mentality, and he gave them all reaason to become Republicans. States rights was no longer the name of the Democrats' game. The duchies were no longer the plantations, but the corporations. So they realized they could continue with the old rules of the game through the use of this northern invention. But the post-New Deal corporation didn't interest them. The unrestrained coporations of the Robber Baron era were the ticket, and it has been their agenda to bring them back.

So the question behind my post is whether the southern switch to Republicanism is the final chapter in the Whig North's victory over the south, or is it really the story of the South's victory over the Whigs.
These southern Neo-Tories are the primary engineers in the aggressive dismantling of the New Deal compromise that had been effected by the northern Whig elites allied with labor.

I'm writing this late, and so I fear I'm muddying the waters more than I'm clearing them. Let me know if this helps.

[Adrienne]

Jack -
Yes, that explanation helps some. I will have to check out Lind's book and see if his analysis of Texas politics rings true to me. I would point out that much of the power controlling Texas at the state-wide level right now is very much "New Money," however, and that much of the power for many of the "Old Money" families has disintigrated. But thank you for the food for thought.

[Jack Whelan]

Adrienne--

I think the point I'm trying to make is less about the influence of particular families and more about a mentality or cultural spirit that a majority of Texans and other southerners seem to absorb with their mother's milk.

What worries me is that this mentality is now being exported nationwide. This is the phenomenon that Thomas Frank talks about in his book "What's the Matter with Kansas." (This book, by the way is dead on in its description of the paradox, but misunerstands its causes. His blindspots are typical of analysts whose worldview is shaped by the economic determinism of the secular left.)

But the basic phenomenon to which Frank points is accurate. Ordinary Americans have been distracted from seeing what is in their own economic and political interests by southern and western elites who stoke the fires of cultural resentment toward the Northeastern elites and their Whiggish programs.

It's the tried-and-true, divide-and-conquer strategy used in the South to divide poor whites from poor blacks for over two hundred years. Yankees like me see southerners and others (like half my family) who buy into this politics of resentment as being conned by a very effective,well-managed, and well coordinated propaganda campaign that plays on resentment, fear, identity, empty patriotism, and zombie traditional values.

So what I'm talking about here is the revenge of the resentful, primitive old southern mentality spreading to become what we now recognize as the red-state mentality. This is what I mean by the southern Bourbons getting the last laugh. The people who serve that retrograde spirit are finally finding a way to turn the tables on the northern Whigs who defeated and humiliated them during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

So of course, it's not about particular families, but about a mentality or spiritual impulse. Tom Delay is certainly not old money, but his role is to function as a kind of enforcer or consiglieri for this mentality, which has a whole cast of continually changing players to serve it.

Nevertheless, it's interesting to me that the Kings and the Armstrongs are still at the center of it all. But I'm not trying to say that they are directing American politics from their poolside verandas. They interest me as symbols for what I'm arguing is the triumph of the older, regressive plantation mentality through new alliances with corporate America.

Tell me what you think about Lind's book. He comes from an old Texas family and makes his case with much more nuance than I have done. I read an interview with Molly Ivins a ways back after she had read it, and she indicated that presented a new way of understanding her home state she wasn't sure about, but that intrigued her.