Dana Blankenhorn

Mississippi: The Model Republican State

The Civil War isn’t over. It can still be lost.

The Civil Rights movement isn’t over, either. It is being lost.

Nowhere is this truth more obvious than Mississippi.

Mississippi had about 2.1 million people in 1960. In 2020 it had 2.9 million. It was only two states to lose population during the decade of the cloud. Its economic growth is anemic. Growth is best when federal receipts expand during recessions, or during economic boom times when gambling rises.

If Mississippi were a country, and not getting federal aid, it would be part of the Third World. It tried to build an oil economy, and a lumbering economy, but the big draw is still casinos, which line the Mississippi, the Gulf Coast. What happens when online gambling, and online sports betting, eliminates the need for casinos? It’s a question no one even asks.

Mississippi is a case study for current Republican priorities. Jim Crow never left Mississippi. He just adapted, giving local power where blacks held local majorities, but maintaining power through an all-white power structure that still survives.

Why Business is Becoming Progressive

Most people don’t know this, because the relative positions of our political parties reversed during the Civil Rights era. For most of our history, business has been on the progressive side of politics.

There are reasons. In the late 19^th century, land grant policies that opened the West were considered progressive. In the early 20^th century, regulatory regimes kept input prices low for manufacturers and were progressive. During the middle of the 20^th century, spending that kept demand high was progressive.

It was only in the second half of the last century that business became politically conservative. That’s because resource industries don’t need people. The gating factor to growth is land. Control the land and you control the oil, the minerals, the agriculture, the market. The only people you need are cops and soldiers to enforce your control over the land. The dominant political players of the Nixon era were oilmen, or resource oligarchs like the Koch Brothers.

Know Your Enemy

My biggest frustration with Lefty Twitter these days is they don’t know what they’re facing.

They think it’s Trump. Or Marjorie Greene. Or the Texas Legislature. Or Fox News.

It’s none of those things. These perceived enemies are merely front-line targets. Take them out and there are others behind them.

The Republican Party isn’t in disarray. It isn’t incoherent. It’s very coherent. I’ve already identified where most of its foot soldiers come from.

But the Great Awakening is just one element in a broader coalition. It’s a coalition familiar to any Latin American, from Mexico to Argentina. It’s a coalition that was Made in the USA and imposed on their home nations by Americans. We’ve been at it for two centuries, ever since John Quincy Adams wrote, and James Monroe endorsed, what became known as the Monroe Doctrine.

Kids are taught that the Monroe Doctrine told Europe to keep its hands off the Americas. It did. But it didn’t say the USA wouldn’t keep its hands off the rest of the Americas. We have been doing it ever since. Nearly every nation in this hemisphere has seen an American invasion, either directly or by proxy. Most have had governments imposed on them, and they’ve all been driven by three basic elements:

• Militarists – These governments have been led by generals. Armies and police can impose whatever order they want, especially if they have a bigger army, like ours, behind them.
• Oligarchs – A few rich men can organize an economy however American sponsors want. It’s about controlling the land on behalf of some activity. The phrase “banana republic” comes from American control over Central American countries on behalf of United Fruit. We have also used oligarchs to control minerals, and oil, even tourism.
• Religion – This is how you control a people. You tell them this is what God wants, and you may not question it. The more extreme the religion, the better it works. You put the other race down, the other sex down, and tell them it's God's will. 

Obligations of Capitalism

Capitalism isn’t a free ride. As described by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, wealth carries obligations to the common good.

This isn’t a new concept. The whole story of Buddhism is of a man in mid-life who renounces the pursuit of wealth in favor of spirituality. Even Mohammed was a trader before he was a prophet. The idea is that you spend the first half of your life building wealth, recognize how shallow that is, and spend the back end doing for others.

Against that we have Nietzsche, for whom self-interest was the whole of the law. Against that we have Nietzsche’s acolyte, Ayn Rand, who brought him to America with badly-written novels that were thinly-disguised political screeds telling the poor to fuck off.

Democrats Should Stop Worrying

A lot of liberal Democrats, helped along by ignorant Washington pundits, insist that Democrats are in trouble.

They’re not. We’re just not.

Yes. Republicans have put in idiotic voter suppression laws. Yes, Republicans want to gerrymander. Yes, there are big money groups hiding their support for right-wing causes. Yes, Fox News. I get it.

But there are bigger, stronger, longer-term trends at work here.

Reckoning With The Great Awakening

If any period in American history deserves re-examination today, it’s The Great Awakening. 

Following a similar movement in 18^th century Britain, America’s Great Awakening came in the first half of the 19^th century. Most of our popular Protestant denominations – Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Mormons – had their heyday then.

But the most historically important group were the Millerites. They initially followed a man named William Miller who claimed to know when the Second Coming of Christ would happen, followed by the end of the world. It didn’t happen. But The Great Disappointment led, in turn, to the creation of 7^th Day Adventists.

A version of Millerism has been alive in America ever since. It was the primary reaction to the 1960s. Evangelical and fundamentalist risings occurred in both Catholic and Protestant churches. This was accompanied by rising political involvement, the “Religious Right” that stood behind Reagan, the Bushes, and Trump.

Liberals who pretend that current events are unprecedented, that mass denial of reality hasn’t happened here, haven’t studied the Great Awakening. That, too, was a rejection against elites. Its political tool was Andrew Jackson, who owned slaves, expelled Indians, treated women like dirt, and destroyed the economy along with the Second Bank of the United States. It’s no coincidence that Trump put Jackson’s picture over his desk. His is the same type of movement.

Class Struggle in the 2020s

In the 2020s there are generally two classes of people. (The Class Sketch was first broadcast in 1966. See the whole sketch here.) 

There are the highly educated with their hands on the code. Then there are the uneducated whose actions are controlled by the code.

The result is that instead of having three economic classes in America we mostly have two. Both sides feel bad about it.

The controlling class, understanding that human potential has value, support all kinds of aid to the controlled. We’re liberals. We’re “woke.” We oppose discrimination because it’s inefficient. We support education because we want more of us. Health care, infrastructure, all the social costs that let us focus on the work we do rather than the rest of life, we’re all for it.

The controlled class sees accepting aid as demeaning and they have they pride. It may be all they have, but it’s a potent political force. Knowing that they lack skills, they’re also deathly afraid of being replaced. They lash out in anger at anyone they think might do this – at minorities, at gays, at smart women. They’re focused on protecting what they have.

Tech Needs People

On the surface the economic policies of Joe Biden, Ronald Reagan, and Franklin D. Roosevelt look very different.

They’re not. Each path has been designed toward the same aim, benefitting a dominant industry.

Today that industry is computer technology – chips, software, and the cloud. Look at the latest Forbes 400. That’s where the money is. Found a tech company and, if you’re lucky, you can become a billionaire. Jeff Bezos likes Bidenomics.

What do tech companies need? What is the gating factor to their growth? It’s people. To be specific, smart people. It doesn’t matter what color the skin, what the brains’ sex is or who they love. Can’t get out of your wheelchair? You could become Stephen Hawking.

Educated, motivated, empowered minds are what make technology happen. What do such minds need? Security, challenges, the ability to chase their dreams, unencumbered by other worries. It’s true they need the three-legged stool of capitalism, democracy, and personal liberty. But they also need time to focus on the task at hand, all the time they can get. If you’re worried about your kids or your parents, if you’re worried about your health, that’s mental energy that’s not going into the work. Tech needs all of that it can find to discover the next big thing.

Adam Smith Was Wrong

Adam Smith’s book The Wealth of Nations is treated, by conservatives, with the reverence Marxists offer Das Kapital.

Both are books of political philosophy. Both are also wrong.

Smith’s mistake is the most important one today. He believed that prosperity would naturally incline the wealthy toward the common good. This is true, for some. For Bill Gates, wealth is a responsibility, as it was for John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. It’s a tool to be deployed toward the good of all.

But that’s not true for all wealthy people, especially in technology. As a political force, wealth has generally been deployed on behalf of more wealth for the wealthy. In our time this has created a self-perpetuating economic elite, where heirs have greater fortunes than the men who made them, and greater political power to pile ever higher on their own children and grandchildren, while billions remain Les Miserables,

For capitalism to resemble a moral force, this needs to change. It needs to become as easy for people to fall as to rise. Right now, rising to wealth is a long, long shot, and wealthy wastrel bros go on-and-on. Having power invested in people with no interest in the common good isn’t democracy, it’s feudalism.

The Trump years made this clear. Money can’t be our god, an end unto itself. That’s what Adam Smith believed. Adam Smith was no Marxist.

1876: Original Sin, Republican Hell

Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election are not unprecedented.

Republicans have already won twice this century without getting the most votes. Gore outpolled Bush. Clinton outpolled Trump. If just 45,000 votes in a few states had gone the other way, Trump would have won again.

But this isn’t new. Twice in the 19^th century Republicans won the White House while losing the popular vote. The 1888 election, with Benjamin Harrison beating Grover Cleveland, was like 2016.

It’s the 1876 election that is the Republicans’ original sin.

After 8 years of Reconstruction, with the South occupied, Wall Street was tired of it. New York had never been behind Lincoln’s War. The Panic of 1873, caused by New York greed, was still laid entirely at the feet of Washington. Mark Twain’s least successful book, The Gilded Age, is also the one he didn’t write by himself. Charles Dudley Warner, an essayist, was co-author. It’s as if Mozart wrote an opera with Salieri. It's the very definition of gilded, and history isn't fooled. 

But the book’s name became that of the era. The late 19^th century was truly gilded. Wealth was designed to impress, but it was all show. There was nothing behind it. Speculation ran rampant, and big railroad owners were like wolves. I’m considered out of step for saying this but the Progressive Era’s reforms were driven by Wall Street, by men like J.P. Morgan, forced to personally step in and stop the Panic of 1893, acting again in 1907. The only solution for the excesses of the market, it would turn out, was the firm hand of government. When everyone is a crook, civilization requires cops.