I finished Heather Cox Richardson’s book, How the South Won the Civil War and I’m ready with a Book Report.
Her main point is that our current struggle between democracy (equality) and oligarchy (MAGA) reaches all the way back to the founding of the nation.
This book is for anyone who says, “OMG what’s happening right now in the US is completely new and never happened before!”
“History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes” (attributed to Mark Twain). What’s happening now differs in particulars, but it’s the same story.
That’s not to minimize this moment. We’re at a crisis point, tipping toward oligarchy (a hierarchy with a few people at the top controlling all the nation’s wealth.) But this isn’t the first time we’ve been here, which means we have a blueprint for getting out.
We start with a question: How could Jefferson, a slaveowner, write the words: “All men are created equal”?
This is what Richardson calls the central paradox of our nation: Slaveholders created a “democracy” while justifying slavery. The paradox has plagued us ever since.
Jefferson and others believed that some people (women, Blacks, etc.) weren’t capable of responsible self-determination. Removing them from the body politic meant everyone else could be equal. The idea was that if you let them vote, they’ll vote to dominate and take from those who are capable. (Screenshots from the Kindle version).
Thus allowing them to participate in politics would lead to chaos, anarchy, and a breakdown of self-governance.
The Plantation System was built on the idea that capable men enslaved (or exerted control over) those who were incapable of responsible self-governance.
Here’s the problem: When you create a hierarchy, those at the very top consolidate their power and become oligarchs. Thus a democracy built on a hierarchy is always in danger of tipping into oligarchy.
Before the Civil War, a few plantation owners consolidated power until they controlled all three branches of the federal government.
Oligarchy harms all but a few at the top. Oligarchs (and would-be oligarchs) get those lower on the hierarchy to vote for them by presenting them with myths.
The plantation oligarchs kept poor whites in line by advancing the following myth:
- America was built by the yeoman, a self-reliant farmer.
- Allowing for universal equality—allowing those supposedly incapable of self-governance to vote—would reduce self-reliant white farmers to subservience because, if given power, the incapable would pass laws allowing them to seize the property of those who can produce.
Slaveowners thus argued that any attack on slavery was an attack on liberty and democracy.
See also this excerpt:
Lincoln put forward another view of democracy: All men were created equal meant ALL men, and the function of government was to create equal opportunity for all people.
For a few years after the Civil War it appeared Lincoln’s view would prevail—but the former Confederates fought back hard. They lost the war but didn’t give up the fight. They argued that a government creating opportunity for Blacks really just meant giving handouts. And handouts required robbing the “capable” of their property and giving it to those incapable.
The former Confederates, by means of domestic terrorism (for example, the Ku Klux Klan) rolled back the Civil War advances until they had re-established Jim Crow and a hierarchy.
After the Civil War, the Confederate ideology found a new foothold on the frontier. The frontier was based on the cowboy myth: A [white] man worked hard, was self-reliant, “tamed” the “savage” land, and didn’t need government help.
This was as untrue as the yeoman myth. In fact, most cowboys weren’t white. “Taming” meant plundering, killing, and enslaving. Moreover, federal regulations made westward expansion possible.
The frontier—like the Old South—was based on a hierarchical ordering of people. Laws placed white men above all others. See:
The industry of the west was labor intensive. Chinese immigrants worked on the railroads, then were denied equal rights. The Mexicans who were originally on the land did the picking. White men dominated them.
Thus a new hierarchy / oligarchy was created in the west.
Richardson touches more on the oligarchy of business tycoons in her last book:
The New Deal wiped out the existing oligarchies and created a middle class. Blacks and minority communities, however, were excluded. Women remained mostly subordinate.
This started to change in the 1950s and 1960. The pushback started right away.
What Richardson calls the Movement Conservatives took root in the 1950s, and took over the Republican Party by the 1980s. Movement Conservatives are not traditional conservatives, and are not traditional Republicans. The movement’s aim was to smash the New Deal.
Notice that they’re out to destroy. Notice also that destroying the New Deal requires dismantling much of the federal government, including social security, workers’ protection, laws against racial discrimination, insider trading, market manipulation, etc.
Richardson explains that since Reagan, Republicans have conceived of an ‘other’ that is destroying American society and ultimately must be kept from power at all costs. This echoes the South in the 1850s, and the 1890s when ‘others’ were purged from the electorate through lynching and Jim Crow.
Richardson’s insight is that Goldwater and Reagan used the same arguments as the plantation owners and western oligarchs.
The argument: There are makers and takers. Takers just want handouts. Giving handouts means taking from those who are self-reliant, thus taking their liberty and destroying democracy. Allowing these unworthy takers power (so the belief goes) will create chaos and the end of democracy and personal liberty. Empowering ‘others,’ therefore, leads to anarchy.
Good Americans (according to Movement Conservatives) must destroy the ‘others’ who are trying to destroy America. The ‘others’ include minority communities, liberals, immigrants, and Democrats. This is what Trump means when he calls BLM protesters dangerous enemies of America.
By 2015, the United States was tipping dangerously toward oligarchy, with wealth and power becoming dangerously concentrated in a relatively few people.
The thing to remember is this: The New Deal got us out of oligarchy and moved us toward a fairness government. What allowed the New Deal was that FDR had a clear majority of voters behind him.
People ask, “How can Trump, an incumbent, run for reelection on the message that he’ll get rid of the chaos that he caused?”
Prof. Richardson’s explanation of Movement Conservatives answers this question. (Some quotations taken from the two talks linked at the end of this post).
Richardson gives the formula (which is similar to Timothy Snyder’s sadopopulism:
- Destabilize society
- construct through language a picture of an “other”
- stoke fear and anger
Then, when the oligarch’s policies hurt their own voters:
- isolate the voters by controlling the media and suppressing those voting to empower the enemies.
This is the part where they try to destabilize the society:
In the Movement Conservative view of things, the recent protests and upheavals are not Trump’s fault. It’s the ‘others,’ the enemies, showing who they really are. Richardson also says that if the ‘others’ insist on political power, the final resort is to kill them. Thus Tucker Carlson can say something like this:
And Ann Coulter can say:
See also these talks in which Prof. Richardson talks about her book:
