Civil War – The Rise of The South

I mean seriously.

The details of a deal being brokered in the Senate to end both the debt ceiling hostage taking and the government shut down by the Republicans are, to say the least, pitiful.

The “deal” would re-open the government until January 15th next year, and would lift the debt ceiling until next February. In any normal nation this would be a shambolic nonsense. Were this some third world country indulging in such shenanigans we would laugh at the amateurish prospect of yet another round of hostage taking in just a few months. We would decry their puerile and, presumably, corrupt politics. We would point to our long history of solid democracy and the great virtue of representative government with its growth inducing stability.

No more.

No, not any more.

We are diminished. So much so that a mere extension in the grace period before the extremists shoot the hostage is greeted as a great breakthrough.

This is pathetic. It is a stain on our reputation that will take a while to remove. Yet it seems inevitable, and many of us are almost relieved that we could get this much progress. That we were expecting so much less, and that this deal, awful though it is, might still fail to clear the House, is all we need to know about our crisis.

It persists. It festers unabated.

We are in the midst of a non-violent civil war. Our nation is being torn apart by deep fissures that may never be closed up.

I have held for a long time that the United States is an unstable coalition of disparate states. This is undeniable given history. The Civil War was never ended, it was merely papered over. The attempt to break the US apart by the Confederacy has lingered ever since as a dormant threat. The old south was mollified by its disproportionate power and by its appalling anti-democratic – meaning racist – voting laws. Those voting laws meant that its representation in Washington was based on an extraordinarily exclusive electorate. Delegations of representatives were often elected by less than 20% of the adults in those states. So the embrace of post-Civil War morality was never real. The old sentiments lingered on behind a thin veil that deluded the rest of the nation into thinking the south had changed. It hadn’t. It still hasn’t.

What other explanation is there for the radical flip from supporting the Democrats to being the bastion of the Republicans? This is hardly news. Yet it is never confronted. Why did Ronald Reagan, a Californian through and through by the time he ran for the presidency, travel to the deep south to announce his run for that office? To stir up those old racist sentiments and to remind voters there of the affront to their traditions of the Civil Rights Act. It was a tribal and visceral appeal to rally the south behind the Republican banner and to reject the move of the Democrats into progressive and more diverse territory.

We, those of us on the coasts and up north, wanted to leave the squalor of that argument behind. We wanted to progress. We wanted to ignore the past and move, often very awkwardly, into the future. The south didn’t. It wanted to stay put, entrenched in its own very unique blend of religious conservatism, racism, and polite hypocrisy that echoes the mid 1800’s of everywhere else.

To this day its modernized veneer hides terrible inequality, great pockets of poverty, social divisions, and disregard for education. Much of the south’s modern economic rise has been a form of internal globalization. It attracted business by providing a low wage, non-union, and low benefit workforce. This approach forced the old north to go the same route. The south led the race to the bottom that the nation as a whole was forced into by corporate profit seeking policies. This shows up in many statistics: for all its so-called economic progress the south still dominates national poverty, illiteracy, and other impediments to progress.

At the same time much of the great national progress of the last seventy five years is seen by many in the old south – and not a few hangers on up north – as somehow un-American. That is in their definition of what it means to be American. They resist the notion that social programs are helpful or morally sound. To them they are an affront to long held ideals. They use the phrase “state’s rights” to indicate their rejection of the ideas that permeate everywhere else. They deny that diversity is beneficial and prefer to see it as a threat to their age-old way of life. They are deeply suspicious of science and its presumed contradiction of their religious beliefs. Recent history is redolent of all these things.

Yet it is the hypocrisy that chokes me the most.

The decry federal spending and the huge central budget, and yet accept a flood of incoming federal money far in excess of the contribution they make.

This is the division that they least want us to know about. Apart from Texas, the old southern states, that bastion of “small government” politics is the most reliant on government largesse. The much hated liberal north and west coast subsidize the southern way of life, which could not survive without that subsidy. Yet, petulantly, they repeatedly argue for its destruction. It is as if they recognize their dependency and, realizing their own failure, want to doom everyone else to a similar fate. Or that, since they are unable to move forward, that they want to prevent everyone else from moving also.

In the recent crisis states like Florida benefitted from huge, yet anonymous, inflows of aid from elsewhere. As the local economy crashed under the weight of the real estate bubble implosion, its tax base crumbled and the state would have been unable to meet its obligations to retirees had those obligations been on its books. But they weren’t. Those payments come from Washington and were maintained. This represented a massive subsidy of the local economy. One that allowed a quick recovery. Contrast that with many European nations who are facing huge cuts to pensions or other obligations and the consequent destruction of wealth and delay in recovery. Washington’s ability, and the rest of the nation’s willingness, to go into debt staved off a disaster in Florida. The union worked. The debt was, in effect, taken on as a joint responsibility, rather than being left as a purely local one.

Yet this fact is left obscured by the subsequent outrage at the size of that debt. The fact of the source of the debt has been hidden by the newer fact of the burden that it represents.

Such denial of fact, or the creation of convenient fact, has a long tradition amongst those who constitute the rump of the modern extremists they elect and send to Washington. Denial has also induced an isolated, and separate, interpretation of American history and society, one that accommodates the old southern narrative more easily. This parallel history sits aside ours uncomfortably and often in contradiction to it. The tension between the two visions of America only breaks into the open at moments of great change. And we are in the midst of such change now.

That change is demographic and is threatening, once and for all, the predominantly racist view held by many of a white Christian America. That old America is destined to disappear sometime in the next decade or two. Which means the height of resistance to it is only now reaching a crescendo.

The risk we run during this re-engagement of the old civil war is that we lose. Then the outcome could take two forms. One is that the entire nation is forced to accept the traditional norms of the old south and adopt its resistance to change. The other is to break apart and allow the old south to follow its long desired separatist path.

The third possibility, of course, is that we face down this threat to our union once more.

I remain skeptical yet strangely optimistic.

That this civil war erupts every so often tells me that the underlying fracture is permanent and that it can only ever be papered over.

America is a continent full of highly diverse states. The common bonds are strong, but they are not so strong that they are everlasting. That is a presumptuous thought that defies world history. Unless America can locate a common set of facts, a common history, and a common view of the future, then this current diminution, this temporary up-swelling of destructive sentiment, will do lasting damage. It could remain.

The events of the last few years – the great cycle of demographic changing alters the nation’s character and  the ideological failure of Reaganism – represent an existential challenge to a very vocal and sizable minority. They, in turn, have made that challenge ours. They have forced their rejection of the future onto us. They have made their upset ours. And they have shown that they view the union and its governance as a convenience for their benefit rather than as a symbol of something more grand. It is up to us to defend the larger future we see and desire.

The tussle is epic. The challenge is to recognize it for what it is, and to react accordingly. This is not s a struggle over the federal budget, or the national debt. Those are minor by comparison and, in any case, are on the road to health. No. This struggle is about the nature of America and what we, collectively, believe it to represent to us all. We had better figure all that out.

Else we will remain diminished.