This series of posts ended up being quite a bit longer than I'd intended; when I made the original post a week ago I didn't think I'd be writing a lot more. But it turns out that the thesis of this series was worth exploring in some depth (or at least what passes for depth on a blog). For this post I'm going to eschew a summary (go read the other posts!) and instead just offer some parting thoughts.
The Democratic party and the nation as a whole is fortunate that the first candidate to speak directly to this sense of white ethnic anxiety is such a buffoon. Trump's combination of incompetence and ignorance almost certainly mean his candidacy is doomed; as of this writing Hillary Clinton's lead in the polls seems to be approaching double-digit margins. But we should not imagine that Trump's upcoming defeat means the defeat of Trumpism; I expect that the political movement he represents will endure. The Republican party is--like the Democratic party--a collection of factions and interest groups, but I expect that the Trumpist faction will remain the dominant faction in the coming years.
The coalition that propelled Donald Trump to victory in the Republican primaries and which provides the core of his diminishing support today will not go away. His base of white voters motivated by ethnic anxiety stemming from the changing face of the country is going nowhere. Furthermore, having now had a candidate that speaks openly to their concerns, these voters are not likely to be satisfied with a return to the dog-whistling that characterized previous Republican candidates' attempts to court them. They will almost certainly demand a candidate that will continue to address them openly, and in 2020 there will almost certainly be a Republican candidate who attempts to ride the Trumpist coalition to victory in the primaries. If I might butcher an old principle of economics: in politics, demand creates its own supply. And it's likely such a candidate--perhaps Ted Cruz (who I believe has not a single political principle beyond his own advancement)--will have a strong chance of being the party's nominee, by exploiting the politics of white anxiety and resentment while also managing to run a disciplined and even formidable campaign. This country is deeply divided; despite being manifestly incompetent and unsuited for the role of President, Donald Trump will almost certainly receive at least forty to forty-five percent of the popular vote.
The challenge we face as liberals is to grapple with this reality, and find a way to grapple with these voters. Some commenters (such as Chris Arnade, who is worth following) maintain that Trumpism is still best understood as having its origins in the economic conditions facing the middle class. And while it's possible that some of Trump's supporters are motivated by stagnating wages and an increasingly unstable economic position, they are generally not those for whom the economy truly has failed. Rather, Trump's voters seem to be white people who sit a few rungs up the economic ladder. And to judge them by their own words (instead of by inferences about their economic circumstances), these voters are primarily motivated by ethnic concerns: issues like immigration and political correctness. In my mind, these are not people who liberals can appeal to, not without abandoning the principles of inclusiveness and diversity that motivate the party.
It seems that I've been a bit of a trailblazer with these posts, several commentators have spent the past few days discussing the nature of Trump's support. Matt Yglesias makes the same point that I do. James Kwak thinks Yglesias is going too far, but I find his reasoning to be unpersuasive. On Twitter, Brian Beutler more or less agrees with Yglesias and I. And Kevin Drum has a typically level-headed take. While I'm sure the discussion will continue online, for the purposes of this blog I'm done and moving on to other areas i'm more interested in.
Monday, August 15, 2016
Sunday, August 14, 2016
How the Long Con killed the Tea Party
I've linked to Rick Perlstein's fantastic article The Long Con in a previous post. Anyone who seeks to understand American politics and especially the conservative movement in the late twentieth / early twenty-first century ought to read it. The article describes how the conservative movement is deeply entwined with grifters: people who seek to exploit the ignorance and passion of the conservative base to make a buck.
I mention it because I want to highlight an article I came across today in Politico: How We Killed the Tea Party. The article is written by a lawyer who worked for a conservative political action committee, and he describes how these organizations bilked Tea Party voters out of millions of dollars. I don't have anything to add, I just thought that the article was interesting. It turns out the Long Con is alive and well!
I mention it because I want to highlight an article I came across today in Politico: How We Killed the Tea Party. The article is written by a lawyer who worked for a conservative political action committee, and he describes how these organizations bilked Tea Party voters out of millions of dollars. I don't have anything to add, I just thought that the article was interesting. It turns out the Long Con is alive and well!
Friday, August 12, 2016
Trumpism, Conservatism, and the Republican Party (V)
This is the second to last post I will make on the subject of Trumpism and what it means for the broader Republican party. My goal has been to contextualize Trumpism within the context of white ethnic nationalism. My thesis is that rather than being an insurgency, Trumpism represents the mainstream Republican electorate in the early twenty-first century.
Before I continue with this post, I wanted to flag a story in the Washington Post about a recent study that provides some support for my thesis that Trump voters are motivated more by ethnic rather than economic anxiety.
Previous posts in this series:
Before I continue with this post, I wanted to flag a story in the Washington Post about a recent study that provides some support for my thesis that Trump voters are motivated more by ethnic rather than economic anxiety.
Previous posts in this series:
- The first, in which I introduce the concepts I'm discussing.
- In the second post I discuss small government conservatism and point out that rather than being a foundational ideology, it's a rather new concept.
- The third post deals with white ethnic nationalism and link it to our country's ugly history of racism and white supremacy.
- The fourth post links white ethnic nationalism to small government conservatism to show how the former was exploited to pass tax cuts and deregulation in order to benefit the wealthy.
This post is a bit of a diversion. In it I want to discuss the degree to which the Republican base is afflicted by a strain of know-nothingism. The term know-nothing refers to the American party, which was active nationally in the 1850s in the interregnum between the disintegration of the Whig party and the coalescence of the Republican coalition that propelled Lincoln to the presidency in 1865. The party was colloquially known as the Know-Nothing party; the party was a semi-secret organization and upon being asked about the party members were supposed to respond with the phrase "I know nothing."
Of course there are similarities between the policy agenda of the two parties. The Know-Nothing party was aggressively anti-immigrant, a response to the immigration of a large number of German and Irish immigrants in the mid 19th century, while the modern Republican party has often been outright xenophobic in its opposition to Mexican immigrants. But perhaps a strong thread uniting the two parties is ignorance: in the case of the Know-Nothings it was professed ignorance about the party. In the case of the modern Republican party it's often outright ignorance about, well, everything.
This isn't a new phenomenon. For decades the right in the United States has cultivated an alternative media landscape dedicated to the care and feeding of the Republican base. The original bastion was of course conservative talk radio. Rush Limbaugh is of course the avatar of the right-wing talk radio host, offering his audience a steady diet of bile and fury about the latest liberal outrages. Talk radio was in no small part the fuel for the controversies of the Clinton presidency; the place where conspiracy theories about the Rose Law Firm and Vince Foster first took root. Limbaugh is the most notorious and successful of the bunch, but he's only the tip of the iceberg. There is a virtual army of right wing radio hosts, at least one per media market across the country. Incidentally: this is a good place to mention David Foster Wallace's classic article Host, which makes right-wing talk radio its subject.
Right wing talk radio is of course a relative fringe. Far more well-known is Fox News, the primary source of news and commentary for the Republican base. Numerous polls show that Republicans engage in far more media monoculture than independents and Democrats, and the focus of that monoculture is Fox News. "Fair and balanced," tagline aside, it's also well established that Fox News presents a distinctly right-wing view of the world. This extends beyond its editorial content and into its news coverage, both in terms of the subjects it chooses to focus on (Benghazi, the IRS scandal, etc) and the tone of that coverage. Of course it's also well established that people who use Fox News as their primary source of news about the world are less well informed than those who prefer other sources. This is not a coincidence.
Online, sites ranging from the Drudge Report to Breitbart.com to others decidedly less savory perform the task of caring and feeding for the Republican base. These sites feel even less of a burden than Fox News in terms of acknowledging reality, often peddling outright falsehoods and deceptions (Breitbarts series of "sting" videos have been universally discovered to have been frauds; Breitbart is being sued by Planned Parenthood over one such series). Spend some time on these sites and you'll rapidly come to the impression that these people aren't just seeing the world from a different perspective; they are living in another world entirely.
This phenomenon is deliberate. The entire point of the conservative media complex is to create an alternative world in which Republican voters are constantly one election away from disaster. From having their guns taken, their jobs seized, their daughters married off to minorities. Conservative media exists to keep the base in in a state of perpetual panic, living in a world where only Republicans stand between the voter and the barbarian hordes.
Let me make something clear: it's not that Republicans are dumb, though they often seem that way. It's that they are the victims of a decades-long effort to exploit their insecurities. The Republican party has performed this exploitation for electoral gains. And as Rick Perlstein documented in his fantastic article The Long Con, an array of hangers-on have exploited them for financial gain. Indeed, the entirety of Ben Carson's 2016 presidential campaign appears to have been a scam to enrich unscrupulous political consultants. Republicans have been convinced by their alternative media landscape that they are under siege. Furthermore, they have been convinced that they can trust no other sources of information: academics, experts, elites, and all other outside sources are necessarily afflicted with liberal bias and are not to be trusted. Julian Sanchez in 2010 coined a term for this: epistemic closure.
And in 2016 this epistemic closure has bit the party on the ass. The Republican base has been kept in a state of frenzied panic for decades. And all that their leadership has delivered in that time has been a series of tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. For all the sturm und drang over the threat Obamacare presented to the nation, the Republican Congress could not repeal it. For all the furor over Hillary Clinton's emails, the FBI refused to indict her. It's important to realize the depth of Republican delusion: Republicans were not simply rooting for an FBI indictment: they were certain of it. They were genuinely shocked when Director Comey declined to recommend an indictment. Because of course Hillary Clinton is a criminal. Rush says so. Breitbart says so. Hannity says so.
One important function of political parties and elites is to guide the nomination process. This was the subject of the 2008 book The Party Decides, which examines the modern presidential nomination system. The book describes the nomination process as a contest among elites, where elites signal their preferences via fundraising and endorsements. The nomination of Donald Trump presents a powerful counter-argument to the thesis of the book; he trailed badly in both fundraising and endorsements and yet throughout the primaries lead in polling as his more well-funded and endorsed opponents fell by the wayside. To anyone with a modicum of sense Trump was obviously a terrible choice for President. Forget that he's proven to be an awful candidate in the general election: the man is a buffoon. He's a dim-witted narcissist, a bully, as well as a bigot. He's been a disaster as a businessman (as anyone who grew up in the New York media market in the 80s and 90s knows). A character like Trump would never have had a chance in the Democratic primaries, regardless of what policies he offered. But Republican voters--who among all have a well-cultivated sense of ignorance and distrust of elites--chose Trump. They did this in no small part because Donald Trump appeals to their ethnic anxiety; the most common refrain from Trump supporters when they explain their support for him is "He says what he thinks." But they also did this because they were too ignorant to recognize what a disaster Trump would be, both as a candidate and as a president. And their distrust of elites meant that they could not be convinced otherwise.
Wednesday, August 10, 2016
Trumpism, Conservatism, and the Republican Party (IV)
This series of posts has gone on longer than I'd anticipated. This is the fourth in the series. In the first, I laid out my general thesis: that Trumpism should not be viewed as having hijacked the Republican party, but rather should be understood as an expression of the Republican Party's motivating principle: white ethnic nationalism. In the second post I examined briefly the history of the Republican party's conservative principles, in order to show that the small-government conservatism espoused by Republican elites is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the third post, I examined how white ethnic nationalism is a modern expression of racial anxiety and animus. I anticipate making two more posts on this subject: today I will examine how small-government conservatism and white nationalism were brought together. In the fifth post on the subject I will detour on an important tangent: the embrace of know-nothingism by Republicans. And then in the final post I will tie these things together, bringing them back to my thesis.
I've often said to friends that I feel as if I'm living in a Thomas Pynchon novel. Donald Trump--a buffoonish figure whom I am more than familiar with due to having grown up in the New York City media market during the 1980's and 1990's when his buffoonery was on frequent display--is now the Republican candidate for president. It's impossible to understand how this state of affairs came to be without examining how the small-government conservative agenda was operationalized with the support of voters whose Republican votes were an expression of white ethnic nationalism.
Put simply: the Republican party has operationalized the ideology of small-government conservatism by attempting to minimize the taxes paid by the wealthy and by corporations, and the regulations applying to corporations. That's it. They have been largely unconcerned with abstract questions about the size of government, or with the national debt, or with any of the other things they often claim to care about. The case of Ronald Reagan is instructive: Reagan famously passed a series of tax cuts that brought top tax rates from 70% to 28%. He also raised payroll taxes (which are used to pay for social security and Medicare). But of course there is a payroll tax cap; income above a certain level is exempt from the payroll tax. The interaction of these changes to the tax code resulted in both an overall reduction in tax revenues, as well as a shift in the tax burden from the upper class (who saw their income tax rates slashed) to the middle and lower classes (who saw their payroll taxes hiked).
Exhibit two in this case: the Ryan budget. Much ink has been spilled on this subject by various analysis and I won't waste time by reproducing their analysis; you could do worse than starting off with Paul Krugman. I bring up the Ryan budget because he's lauded by conservative intellectuals as a serious person worth listening to, and because the budget itself is such nonsense. Naturally it includes huge tax cuts for the wealthy, and beyond that? It makes some drastic changes to social safety net programs (block granting Medicaid, switching Medicare to a voucher scheme). The Ryan budget achieves deficit reduction by the use of magic asterisks: it simply assumes that the numbers will add up in a favorable way. I mention the magic asterisks to demonstrate how totally unserious the Ryan plan is, and thus how totally unserious conservative intellectuals are. Furthermore, the Ryan budget is in no way a conservative document! It makes sweeping, drastic changes to programs that are at the core of our country's social safety net. Recall in my first post when I pointed out that conservatism involves a belief in small, incremental changes. The changes proposed by Ryan to Medicaid and Medicare are neither small nor incremental; they are sweeping and drastic.
To review: in operations, small government conservatism is neither philosophically conservative (in that it does not follow the principle of small, incremental changes) nor is it about small government. Rather, conservatism since the 1980s has been focused on passing tax cuts for wealthy Americans while rolling back (when possible) regulations that limit corporate bad behavior. So how the heck did Republicans get so many voters to vote for this for so long?
The answer, of course, is by exploiting the politics of racial backlash. Probably the best single source on how this came to be comes from the historian Rick Perlstein. In Before the Storm, he tells the story of Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, in which conservative insurgents were able to capture the Republican nomination and elevate Barry Goldwater as their candidate for president. Of course Goldwater lost in historic fashion; the country simply wasn't willing to buy his brand of conservatism. Perlstein's next book--Nixonland--details the ascendancy of Richard Nixon, who ably exploited white backlash to the Civil Rights movement to capture the presidency in 1968, and then win reelection with a historic margin in 1972. Nixon's 1968 victory was based off of the infamous Southern Strategy, architected by Harry Dent and then famously described by Lee Atwater in the interview I've mentioned now several times.
I recently listened to Ezra Klein's interview with Heather McGhee, where she very ably summarized the Republican two-step by which racial animus was exploited to roll back the welfare state and cut taxes for the wealthy. Two brief quotes are instructive: in describing how Republicans got white voters to vote for tax cuts for the wealthy while cutting benefits that accrue to the poor and middle class, McGhee says, "White voters became alienated from the idea of government and government benefits because they didn’t, in the conservative methodology, benefit them." She then later elaborates on this theme:
White nationalism hasn't been enough to enable Donald Trump. In the next post on this subject I will detail how Republican elites have spent twenty years cultivating a strain of know-nothingism among Republican voters; what Julian Sanchez called in 2010 "epistemic closure." The cultivated ignorance and distrust of elites created a base of voters that are by and large resistant to elite attempts to direct them, which has been crucial to the rise of Trump.
I've often said to friends that I feel as if I'm living in a Thomas Pynchon novel. Donald Trump--a buffoonish figure whom I am more than familiar with due to having grown up in the New York City media market during the 1980's and 1990's when his buffoonery was on frequent display--is now the Republican candidate for president. It's impossible to understand how this state of affairs came to be without examining how the small-government conservative agenda was operationalized with the support of voters whose Republican votes were an expression of white ethnic nationalism.
Put simply: the Republican party has operationalized the ideology of small-government conservatism by attempting to minimize the taxes paid by the wealthy and by corporations, and the regulations applying to corporations. That's it. They have been largely unconcerned with abstract questions about the size of government, or with the national debt, or with any of the other things they often claim to care about. The case of Ronald Reagan is instructive: Reagan famously passed a series of tax cuts that brought top tax rates from 70% to 28%. He also raised payroll taxes (which are used to pay for social security and Medicare). But of course there is a payroll tax cap; income above a certain level is exempt from the payroll tax. The interaction of these changes to the tax code resulted in both an overall reduction in tax revenues, as well as a shift in the tax burden from the upper class (who saw their income tax rates slashed) to the middle and lower classes (who saw their payroll taxes hiked).
Exhibit two in this case: the Ryan budget. Much ink has been spilled on this subject by various analysis and I won't waste time by reproducing their analysis; you could do worse than starting off with Paul Krugman. I bring up the Ryan budget because he's lauded by conservative intellectuals as a serious person worth listening to, and because the budget itself is such nonsense. Naturally it includes huge tax cuts for the wealthy, and beyond that? It makes some drastic changes to social safety net programs (block granting Medicaid, switching Medicare to a voucher scheme). The Ryan budget achieves deficit reduction by the use of magic asterisks: it simply assumes that the numbers will add up in a favorable way. I mention the magic asterisks to demonstrate how totally unserious the Ryan plan is, and thus how totally unserious conservative intellectuals are. Furthermore, the Ryan budget is in no way a conservative document! It makes sweeping, drastic changes to programs that are at the core of our country's social safety net. Recall in my first post when I pointed out that conservatism involves a belief in small, incremental changes. The changes proposed by Ryan to Medicaid and Medicare are neither small nor incremental; they are sweeping and drastic.
To review: in operations, small government conservatism is neither philosophically conservative (in that it does not follow the principle of small, incremental changes) nor is it about small government. Rather, conservatism since the 1980s has been focused on passing tax cuts for wealthy Americans while rolling back (when possible) regulations that limit corporate bad behavior. So how the heck did Republicans get so many voters to vote for this for so long?
The answer, of course, is by exploiting the politics of racial backlash. Probably the best single source on how this came to be comes from the historian Rick Perlstein. In Before the Storm, he tells the story of Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, in which conservative insurgents were able to capture the Republican nomination and elevate Barry Goldwater as their candidate for president. Of course Goldwater lost in historic fashion; the country simply wasn't willing to buy his brand of conservatism. Perlstein's next book--Nixonland--details the ascendancy of Richard Nixon, who ably exploited white backlash to the Civil Rights movement to capture the presidency in 1968, and then win reelection with a historic margin in 1972. Nixon's 1968 victory was based off of the infamous Southern Strategy, architected by Harry Dent and then famously described by Lee Atwater in the interview I've mentioned now several times.
I recently listened to Ezra Klein's interview with Heather McGhee, where she very ably summarized the Republican two-step by which racial animus was exploited to roll back the welfare state and cut taxes for the wealthy. Two brief quotes are instructive: in describing how Republicans got white voters to vote for tax cuts for the wealthy while cutting benefits that accrue to the poor and middle class, McGhee says, "White voters became alienated from the idea of government and government benefits because they didn’t, in the conservative methodology, benefit them." She then later elaborates on this theme:
It’s not really clear why a base white conservative really wants a small government or spending cuts. Why am I driven to the polls to cut spending? It’s in large part, and lots of research shows this, that government spending has been racialized. …By racializing government spending, Republicans were able to get the white middle class to support cuts to the social safety net, and the attendant tax cuts for the wealthy. They were able to do this because the Republican base has always been motivated in no small part by racial animus. Republicans have now spent nearly fifty years exploiting this animus: stoking racial fears and paranoia. Of course the targets of the fears have evolved: thirty six years ago it was "welfare queens," twenty years ago it was urban "super predators." Today it's Muslim immigrants and Mexicans. But the underlying tactic remains the same: stoke fear of others in order to motivate Republican voters. This fusion of white nationalism as a voting motivation in order to secure tax cuts for the wealthy has been wildly successful, but in Donald Trump the conservative movement seems to have lost control of the forces it has long been exploiting.
White nationalism hasn't been enough to enable Donald Trump. In the next post on this subject I will detail how Republican elites have spent twenty years cultivating a strain of know-nothingism among Republican voters; what Julian Sanchez called in 2010 "epistemic closure." The cultivated ignorance and distrust of elites created a base of voters that are by and large resistant to elite attempts to direct them, which has been crucial to the rise of Trump.
Monday, August 8, 2016
Trumpism, Conservatism, and the Republican Party (III)
This is the third post in which I seek to understand the modern Republican party of the United States in the context of Donald Trump's surprising candidacy. The thesis of this series of posts is that we should not have been surprised by his candidacy; Donald Trump's combination of ignorance and overt racial and cultural animus is a reflection of where the majority of the Republican Party finds itself in the twenty-first century. The first post--in which I identify Trumpism as a manifestation of white ethnic nationalism--can be found here. In my second post on the subject I discussed the modern conception of small-government conservatism, and show that it is a very recent phenomenon (n.b., I will have another post up in the coming days examining whether or not small government conservatism is a governing philosophy or just a load of nonsense used to justify tax cuts for the wealthy. Can you guess in advance what I think?) In this post I will seek to provide some historical context for this idea of white ethnic nationalism that--in contrast to small-government conservatism--so strongly animates the modern Republican party
In my second post on this subject (and indeed, on this incarnation of my blog) I spoke of how Thomas Jefferson and the antebellum Democratic party viewed a weak United States government as crucial to the maintenance and even extension of slavery. To understand the modern Republican party (and indeed, modern politics in this country) you must grapple with this country's ugly history with regards to race. That the Republican party of the twenty-first century consists overwhelmingly of white men is not a coincidence; the white ethnic nationalism motivating the Republican party is merely the latest manifestation of this country's ugly history of racism.
The topic of race relations in the United States is beyond the scope of a single blog post. Indeed, it's beyond the scope of a single book; entire academic careers could be built on the subject. I have previously mentioned Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom; this book is required reading for anyone who wants an understanding of U.S. history and U.S. politics. In that work, Morgan details the origins of the slave economy that came to dominate the southern half of the nation for two centuries, as well as the origins of American racism and bigotry toward blacks. Put simply: racism did not happen naturally or organically; ideas about the inferiority of blacks were created. They were created not just to justify the enslavement of those people and the plunder of their labor, but also to separate enslaved blacks from poor whites, whose living conditions were not all that much better than those of slaves. Socially, what the nascent aristocracy did was to create a class below that of the white underclass, and then used class- and race-based resentment to secure their own superior position in society. As bad as life was for a poor white person in the early days of those colonies, it could always be worse. You could be black.
Racism and the halo of associated social ills remained a enduring feature in American society through the mid nineteenth century. So powerful was slavery as an issue that the country fought the bloodiest war in its history over the subject. And while the Emancipation Proclamation and the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution settled the question of slavery, the racial animus developed over two centuries endured.
It's worth digressing here for a bit of basic sociology. Race is a social construct; racial differences were created by society. They were created to justify and perpetuate imbalances between different groups. In the case of black Americans, the purpose initially to separate the interests of poor whites and black slaves in order to protect the status of the planter aristocracy. Racism is a system, it exists within society and like many social systems it creates winners and losers. The winners from racism were almost always white people, the losers were black people. Racism is often (but not always) accompanied by bigotry, which is an emotion felt by and a set of beliefs held by individuals. It is possible to exist within a racist system and even perpetuate that system without being a bigot. Such is the insidious nature of racism.
Newly-freed black slaves enjoyed only a brief respite from the brutal control over their lives that was slavery. As the North lost interest in their fate, Reconstruction came to an end and Jim Crow laws were put into place. These laws kept black citizens in the south in a subservient social position, clearly below even the lowest-class white citizens. Of course the system did not last; cracks began appearing in the 1950s and by the mid 1960s Jim Crow was being rapidly relegated to the dustbin of history. But racism endured. In her masterful book The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander documents how Jim Crow was replaced by a new system of social control over black Americans: mass incarceration.
Of course today that system is beginning to weaken. The Black Lives Matter movement has brought attention to the disparate impact of police violence against African American communities. Michelle Alexander's book along with the work of thousands of tireless activists has raised awareness of the problems inherent in our criminal justice system and how these problems disproportionately affect black people. And of course there is the demographic fact that America is changing. As of last year, the majority of babies born in the United States is not white. It is only a matter of time until whites lose their majority status; they will soon be just one minority amongst many. And some of them are really pissed off about that.
So what does this have to do with Republican politics? Racism is not just a powerful social force; it has been a powerful political force. In the wake of the Civil War, the parties became sorted geographically. The Party of Lincoln was toxic to the states of the Confederacy; whereas the Democratic party--widely associated amongst loyal Unionists with secession and the bloody war--was out of favor in the north. This geographical sorting of the parties might seem a strange thing to us; today our parties are sorted by ideology. But during the century or so from the end of Reconstruction through the 1960s there was quite a bit of ideological overlap between the parties. In my previous post I talked about small-government conservatism as an animating political philosophy of the modern Republican party; during the century from 1865 to 1965 support for this philosophy was at its nadir. Conflict between Democrats and Republicans was not an abstract conflict about the scope of the federal government and the reach of its policies; by and large it was a conflict over patronage. To wit: whichever party controlled Congress and especially the Presidency would be able to grant coveted government jobs to its supporters.
The geographical sorting of the parties meant that there were liberal and conservative Republicans, as well as liberal and conservative Democrats. Conservative Democrats were an especially important part of the equation; most of them hailed from the south and as such they had extremely regressive views on race. Indeed, questions of race and the continued ability to oppress black citizens were at the top of their list of priorities. During the New Deal, FDR was able to pass social security legislation with the support of these Democrats; as originally written Social Security was structured to avoid providing benefits to African Americans.
So why do I make the claim that the Republican party is now the standard bearer of this regressive racial legacy? United States politics underwent a realignment in the 1960's. As President Johnson passed Civil Rights legislation through Congress, he lost the support of the south. Many conservative southern Democrats defected to the Republican party. Others died off or retired, and were replaced by Republicans. This process took decades; it wasn't completed until the 1994 Gingrich Revolution swept the last of the southern Democrats out of Congress.
The Republican party deliberately cultivated bigoted voters. In my first post on this subject I mentioned Lee Atwater's famous interview on the subject. I also mentioned Ronald Reagan's calculated speech on states' rights (which in the south is code for the right to discriminate against black people). The Republican electoral playbook in the 1980s and 1990s was to exploit racial resentment in order to justify gutting the social safety net and lowering taxes. Welfare benefits had to be cut because welfare was going to those people, where those people were inevitably black. It worked.
Of course the Republican party no longer stands for overt racism, or at least it no longer claims to. This is belied by the fact that a host of its policies achieve overtly racist ends, from the gutting of the social safety net to its historical support for mass incarceration to the more modern phenomenon of voting restrictions which are usually targeted to reduce minority turnout (the recent example in North Carolina is particularly flagrant and repulsive). I believe it indisputable that the Republican party--like the rest of the country--has been slowly (if reluctantly) been moving in the right direction on questions of race and racism. Which is why I identify the Trump movement as one of white ethnic nationalism, not of white racism. As I mentioned previously, the racial hierarchy created back in the early decades of the Virginia colony created winners and losers; it created a system in which all whites--regardless of their place in society--enjoyed a privileged position relative to blacks. That system is steadily breaking down, which necessarily means a loss of privilege. Furthermore, as I again previously mentioned, whites will soon be a minority in this country. For the first time in nearly four hundred years, white people across the nation face the prospect of not occupying the dominant position in our society. This creates a perhaps understandable sense of unease, even resentment. And it is this sense of unease and resentment that I call white ethnic nationalism.
Let me be clear: I do not claim that a majority or even a significant minority of the Republican party are bigots. I claim only that a majority of the Republican party has benefited and continues to benefit from racism; because of the racialized structure of our society they occupy a superior position than they might otherwise. They probably do not see their superior position in society in these terms, which is an understandable defense mechanism. But that does not make it true. And these people are now facing the steady erosion of their superior position. This leads to the anxiety and animus that animates white ethnic nationalism.
In manipulating the politics of racial animus and then white ethnic nationalism for electoral gain, the Republican party gathered the forces that Donald Trump has unleashed. For nearly forty years they directed these forces towards conservative ends: dismantling the social safety net, and passing tax cuts for the wealthiest members of our society. Of course there is one more element of Trumpism I haven't yet mentioned: a sort of cultivated ignorance, a deliberate and even delighted-in know-nothingism that manifests in a rejection of all things considered to be "elite," whether it be scientists or political experts. In my next post on this subject I will describe how the cultivation of white ethnic nationalism combined with a decades-long diet of know-nothingism served up by the likes of Fox News lead inevitably to The Donald being the Republican nominee in 2016.
edit: I was just reminded of a fantastic book on the subject of how race and Republicans' tax-cutting fanaticism interacted: Thomas and Mary Edsall's Chain Reaction. It's a bit older, but still a fantastic read.
In my second post on this subject (and indeed, on this incarnation of my blog) I spoke of how Thomas Jefferson and the antebellum Democratic party viewed a weak United States government as crucial to the maintenance and even extension of slavery. To understand the modern Republican party (and indeed, modern politics in this country) you must grapple with this country's ugly history with regards to race. That the Republican party of the twenty-first century consists overwhelmingly of white men is not a coincidence; the white ethnic nationalism motivating the Republican party is merely the latest manifestation of this country's ugly history of racism.
The topic of race relations in the United States is beyond the scope of a single blog post. Indeed, it's beyond the scope of a single book; entire academic careers could be built on the subject. I have previously mentioned Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom; this book is required reading for anyone who wants an understanding of U.S. history and U.S. politics. In that work, Morgan details the origins of the slave economy that came to dominate the southern half of the nation for two centuries, as well as the origins of American racism and bigotry toward blacks. Put simply: racism did not happen naturally or organically; ideas about the inferiority of blacks were created. They were created not just to justify the enslavement of those people and the plunder of their labor, but also to separate enslaved blacks from poor whites, whose living conditions were not all that much better than those of slaves. Socially, what the nascent aristocracy did was to create a class below that of the white underclass, and then used class- and race-based resentment to secure their own superior position in society. As bad as life was for a poor white person in the early days of those colonies, it could always be worse. You could be black.
Racism and the halo of associated social ills remained a enduring feature in American society through the mid nineteenth century. So powerful was slavery as an issue that the country fought the bloodiest war in its history over the subject. And while the Emancipation Proclamation and the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution settled the question of slavery, the racial animus developed over two centuries endured.
It's worth digressing here for a bit of basic sociology. Race is a social construct; racial differences were created by society. They were created to justify and perpetuate imbalances between different groups. In the case of black Americans, the purpose initially to separate the interests of poor whites and black slaves in order to protect the status of the planter aristocracy. Racism is a system, it exists within society and like many social systems it creates winners and losers. The winners from racism were almost always white people, the losers were black people. Racism is often (but not always) accompanied by bigotry, which is an emotion felt by and a set of beliefs held by individuals. It is possible to exist within a racist system and even perpetuate that system without being a bigot. Such is the insidious nature of racism.
Newly-freed black slaves enjoyed only a brief respite from the brutal control over their lives that was slavery. As the North lost interest in their fate, Reconstruction came to an end and Jim Crow laws were put into place. These laws kept black citizens in the south in a subservient social position, clearly below even the lowest-class white citizens. Of course the system did not last; cracks began appearing in the 1950s and by the mid 1960s Jim Crow was being rapidly relegated to the dustbin of history. But racism endured. In her masterful book The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander documents how Jim Crow was replaced by a new system of social control over black Americans: mass incarceration.
Of course today that system is beginning to weaken. The Black Lives Matter movement has brought attention to the disparate impact of police violence against African American communities. Michelle Alexander's book along with the work of thousands of tireless activists has raised awareness of the problems inherent in our criminal justice system and how these problems disproportionately affect black people. And of course there is the demographic fact that America is changing. As of last year, the majority of babies born in the United States is not white. It is only a matter of time until whites lose their majority status; they will soon be just one minority amongst many. And some of them are really pissed off about that.
So what does this have to do with Republican politics? Racism is not just a powerful social force; it has been a powerful political force. In the wake of the Civil War, the parties became sorted geographically. The Party of Lincoln was toxic to the states of the Confederacy; whereas the Democratic party--widely associated amongst loyal Unionists with secession and the bloody war--was out of favor in the north. This geographical sorting of the parties might seem a strange thing to us; today our parties are sorted by ideology. But during the century or so from the end of Reconstruction through the 1960s there was quite a bit of ideological overlap between the parties. In my previous post I talked about small-government conservatism as an animating political philosophy of the modern Republican party; during the century from 1865 to 1965 support for this philosophy was at its nadir. Conflict between Democrats and Republicans was not an abstract conflict about the scope of the federal government and the reach of its policies; by and large it was a conflict over patronage. To wit: whichever party controlled Congress and especially the Presidency would be able to grant coveted government jobs to its supporters.
The geographical sorting of the parties meant that there were liberal and conservative Republicans, as well as liberal and conservative Democrats. Conservative Democrats were an especially important part of the equation; most of them hailed from the south and as such they had extremely regressive views on race. Indeed, questions of race and the continued ability to oppress black citizens were at the top of their list of priorities. During the New Deal, FDR was able to pass social security legislation with the support of these Democrats; as originally written Social Security was structured to avoid providing benefits to African Americans.
So why do I make the claim that the Republican party is now the standard bearer of this regressive racial legacy? United States politics underwent a realignment in the 1960's. As President Johnson passed Civil Rights legislation through Congress, he lost the support of the south. Many conservative southern Democrats defected to the Republican party. Others died off or retired, and were replaced by Republicans. This process took decades; it wasn't completed until the 1994 Gingrich Revolution swept the last of the southern Democrats out of Congress.
The Republican party deliberately cultivated bigoted voters. In my first post on this subject I mentioned Lee Atwater's famous interview on the subject. I also mentioned Ronald Reagan's calculated speech on states' rights (which in the south is code for the right to discriminate against black people). The Republican electoral playbook in the 1980s and 1990s was to exploit racial resentment in order to justify gutting the social safety net and lowering taxes. Welfare benefits had to be cut because welfare was going to those people, where those people were inevitably black. It worked.
Of course the Republican party no longer stands for overt racism, or at least it no longer claims to. This is belied by the fact that a host of its policies achieve overtly racist ends, from the gutting of the social safety net to its historical support for mass incarceration to the more modern phenomenon of voting restrictions which are usually targeted to reduce minority turnout (the recent example in North Carolina is particularly flagrant and repulsive). I believe it indisputable that the Republican party--like the rest of the country--has been slowly (if reluctantly) been moving in the right direction on questions of race and racism. Which is why I identify the Trump movement as one of white ethnic nationalism, not of white racism. As I mentioned previously, the racial hierarchy created back in the early decades of the Virginia colony created winners and losers; it created a system in which all whites--regardless of their place in society--enjoyed a privileged position relative to blacks. That system is steadily breaking down, which necessarily means a loss of privilege. Furthermore, as I again previously mentioned, whites will soon be a minority in this country. For the first time in nearly four hundred years, white people across the nation face the prospect of not occupying the dominant position in our society. This creates a perhaps understandable sense of unease, even resentment. And it is this sense of unease and resentment that I call white ethnic nationalism.
Let me be clear: I do not claim that a majority or even a significant minority of the Republican party are bigots. I claim only that a majority of the Republican party has benefited and continues to benefit from racism; because of the racialized structure of our society they occupy a superior position than they might otherwise. They probably do not see their superior position in society in these terms, which is an understandable defense mechanism. But that does not make it true. And these people are now facing the steady erosion of their superior position. This leads to the anxiety and animus that animates white ethnic nationalism.
In manipulating the politics of racial animus and then white ethnic nationalism for electoral gain, the Republican party gathered the forces that Donald Trump has unleashed. For nearly forty years they directed these forces towards conservative ends: dismantling the social safety net, and passing tax cuts for the wealthiest members of our society. Of course there is one more element of Trumpism I haven't yet mentioned: a sort of cultivated ignorance, a deliberate and even delighted-in know-nothingism that manifests in a rejection of all things considered to be "elite," whether it be scientists or political experts. In my next post on this subject I will describe how the cultivation of white ethnic nationalism combined with a decades-long diet of know-nothingism served up by the likes of Fox News lead inevitably to The Donald being the Republican nominee in 2016.
edit: I was just reminded of a fantastic book on the subject of how race and Republicans' tax-cutting fanaticism interacted: Thomas and Mary Edsall's Chain Reaction. It's a bit older, but still a fantastic read.
Sunday, August 7, 2016
In Review: Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton
I'll get back to talking about the conservative movement in America tomorrow. Today I wanted to write a bit about a book I mentioned in yesterday's post: Sven Beckert's amazing Empire of Cotton.
I am of course late to the party on this one; The New York Times named it one of its ten best books of 2015. It's a bestseller on Amazon, #1 in Fashion and Textile Business, which category seems to be heavier on the fashion than the textiles. It was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Undoubtedly it's destined to win some other awards. The book provides a global history of the cotton industry, from about the mid seventeenth through the twentieth century. But what it really provides--and what I found fascinating--was a history of the birth of modern capitalism. Here I'll go ahead and provide a blurb courtesy of Amazon:
Rather than review the book--which frankly I'm not well suited for, on account of my own limitations as well as a failure to take notes and highlight and all of the attendant stuff that goes along with reading a book one intends to review--I'll just provide three things I took away that I thought were worth further considering.
The rise of modern capitalism was linked to and enabled by the rise of the modern state
Briefly, Beckert's history begins in the late mercantile error. Mercantilism was the dominant economic theory of the time; it emphasized net gold flows (inward flows good, outward flows bad) as the metric by which an economy's health should be judged. During this era most gold flows came by seizing it from the New World. Beckert describes this transitioning to what he dubs "War capitalism," which still had violent expropriation at its heart, but was directed increasingly by and for the benefit of growing industrial interests, specifically in England, and--at least so far as his narrative is concerned--specifically for the burgeoning cotton industry.
The cotton industry required three things, and the state was grown and employed to obtain two of them. The first was land upon which to grow cotton. The second was labor, both for the growing of cotton and for its processing. The third was capital: the machines and later financial instruments needed to convert cotton into thread, and thread to cloth. War capitalism was instrumental in acquiring the first two. The British of course administered India as an imperial holding, and it was India that at the dawn of the narrative provided the bulk of the world's supply of raw cotton. But Indian cotton production was unable to keep up with the voracious demands of the burgeoning industry in England and continental Europe. Of course India was supplanted by the US South, which embodied war capitalism in that the labor of millions of African slaves was violently expropriated by slaveholders, with support (tacit and overt) of the government. Beckert documents elsewhere how nations (primarily European) grew in state power, and exercised that power to acquire land and labor for the growing of cotton. The goal in all cases was to induce a population to practice something approaching agricultural monoculture: to focus on the growth of cotton above all other crops, including those needed for survival. The foods and other goods required for survival would be purchased with revenue paid for the production of cotton. Of course in many cases the populations in question resisted, and I'll return to that resistance later in this post.
Beckert then describes how war capitalism transitioned into industrial capitalism. Imperialism solved the problem of finding territory on which to grow cotton, and slavery in the United States (at least temporarily) solved the problem of finding labor to cultivate the plant. But of course cultivation was only the first step; the plant needed to be turned into thread, and thread into cloth. This process was originally performed by individual households, a process known as "putting out" work in which individuals (usually women) were employed to perform spinning and weaving at home. Putting out work provided some small supplementary income for those practicing subsistence agriculture. However the production of cotton on a truly industrial scale was impossible to achieve with putting out work; labor had to be marshaled to serve in factories, many of which ran day and night (Two twelve-hour shifts was the norm).
As with the acquisition of land, the marshaling of labor on an industrialized scale was accomplished by the state. States were given increasing power to push individuals into these factories. In some case the push was indirect: in the form of taxes levied that compelled households to send members to a factory in order to earn cash wages with which to pay the tax. In other cases the push was direct: laws against vagrancy and idling were passed in order to create a convict population that could be put to work in the factories. On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and in both England and continental Europe, state power was employed to marshal the labor necessary to power the looms and gins and spinners.
Finally the state aided the growth of the empire via the development of infrastructure. One recurring theme of the history was the difficulty in getting agricultural populations to practice cotton monoculture; Beckert documents how the British government created railroads in India that allowed the extension of imperial power such that they were able to push previously resistant Indian farmers into cotton monoculture. Railroads, canals, and other forms of transportation infrastructure expanded both the depth and breadth of the empire, and were all managed and provided by increasingly powerful states.
Needless to say, this history of modern capitalism--one in which the state plays a central role in marshaling necessary resources--is contra the laissez-faire version of capitalism promoted in the modern era. And in fact Beckert shows at the end of his history that the modern corporations that now dominate the Empire of Cotton have by and large slipped state controls, operating in a laissez-faire wold in which prices--both those paid for labor, and for the empire's titular raw product--are pushed ever further downward.
Capitalism is adaptable and ever-changing
The empire described by Beckert was not static, and at different time in its history the profits were distributed to different players. In the Antebellum era, merchants pocketed a disproportionate share of the profits generated by cotton production. These merchants purchased cotton in ports in the United States, and ensured its safe delivery to ports in England in Europe. Later they were supplanted by more modern financial instruments--futures contracts--that allowed producers to purchase cotton in the abstract and drove the merchants out. Financiers of course profited, both by selling these contracts, and by offering loans to the planters who were responsible for producing the raw crop. Cotton factories in England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century were fantastically profitable; but eventually were squeezed out by production in India and China. Antebellum plantation owners in the U.S. South enjoyed great profits by violently seizing the labor of black slaves, though their profits evaporated in the wake of the US Civil War as the broader empire sought and found other sources of cotton. In the modern day, the current rulers of the empire are the large corporations that purchase finished cotton goods: clothing designers and retailers like Wal-Mart. Today the planters and even the producers of cotton goods see their profits tightly squeezed. The history of which players were "winners" in the global empire provides a reminder that the specific configuration of an economic market is always a transitory thing, that even powerful players can fall by the wayside as circumstances around them change.
Furthermore, capitalism as embodied in the Empire of Cotton was able to adapt to changing circumstances. On the eve of the United States Civil War there was a widely-held belief that cotton monoculture was not possible without slave labor; the U.S. South dominated the market. But as a blockade choked off the supply of cotton from this region and sent the price of raw cotton skyrocketing, the empire was able to adapt, finding new sources of cotton and new ways to push agricultural monoculture into hitherto unreachable territories such as India and China. This in defiance of the "Cotton is King" predictions on both sides of the Atlantic that the South would be able to eventually win the war, owing to European industry's dependence on slave-cultivated cotton.
Individuals resisted being brought into the market
A few times now I've mentioned the continuous push toward agricultural monoculture, and the degree to which it was resisted by farmers. The reason for this was simple: despite the promise (rarely realized) of wealth to be had by raising cash crops, agricultural monoculture came with significant risks. Subsistence agriculture (with perhaps a side helping of putting out work) was tedious and provided a standard of living best described today as intolerable, but it also came with a great deal of risk mitigation. To wit: the failure of a single crop was not catastrophic. On the contrary, for a farmer raising only cotton, failure of a crop represented a disaster, perhaps a fatal one. Throughout the world farmers ranging from Egypt to India to China resisted pressure to practice agricultural monoculture.
And it turns out they did this with good reason. With the exception of antebellum slave plantations, most cotton agriculture was not profitable. Farmers were squeezed both by the ever-falling price of cotton and by high interest rates charged for borrowing money to purchase seeds, equipment, food, and clothing. As I mentioned above, eventually this resistance was overcome, often via the direct application of government force. Nonetheless, I found this resistance--this rejection of modern market capitalism--to be a powerful reminder that capitalism is not the natural order of things; that markets are man-made creations and subject to human influence.
Obviously the book has a lot more to take from it, especially if you geek out on the details of the textile industry (I don't). But for those of us interested in economic history it's a remarkably well-researched, fascinating take on the rise of industrial capitalism and the modern nation-state. Very highly recommended!
edit 1: edited to reflect the correct spelling of "laissez-faire," this edit also reflecting my lacking as both a speller of french and also probably as an economist.
I am of course late to the party on this one; The New York Times named it one of its ten best books of 2015. It's a bestseller on Amazon, #1 in Fashion and Textile Business, which category seems to be heavier on the fashion than the textiles. It was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Undoubtedly it's destined to win some other awards. The book provides a global history of the cotton industry, from about the mid seventeenth through the twentieth century. But what it really provides--and what I found fascinating--was a history of the birth of modern capitalism. Here I'll go ahead and provide a blurb courtesy of Amazon:
The empire of cotton was, from the beginning, a fulcrum of constant global struggle between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, workers and factory owners. Sven Beckert makes clear how these forces ushered in the world of modern capitalism, including the vast wealth and disturbing inequalities that are with us today.
In a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful politicians recast the world’s most significant manufacturing industry, combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to make and remake global capitalism. The result is a book as unsettling as it is enlightening: a book that brilliantly weaves together the story of cotton with how the present global world came to exist.(Incidentally, as usual the one-star reviews on Amazon are worth reading if you're bored and looking for some amusement).
Rather than review the book--which frankly I'm not well suited for, on account of my own limitations as well as a failure to take notes and highlight and all of the attendant stuff that goes along with reading a book one intends to review--I'll just provide three things I took away that I thought were worth further considering.
The rise of modern capitalism was linked to and enabled by the rise of the modern state
Briefly, Beckert's history begins in the late mercantile error. Mercantilism was the dominant economic theory of the time; it emphasized net gold flows (inward flows good, outward flows bad) as the metric by which an economy's health should be judged. During this era most gold flows came by seizing it from the New World. Beckert describes this transitioning to what he dubs "War capitalism," which still had violent expropriation at its heart, but was directed increasingly by and for the benefit of growing industrial interests, specifically in England, and--at least so far as his narrative is concerned--specifically for the burgeoning cotton industry.
The cotton industry required three things, and the state was grown and employed to obtain two of them. The first was land upon which to grow cotton. The second was labor, both for the growing of cotton and for its processing. The third was capital: the machines and later financial instruments needed to convert cotton into thread, and thread to cloth. War capitalism was instrumental in acquiring the first two. The British of course administered India as an imperial holding, and it was India that at the dawn of the narrative provided the bulk of the world's supply of raw cotton. But Indian cotton production was unable to keep up with the voracious demands of the burgeoning industry in England and continental Europe. Of course India was supplanted by the US South, which embodied war capitalism in that the labor of millions of African slaves was violently expropriated by slaveholders, with support (tacit and overt) of the government. Beckert documents elsewhere how nations (primarily European) grew in state power, and exercised that power to acquire land and labor for the growing of cotton. The goal in all cases was to induce a population to practice something approaching agricultural monoculture: to focus on the growth of cotton above all other crops, including those needed for survival. The foods and other goods required for survival would be purchased with revenue paid for the production of cotton. Of course in many cases the populations in question resisted, and I'll return to that resistance later in this post.
Beckert then describes how war capitalism transitioned into industrial capitalism. Imperialism solved the problem of finding territory on which to grow cotton, and slavery in the United States (at least temporarily) solved the problem of finding labor to cultivate the plant. But of course cultivation was only the first step; the plant needed to be turned into thread, and thread into cloth. This process was originally performed by individual households, a process known as "putting out" work in which individuals (usually women) were employed to perform spinning and weaving at home. Putting out work provided some small supplementary income for those practicing subsistence agriculture. However the production of cotton on a truly industrial scale was impossible to achieve with putting out work; labor had to be marshaled to serve in factories, many of which ran day and night (Two twelve-hour shifts was the norm).
As with the acquisition of land, the marshaling of labor on an industrialized scale was accomplished by the state. States were given increasing power to push individuals into these factories. In some case the push was indirect: in the form of taxes levied that compelled households to send members to a factory in order to earn cash wages with which to pay the tax. In other cases the push was direct: laws against vagrancy and idling were passed in order to create a convict population that could be put to work in the factories. On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and in both England and continental Europe, state power was employed to marshal the labor necessary to power the looms and gins and spinners.
Finally the state aided the growth of the empire via the development of infrastructure. One recurring theme of the history was the difficulty in getting agricultural populations to practice cotton monoculture; Beckert documents how the British government created railroads in India that allowed the extension of imperial power such that they were able to push previously resistant Indian farmers into cotton monoculture. Railroads, canals, and other forms of transportation infrastructure expanded both the depth and breadth of the empire, and were all managed and provided by increasingly powerful states.
Needless to say, this history of modern capitalism--one in which the state plays a central role in marshaling necessary resources--is contra the laissez-faire version of capitalism promoted in the modern era. And in fact Beckert shows at the end of his history that the modern corporations that now dominate the Empire of Cotton have by and large slipped state controls, operating in a laissez-faire wold in which prices--both those paid for labor, and for the empire's titular raw product--are pushed ever further downward.
Capitalism is adaptable and ever-changing
The empire described by Beckert was not static, and at different time in its history the profits were distributed to different players. In the Antebellum era, merchants pocketed a disproportionate share of the profits generated by cotton production. These merchants purchased cotton in ports in the United States, and ensured its safe delivery to ports in England in Europe. Later they were supplanted by more modern financial instruments--futures contracts--that allowed producers to purchase cotton in the abstract and drove the merchants out. Financiers of course profited, both by selling these contracts, and by offering loans to the planters who were responsible for producing the raw crop. Cotton factories in England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century were fantastically profitable; but eventually were squeezed out by production in India and China. Antebellum plantation owners in the U.S. South enjoyed great profits by violently seizing the labor of black slaves, though their profits evaporated in the wake of the US Civil War as the broader empire sought and found other sources of cotton. In the modern day, the current rulers of the empire are the large corporations that purchase finished cotton goods: clothing designers and retailers like Wal-Mart. Today the planters and even the producers of cotton goods see their profits tightly squeezed. The history of which players were "winners" in the global empire provides a reminder that the specific configuration of an economic market is always a transitory thing, that even powerful players can fall by the wayside as circumstances around them change.
Furthermore, capitalism as embodied in the Empire of Cotton was able to adapt to changing circumstances. On the eve of the United States Civil War there was a widely-held belief that cotton monoculture was not possible without slave labor; the U.S. South dominated the market. But as a blockade choked off the supply of cotton from this region and sent the price of raw cotton skyrocketing, the empire was able to adapt, finding new sources of cotton and new ways to push agricultural monoculture into hitherto unreachable territories such as India and China. This in defiance of the "Cotton is King" predictions on both sides of the Atlantic that the South would be able to eventually win the war, owing to European industry's dependence on slave-cultivated cotton.
Individuals resisted being brought into the market
A few times now I've mentioned the continuous push toward agricultural monoculture, and the degree to which it was resisted by farmers. The reason for this was simple: despite the promise (rarely realized) of wealth to be had by raising cash crops, agricultural monoculture came with significant risks. Subsistence agriculture (with perhaps a side helping of putting out work) was tedious and provided a standard of living best described today as intolerable, but it also came with a great deal of risk mitigation. To wit: the failure of a single crop was not catastrophic. On the contrary, for a farmer raising only cotton, failure of a crop represented a disaster, perhaps a fatal one. Throughout the world farmers ranging from Egypt to India to China resisted pressure to practice agricultural monoculture.
And it turns out they did this with good reason. With the exception of antebellum slave plantations, most cotton agriculture was not profitable. Farmers were squeezed both by the ever-falling price of cotton and by high interest rates charged for borrowing money to purchase seeds, equipment, food, and clothing. As I mentioned above, eventually this resistance was overcome, often via the direct application of government force. Nonetheless, I found this resistance--this rejection of modern market capitalism--to be a powerful reminder that capitalism is not the natural order of things; that markets are man-made creations and subject to human influence.
Obviously the book has a lot more to take from it, especially if you geek out on the details of the textile industry (I don't). But for those of us interested in economic history it's a remarkably well-researched, fascinating take on the rise of industrial capitalism and the modern nation-state. Very highly recommended!
edit 1: edited to reflect the correct spelling of "laissez-faire," this edit also reflecting my lacking as both a speller of french and also probably as an economist.
Saturday, August 6, 2016
Trumpism, Conservatism, and the Republican Party (II)
In my last post, I talked about how Trumpism is best understood as a manifestation of white ethnic nationalism, and how this has replaced small-government conservatism as the motivating force in twenty-first century Republican politics. In my next posts I want to dive a bit deeper and examine in brief the history of these competing ideas, beginning here with small-government conservatism.
The US version of conservatism traces its intellectual roots back to two men: Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson. Burke was an Irishman who famously wrote about the French Revolution which it turns out he was no big fan of. And for good reasons; for all of the problems inherent under the French monarchy, the Revolution was often a grisly, brutal affair. And while Burke was sympathetic to the goals of the French revolutionaries, he was repulsed by the result.
Hence conservatism, which in its Burkean conception calls for change to happen slowly (when it happens at all) and emphasizes intellectual humility and the dangers of the unknown. In this sense there's a lot to like about conservatism. Of course there's also a more cynical take on conservatism, that it represents an intellectual justification and defense of the existing social order. The best description of this I've come across comes from Corey Robin, in a book he wrote several years ago: conservatism is "... a meditation on, and theoretical rendition of, the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back."
Regardless of your level of cynicism, twentieth-century conservatism bears little resemblance to the Burkean ideals of intellectual humility and slow, careful change. Rather, early conservative intellectuals like William F. Buckley viewed conservatism as being primarily about low taxes (especially on the wealthy) and minimal government interference in the economy. "Small government," was the main ideological guidepost and in this sense the twentieth century conservatism seems quite a bit closer to Corey Robin's interpretation.
With regards to Jefferson: of course he needs no introduction. First as Secretary of State and then as Vice President and then President he was an advocate of a small central government with limited powers, which advocacy makes him a popular figure among the right. This view of the role of the federal government was dominant through early US history and was embodied in the politics of the Democratic-Republican and then Democratic party. That said, despite Democratic dominance, the government did steadily increase its reach of the course of the antebellum period (for an excellent history of this time you could do a lot worse than Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought). The key thing I want to focus on here is that during the antebellum era, the Democratic party did not advocate for limited government out of some abstract principle. Rather, the pursuit of limited government power was in the interest of defending the existing social and economic order. To wit: plantation slavery.
The United States of the antebellum period was unique in that it really was two distinct nations stitched together. North of the Mason-Dixon line was a more-or-less modern industrializing state. Subsistence agriculture was being replaced by wage labor, especially in factories. There was a nascent financial system developing in New York City. The northeastern part of the US represented contemporaneous England far more than it did the South. And as for the South? The economy was based on plantation agriculture and the growth of cotton. In this it resembled contemporaneous Brazil far more than it did the north.
And of course the South bitterly opposed the extension of government power. It did so for rational reasons. Southern plantations were tremendously profitable at the time only due to the violent expropriation of the labor of millions of black persons. Southerners such as Jefferson viewed a strong central government as a threat to slavery. They also rightfully feared industrialization and wage labor. As Sven Beckert makes clear in Empire of Cotton, cotton planters were everywhere destined to be the lowest rung on the ladder in terms of the global cotton industry; squeezed by financiers, merchants, and (much later) retailers. The South's opposition to large government was not out of some abstract Burkean principle; it was out of simple survival instinct: across the world muscular governments were a force for industrialization and the commodification of labor.
The question of slavery was settled by 1865, and it's worth noting that by then the question of the scope of government was also settled, at least for a few generations. Through the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, the United States developed as a major industrial power; by World War I it was the equal of England. And as with England, this process of industrialization was accompanied by a dramatic expansion of the reach of government.
And so rather than being an extension of the Jeffersonian tradition (which was fundamentally a defense of plantation agriculture), twentieth-century small-government conservatism as practiced by the likes of Reagan is a relatively modern idea. As recently as the nineteen-fifties, Republicans did not oppose the existence of the welfare state erected in the wake of the Great Depression; they ran elections on being more competent stewards of that state. It wasn't until the Goldwater nomination of 1964 that small-government conservatism stepped onto the main stage of US politics, and of course in that initial outing it was soundly rejected. Richard Nixon was of course no conservative (he was largely uninterested in domestic politics; his passion was in the global chess match that was the Cold War). It wasn't until Ronald Reagan in 1980 that conservatism found its footing in US politics. And of course Reagan rose to power (as I will write about in my next post) by exploiting the politics of racial backlash.
My next post will examine in brief the history of white ethnic nationalism, which I view as a modern manifestation of the centuries-old idea of white supremacy. I will show that in contrast to the relatively new ideology of small-government conservatism, white supremacy has been a powerful and enduring current in American politics, and today it is expressed in the politics of Donald Trump and his supporters.
The US version of conservatism traces its intellectual roots back to two men: Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson. Burke was an Irishman who famously wrote about the French Revolution which it turns out he was no big fan of. And for good reasons; for all of the problems inherent under the French monarchy, the Revolution was often a grisly, brutal affair. And while Burke was sympathetic to the goals of the French revolutionaries, he was repulsed by the result.
Hence conservatism, which in its Burkean conception calls for change to happen slowly (when it happens at all) and emphasizes intellectual humility and the dangers of the unknown. In this sense there's a lot to like about conservatism. Of course there's also a more cynical take on conservatism, that it represents an intellectual justification and defense of the existing social order. The best description of this I've come across comes from Corey Robin, in a book he wrote several years ago: conservatism is "... a meditation on, and theoretical rendition of, the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back."
Regardless of your level of cynicism, twentieth-century conservatism bears little resemblance to the Burkean ideals of intellectual humility and slow, careful change. Rather, early conservative intellectuals like William F. Buckley viewed conservatism as being primarily about low taxes (especially on the wealthy) and minimal government interference in the economy. "Small government," was the main ideological guidepost and in this sense the twentieth century conservatism seems quite a bit closer to Corey Robin's interpretation.
With regards to Jefferson: of course he needs no introduction. First as Secretary of State and then as Vice President and then President he was an advocate of a small central government with limited powers, which advocacy makes him a popular figure among the right. This view of the role of the federal government was dominant through early US history and was embodied in the politics of the Democratic-Republican and then Democratic party. That said, despite Democratic dominance, the government did steadily increase its reach of the course of the antebellum period (for an excellent history of this time you could do a lot worse than Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought). The key thing I want to focus on here is that during the antebellum era, the Democratic party did not advocate for limited government out of some abstract principle. Rather, the pursuit of limited government power was in the interest of defending the existing social and economic order. To wit: plantation slavery.
The United States of the antebellum period was unique in that it really was two distinct nations stitched together. North of the Mason-Dixon line was a more-or-less modern industrializing state. Subsistence agriculture was being replaced by wage labor, especially in factories. There was a nascent financial system developing in New York City. The northeastern part of the US represented contemporaneous England far more than it did the South. And as for the South? The economy was based on plantation agriculture and the growth of cotton. In this it resembled contemporaneous Brazil far more than it did the north.
And of course the South bitterly opposed the extension of government power. It did so for rational reasons. Southern plantations were tremendously profitable at the time only due to the violent expropriation of the labor of millions of black persons. Southerners such as Jefferson viewed a strong central government as a threat to slavery. They also rightfully feared industrialization and wage labor. As Sven Beckert makes clear in Empire of Cotton, cotton planters were everywhere destined to be the lowest rung on the ladder in terms of the global cotton industry; squeezed by financiers, merchants, and (much later) retailers. The South's opposition to large government was not out of some abstract Burkean principle; it was out of simple survival instinct: across the world muscular governments were a force for industrialization and the commodification of labor.
The question of slavery was settled by 1865, and it's worth noting that by then the question of the scope of government was also settled, at least for a few generations. Through the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, the United States developed as a major industrial power; by World War I it was the equal of England. And as with England, this process of industrialization was accompanied by a dramatic expansion of the reach of government.
And so rather than being an extension of the Jeffersonian tradition (which was fundamentally a defense of plantation agriculture), twentieth-century small-government conservatism as practiced by the likes of Reagan is a relatively modern idea. As recently as the nineteen-fifties, Republicans did not oppose the existence of the welfare state erected in the wake of the Great Depression; they ran elections on being more competent stewards of that state. It wasn't until the Goldwater nomination of 1964 that small-government conservatism stepped onto the main stage of US politics, and of course in that initial outing it was soundly rejected. Richard Nixon was of course no conservative (he was largely uninterested in domestic politics; his passion was in the global chess match that was the Cold War). It wasn't until Ronald Reagan in 1980 that conservatism found its footing in US politics. And of course Reagan rose to power (as I will write about in my next post) by exploiting the politics of racial backlash.
My next post will examine in brief the history of white ethnic nationalism, which I view as a modern manifestation of the centuries-old idea of white supremacy. I will show that in contrast to the relatively new ideology of small-government conservatism, white supremacy has been a powerful and enduring current in American politics, and today it is expressed in the politics of Donald Trump and his supporters.
Friday, August 5, 2016
Trumpism, Conservatism, and the Republican Party
In a recent interview with Ezra Klein, Yuval Levin (he of National Affairs) spoke about the modern Republican coalition, and where conservatism fits within it. The whole interview is interesting, but the part I want to highlight comes from the interview's opening exchange:
In a sense it's amazing that it took so many of us so long to connect the dots. Of course many of us realized that white racial resentment was a crucial part of Republican electoral strategy; Nixon's 1968 election was fueled in no small part by backlash to the Civil Rights reforms of the '60s and subsequent civil unrest in the summer of '68; Lee Atwater famously laid this bare in a 1981 interview. See also Ronald Reagan, particularly his emphasis on "welfare queens," and of course his speech on states' rights at the Neshoba County Fair in 1980 (in which county three civil rights activists were murdered sixteen years earlier). But somehow we still persisted with the belief that the Republican part was a conservative party: dedicated to principles of small government (or--more cynically--minimizing the tax burden of the wealthy). And from a policy and rhetorical standpoint it was, at least at the national level. But this ideological commitment to minimizing the tax burden of the wealthy existed in tension with an electorate that was mostly interested in white ethnic nationalism. In appealing directly to the latter, Trump has brought the interests of the Republican electoral base (as opposed to its donor and intellectual base) to the forefront of the party's political discussion. In essence, "low taxes on the wealthy" has been replaced as the face of the party by by angry white ethno-nationalism.
What's interesting--and I'll expand on this in a later post--is the degree to which we bought into that small-government face, even though the conception of conservatism as Grover-Norquist style drownable-in-a-bathtub government is a very modern phenomenon, whereas the Trumpist style is a constaint thread throughout American politics.
Ezra Klein: So I want to start with an odd question: What is the Republican Party?
Yuval Levin: It’s an odd question that has to be asked now, of course. Any political party is an institution that exists to advance some vision of good and that exists to allow a coalition to cohere. A party is always both of those things.
I think the Republican Party has thought of itself more in recent decades as the first, as a vehicle for a vision of the world, a vehicle for conservatism. In reality, of course, it’s been at least as much of the latter. I think some of the problems it’s had is that its own leaders have not seen that as clearly as they might and have assumed that the Republican electorate is more of a conservative electorate than it’s been .
EK: What do you think happened inside the party this year? It feels like the institution has changed, but how do you locate where that change happened?
YL: For a long time now, the political class of the Republican Party has had a view of its own voters that has been an error. It's looked at the base as a conservative voting base. That view of the electorate has meant that a lot of Republican politicians think they can approach the Republican Party as an essentially conservative institution. The conservative movement, which is different from the Republican Party, has thought this way too, and has had a possessive approach rather than a persuasive approach to Republican voters.Levin came to this realization before I did, and I believe he is spot-on. It speaks to the success of the conservative movement that for nearly four decades, conservatism and the Republican party have been largely indistinct. It's only in hindsight that I can see that this impression is mistaken, and that the Republican party is--as Levin points out, and just as the Democratic party is--a coalition of disparate interests. In fact, as the Trump movement lays bare, if there is a motivating ideology among the Republican party, it is not conservatism but rather white ethno-nationalism. You can see that in action in this video posted by the New York Times (warning: the video contains some pretty nasty racial epithets and the like). The video is not an aberration; a reporter documented similar happenings at a Trump rally in Greensboro back in June. Of course the national media focuses on Trumps various outrages (some of which--like his slurs against the Khan family--truly are horrific), but I think the happenings at his rallies that go largely unreported are both more telling and more troubling.
In a sense it's amazing that it took so many of us so long to connect the dots. Of course many of us realized that white racial resentment was a crucial part of Republican electoral strategy; Nixon's 1968 election was fueled in no small part by backlash to the Civil Rights reforms of the '60s and subsequent civil unrest in the summer of '68; Lee Atwater famously laid this bare in a 1981 interview. See also Ronald Reagan, particularly his emphasis on "welfare queens," and of course his speech on states' rights at the Neshoba County Fair in 1980 (in which county three civil rights activists were murdered sixteen years earlier). But somehow we still persisted with the belief that the Republican part was a conservative party: dedicated to principles of small government (or--more cynically--minimizing the tax burden of the wealthy). And from a policy and rhetorical standpoint it was, at least at the national level. But this ideological commitment to minimizing the tax burden of the wealthy existed in tension with an electorate that was mostly interested in white ethnic nationalism. In appealing directly to the latter, Trump has brought the interests of the Republican electoral base (as opposed to its donor and intellectual base) to the forefront of the party's political discussion. In essence, "low taxes on the wealthy" has been replaced as the face of the party by by angry white ethno-nationalism.
What's interesting--and I'll expand on this in a later post--is the degree to which we bought into that small-government face, even though the conception of conservatism as Grover-Norquist style drownable-in-a-bathtub government is a very modern phenomenon, whereas the Trumpist style is a constaint thread throughout American politics.
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