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 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:

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.