Liberty Expose: Appalachia: The Key To Southern Liberation
belterz
The Return Of The Confederacy Under The Guise Of A “Libertarian” Elite
In American Nations (2011) and, more recently, American Character (2016), Colin Woodard makes a compelling case for the persistence of eleven distinct cultural nations within the North American landscape. One of his foundational claims is that much of American history and politics can be traced back to the conflicting value systems that each of these regions inherits from its originating settler cultures, from the communalism of the Puritans in New England (Yankeedom) to the “libertarian” slave oligarchies of the Deep South. These nations, which Woodard deftly characterizes through a combination of cultural excavation, economic history, and political analysis, provide an illuminating account of the plurality of forces that animate American politics beneath the surface of Party controversy, and help us contextualize contemporary issues in a much richer historical lineage.
A revised map of the American nations, by Colin Woodard
While Woodard’s books present the history of these nations in as nonjudgmental a light as possible, and emphasize the shifting roles that they all have played for good or ill during different historical moments, there is one nation that continues to pose particular challenges to the democratic promise of the country, and one that honest conservatives, nationalists, and populists will need to reckon with in the coming years—and this is the Deep South.
As Woodard describes it in American Character, this “hierarchical libertarian nation” was established
“by slave lords from Barbados as a West Indies-style slave society…[and] has been a bastion of white supremacy, aristocratic privilege, and a version of classical Republicanism modeled on the slave states of the ancient world, where democracy was the privilege of the few and enslavement a natural lot of the many. It spread apartheid and authoritarianism across the southern lowlands, ultimately encompassing most of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana, plus western Tennessee and southeastern Arkansas, Texas, and North Carolina. Even after its slave and caste systems were dismantled by outside intervention, it has continued to fight for rollbacks of federal power, taxes affecting capital and the wealthy, and environmental, labor, and consumer protections.”
The Deep South, or Dixie, has been on a slow ascendancy since the late sixties and has largely succeeded in converting the Republican Party into an instrument of its agenda. Under the warrant of “liberty,” “states’ rights,” and laissez-faire economics, these anti-democratic, southern conservatives have time and again sought to reassert the autonomy, power and liberty of the old ruling class by cutting taxes for the nation’s wealthiest, aggrandizing corporate power, minimizing federal oversight, and shrinking federal social programs. But to sustain a voter base whose real economic interests they don’t support, they have had to camouflage their factional interests by diverting suspicion towards minorities and government regulation—not by plutocratic rule, crucially, but by the alleged liberal, coastal elites. Furthermore, this “Southern Strategy” has unfortunately leveraged racial antagonism to its benefit, even as white supremacists ideology has proved marginal to the primary interests of its main beneficiaries, whose agenda remains fundamentally economic.
Michael Lind provides a complimentary analysis of the same Dixie take over, which he calls “the Southern Autonomy Project.” According to Lind, this “Southern elite strategy, though bound up with white supremacy throughout history, is primarily about cheap and powerless labor, not about race.” To consolidate its power, “this nation-within-a-nation” has sought to “maximize the attractiveness of the former Confederacy to external investors” through “a race to the bottom by means of low wages, stingy government welfare (which if generous increases the bargaining power of poor workers by decreasing their desperation) and low levels of environmental regulation.” In order to sustain its voter base, however, it must “prevent the Southern victims of these local economic policies from teaming up with allies in other parts of the U.S. to impose federal-level reforms on the Southern states.”
Unbeknownst to the working and middle-class portions of the South, the Confederacy has, in sense, returned, and its interests couldn’t be further from the real needs of its constituents, whose economic freedom must be stifled to sustain the neo-Confederate system. Though their aspirations for a life of liberty and independence might be appealed to for electoral gain, they are not intended to be the beneficiaries of Southern ascendancy.
Thus a concerted national project, sufficiently strong to counter this resurgent factional interest, and committed to the liberation of working and middle-class Americans from economic exploitation and political suppression, on behalf of the moral promise of the nation, through the agency of the federal government, must translate the real pain and frustration felt by Southern constituencies into a new kind of political consciousness that might at first seem counterintuitive.
Federal Nationalism Must Activate Appalachia
If the younger generations are to succeed in redeeming the moral promise of the Union, they must inherit the federal project of Hamilton, Webster, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, and recognize the rise of the Deep South for what it is: a covert insurrection fundamentally at odds with the aims of democratic liberation, not only in the South but in the country writ large. However, this movement will not succeed if it relies only on intervention from outside the southern region, as such intervention by itself will lack both the needed moral authority and the electoral weight required for meaningful change on the national level. To prove politically viable, democratic energy must be galvanized from within the South itself.
Luckily, there is another cultural nation in the South that poses a perennial challenge to the Dixie project, one with far more latent democratic energy, and a deep aversion towards Deep Southern elitism—a nation Woodard calls Greater Appalachia. In Appalachia we find a fiercely independent, freedom-loving people with strong democratic, populist, and even radical leanings. As Woodard describes it in American Character:
“...Greater Appalachia has often been lampooned as the home of rednecks and hillbillies. In reality, it is a transplanted culture formed in a state of near-constant warfare and upheaval, characterized by a warrior ethic and a deep commitment to personal sovereignty and individual liberty. From south-central Pennsylvania, it spread down the Appalachian Mountains and out into the southern tiers of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, the Arkansas and Missouri Ozarks, the eastern two-thirds of Oklahoma, and on down to the Hill Country of Texas, clashing with Indians, Yankees, and Mexicans along the way. Intensely suspicious of lowland aristocrats and Yankee social engineers alike, Greater Appalachia has shifted alliances based on whoever appeared to be the greatest threat to its freedom; since Reconstruction and, especially, the upheavals of the 1960s, it has been in alliance with the Deep South in an effort to undo the federal government’s ability to overrule local preferences.”
The take-away here is that this tenuous alliance between Appalachia and the Deep South, though still prevalent in the Republican electorate, has lost much of its real basis in social life, and is rather founded more on political manufacturing then real common interests. If Lind’s take on the Southern Autonomy Project is true, then the greatest threat to the freedom of the Appalachian people is not regulation by Yankees, or coastal elites, but the Deep Southern program of elite economic ascendancy at the expense of suppressed, low-wage labor. Therefore, just as the Appalachians chose to side with the North during the Civil War out of suspicion of Southern aristocratic overreach, they must again recognize that their independence does not stand in opposition to government intervention, but again depends on their joining a countervailing federal project aimed at national democratic uplift.
Again, Lind arrives at a similar conclusion when he calls for the Republican Party to meet its electorate halfway with a nationalist economic agenda that prioritizes American industry and manufacturing. Instead of accommodating the free-trade, race-to-the-bottom project of the prevailing Southern elite, which thrives off of a low-wage workforce with little economic freedom, the conservative party of the future should pivot towards the interests of a strong industrial middle class with bolder spending power. Furthermore, such a program would reveal the common interest between industrialists and workers in social safety measures:
“Foreign markets are only partial substitutes for home-country consumers...Enlightened manufacturers should therefore prefer prosperous to poor service-sector workers — e.g., home health aides, hotel workers, and waiters — in the United States. It makes no strategic sense for science-based, capital-intensive industries to ally themselves in politics with cheap-labor employers in low-productivity, labor-intensive sectors...Industrial corporations and their investors and employees have a natural interest in social-safety-net policies that minimize the collapse in consumer spending during periodic recessions... Of America’s two major parties, the Republican party would be the easier to remake as a party of dynamic industrial capitalism in the national interest.”
Lind goes on to characterize the voter base that such a program would appeal to, and the voter base he has in mind seems to mirror much of the Appalachian profile. “Its voter base,” he continues, “is the disproportionately white private-sector working class, its elite base includes much of the leadership of nonfinancial business, and its regional base includes the states most likely to depend on manufacturing, agriculture, or oil, gas, and coal, as opposed to the post-industrial “knowledge economy” and subsidized, uneconomical green-energy ventures favored by the Democrats.” “Donald Trump,” he concludes, “has proven there is a constituency. What is lacking is a program.”
The Republican Party, as an adjunct of the Deep South, seems far from interested in this nationalist program. But as Woodard and Lind suggest, its program stands at odds with a large share of its Appalachian constituency. It therefore remains a prerogative of federal nationalism to activate this constituency by affirming the inseparability of economic nationalism and the cause of democratic liberation for our working and middle-classes.