The writer, Eve Fairbanks, points out that a great deal of recent conservative rhetoric which claims to the status of "only being reasonable" in reaction to an unreasonable and censoring Left reads exactly as did the pro-Confederacy, pro-slavery commentary before and during the Civil War. For example:
They stressed the importance of logic, “facts,” “truth,” “science” and “nature” much more than Northern rhetoricians did. They chided their adversaries for being romantic idealists, ignoring the “experience of centuries.” Josiah Nott, a surgeon who laid out the purported science behind black inferiority, held that questions like slavery “should be left open to fair and honest investigation, and made to stand or fall according to the facts.” They claimed that they were the ones who truly had black people’s best interests at heart, thanks to their more realistic understanding of human biology. “No one would be willing to do more for the Negro race than I,” John Wilkes Booth wrote shortly before he assassinated Lincoln. He alleged that any pragmatist could see that freeing black people into a cold, cruel world would actually cause their “annihilation.” Slavery, another Southern thinker argued, was natural, because if whites could work the sweltering South Carolina rice fields, they would. The “constitutions” of black men, on the other hand, were “perfectly adapted.”Now, I think it is probably fair to note that realising this doesn't detract from some ideas of the Left being legitimately bad arguments that ignore the facts of nature - the most obvious modern ones surround the extremes of identity politics, like the suggestion that sportswomen should not claim unfairness when transexual men start winning all events. (I'm also sympathetic to the line that a certain basic form of capitalism - whereby people like to organise around, and profit from, things they can do well - is a natural tendency of human society, which explains why far Left attempts to suppress it completely are always doomed to fail.)
They loved hyperbole. Events were “the most extraordinary spectacles” that had “ever challenged the notice of the civilized world,” “too alarming” and threatened “to destroy all that is valuable and beautiful in the institutions of our country.” All over, they saw slippery slopes: Objecting to the extension of slavery into new territories, Lincoln’s longtime position, would lead inexorably to miscegenation.
The most important thing to know about them, they held, was that they were not the oppressors. They were the oppressed. They were driven to feelings of isolation and shame purely on the basis of freely held ideas, the right of every thinking man. Rep. Alexander Sims (D-S.C.) claimed that America’s real problem was the way Southerners were made to suffer under “the sneers and fanatic ebullitions of ignorant and wicked pretenders to philanthropy.” Booth’s complaint, before he shot Lincoln, wasn’t that he could no longer practice slavery, something he’d never done anyway. Instead, he lamented that he no longer felt comfortable expressing “my thoughts or sentiments” on slavery freely in good company.
But it does tell us to be extremely cautions of the Right wing claims of persecution and to being tied to reason, when they are falling to act on dangers promoted by figures on their own side.
The absolute worst thing about it is the way the conservative Right has decided to give, at most, only occasional lip service to objection to the dangerous, authoritarian sympathising stupidity of Trump and his administration, and the global dire dangers of climate change, preferring instead to shrug their shoulders and concentrate on a culture war with the Left as if it was more important.
2 comments:
Missouri at the time was the richest state in the union. The Southern plantations had higher productivity than anything they had going up North. Not all plantations involved slavery. But even the non-slave plantations were fantastically productive.
Now how could this be? Well for one thing the plantation would have presumably had all their infrastructure in-house. Secondly finding a black kid with talent could lead to massive investment in what we now call human capital. So much so that some of these black guys were applying for patents. Elsewhere you weren't supposed to teach blacks to read. But for someone you thought was talented and might be able to run the plantation, you are going to forget all that. Because if you cannot get the black people to do certain tasks you are going to have to do it yourself. On the other hand if you invest all these resources into the development of exceptional black talent, they cannot then leave and get someone else to pay them ten times as much. So thats a good investment. Best investment you could possibly make.
But how about non-compliance-lite? The talented slave may have great managerial and creative powers. But he's got to be motivated to put in the effort just the same. I think this would have lead to extreme cruelty to the less prestigious slaves on the plantation to create a very steep hierarchy of prestige within the slaves you owned.
Of course slavery is never acceptable, but if this was the era when white guys were investing more than at any other time, in black talent, (just for a tiny minority of blacks) there really may be a lot to learn here. And by destroying slavery through property damage it would have left the demand for black labour at horrific low levels. Whereas if slavery had been allowed to die naturally via the repeal of Dred Scott and then the dissolution of the Union, then the capital goods would have been left intact, and the new arrangement would have been great for this tiny minority of hyper-talented black guys.
One of the worst features of this setup would have been sexual exploitation. That would be such a hard habit to quit once you had become addicted to these black girls. Getting to the point of it, we ought to be studying the Southern plantation system. Even if one is too squeamish to study the slave plantations there were still highly productive non-slave plantations that we ought to be putting under the microscope. I suspect that this is close what might be possible under permaculture where one might put high-rise on the farm, or surround the high-rise with permaculture farms, and drive industrial power through the permaculture system.
So I am saying is we ought not be looking on all the Southern arguments as ludicrous. That was the problem with it. They could make a good case. The thing is if the South had been allowed to secede then the blacks could easily escape across the border. That may have been the best solution of all in the short run.
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