DB Roy wrote:In his book "One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race" by Scott Malcolmson, he brings up that the plantation system of the South was dependent upon chattel labor. If there were no blacks brought in and forced to work the fields, the plantation owners would have had no other recourse but to have poor whites brought in and force them to work it. Those fields are not going to just lay fallow because no blacks are around and they aren't going to plant themselves. Recruit a private army to go out and get some slaves too poor and disenfranchised to have any political or material clout to fight back with. Blacks were the easy and natural target but without them, it would have been poor whites.
That makes sense to me, but the economics were surprisingly bad. The old latifundia system of the Mediterranean seems to have been about (olive) oil and cloth commodities. To some extent shipping grain, but grain is relatively low value for long-distance shipping, and makes most sense when the return shipments make a big profit. Keeping in mind "surplus value" (value of product over the food value needed to feed the workers) of less than 10% in Roman days, you can see the problem.
Sugar and tobacco for the rich of Europe were the first answer to this. Later indigo dye, turpentine and King Cotton began to be worth setting up plantations for. But the money did not make itself - one biography of George Washington has the plantation of Martha Custis, whom he married in order to become the richest man in the 13 colonies, actually losing money before Washington stepped in to run things more efficiently. Zinn documents that the first Virginia settlers were still basically starving after, what, 10 years, 20? I forget the detail, sorry.
So yeah, commodities for international trade were the basis of a sort of new thing in the world, with plantation agriculture exploiting slavery, but the default expectation was feudal domination. And what does a frontier do to that? If your serfs can run away and clear new land any time they get disgusted with you, how you gonna keep em down on the farm?
DB Roy wrote: There was always this constant reminder of the familial relations they shared as a reminder--a way of saying, "If you enslave me, you're enslaving your own kin!"
Interesting that the same approach didn't really work for blacks. The mixed race offspring of raping slaves might get a nicer job as a house um, slave, but what they did not get was emancipation. Same impenetrable line in South Africa a century later.
DB Roy wrote:You seem to be showing that Zinn is pointing out how poor whites and blacks were manipulated into hating one another by the rich but I'm not sure that's true. Why would rich whites care what happens to poor whites? Always more where they come from. Poor whites wanted status--not really out of some illusion of grandeur but out of a very real fear that they needed it for protection from the machinations of the rich whites whose motivation was always financially based. The rationale of the poor whites was "the more like them [the rich whites] we are, the less likely they are to see us as them [the blacks]."
Interesting. There is a long history in leftish academic work of considering the initiative taken by capitalists to be the "real" motor behind economic developments. Not always convincing. I suspect it involved initiative from both ordinary whites and from rich manipulators. Either one is capable of thinking about how things look to the other and exploiting it for some modicum of advantage.
DB Roy wrote:The rich politicians cater to the whites to show them "I'm one of you!" because that residual fear that if the rich distance themselves too much then poor whites start to fear for their way of life and react accordingly.
This has a long history in American life, and Andrew Jackson is the premier symbol of it. I think it's fair to say we have not had any president as belligerent as Jackson until our current thug, though surely Polk and T. R. are candidates. Being "one of you" is a tribal thing, and that means identifying enemies and scoring victories over them. I guess I don't really buy the "fear of the aristocrats" version, but maybe if you explained it further I would see it.
DB Roy wrote:The reason Trump was so mysteriously successful was because he wasn't some politician who would kill his own mother to get votes. The poor whites want to impress the Big Daddy up in the big house--not his go-betweens. The go-betweens are not trustworthy. They may relay the Bid Daddy's hopes and dreams but how do we know they aren't just putting one over on everybody and lying to both sides? The establishment politicians they decry so much today are those go-betweens--slimy, scheming, in it only for themselves.
Might help to explain why Reagan's love of luxury went over well, but so did Jack Kennedy's. There may be something to the idea that "dealing directly" with the powerful is appealing. The manipulators back in the shadows, the Svengalis and the Rasputins and the Talleyrands, do seem to attract auras of latent betrayal. But as a narrative it may not deal well with the Hannity's and the Coulter's and the Palin's. Sometimes a worldview is just a worldview.
DB Roy wrote:As long as Trump does nothing to trigger that old fear that rich white Big Daddy will eat us if he takes a whim, they'll love him. If he hurts them in a deliberate way, however---destroys their healthcare, their unemployment checks, their means of employment, then the love affair will be over. If he shows them he holds the go-betweens in higher esteem than he holds them, the love affair is over.
Well, that's the question of the hour, isn't it? Will West Virginians tilt more to fear of Al Gore and of immigrants, or to fear of losing health insurance? Guess I don't think it all comes down to class-based psychodrama, but these days a person has to accept that rational calculation of interest is not the name of the game either.
DB Roy wrote:This wasn't the doing of rich whites but whites in general. It was white people themselves who did this. The country looks the way it does because whites want it to look this way. They are still the dominant class.
It wasn't so long ago that immigrant groups, especially Catholics from Ireland, Italy and Poland, were the excluded class and blacks and Latinos were hardly in the calculus. I think it is sad that so much political evolution comes down to who we can kick that's on a lower rung of the ladder, but I would really like to believe that Trump's inability to deliver will usher that old-style politics out the door and we can get back to grappling with the hard problems of reality.
DB Roy wrote:Trump could have been prevented but non-whites cowered when pissed-off whites flexed their political muscle. Just like voter intimidation of decades past--non-whites stayed home and let the whites have their way. They'll deny it, of course, but that's what it was. Their courage failed them. Whites threatened war if Hillary won and non-whites caved because non-whites are still not a viable political force.
Not buying it. There is still a lot of religious-based conservatism in minority communities. Blacks would turn out to vote for Obama, sure, of course. But lots of them resent Hillary's attitudes toward military adventurism, not to mention her sex, her husband's cavalier willingness to pull strings with the powerbrokers, her sex, her ambition and her sex.
DB Roy wrote:They have great strength but their impulses are divided and they can't use it without a great leader to unite them. Hillary wasn't it. Obama was. He was a tremendous unifier, if nothing else.
I agree with that, despite the determination of Mitch McConnell and Roger Ailes to paint a different picture.
DB Roy wrote:Now, the whites have their tremendous unifier but it's incredibly pathetic. Obama united different races and colors; Trump unifies only the whites against everyone else. It's doomed to failure in the end.
Whatever smart thing he might be, 45 is not any kind of unifier. The people who really got behind him were spoiling for a fight, but he backed into office with more people holding their nose as they voted for him than for anyone in living memory.