Southern Order

You've read here before how I have bemoaned Dixification, the preferred socio-economic model of Southern conservatives, and how it is spreading to the rest of the country. I've written about the centuries-long tradition of a deeply anti-democratic model of hierarchy and privilege, of low wages, benefits, taxes and regulations; replete with voter restriction, fierce hostility to unions, and the ongoing animosity to any social change that upsets long-standing social hierarchies.

Again, the argument is that conservative politicians support policies that do not make economic sense, but that is not the intent. Liberal policy wonks scratch their heads trying to figure out why Republicans are so determined to avoid sensible and proven policies. But they misunderstand the nature and intent of the deeply reactionary politicians that now dominate that party, many state governments, and come January, even more of the federal government.

It is gratifying, in a grim sort of way, to see there is a growing awareness of what Dixification is and how it is redefining national politics as never before.

To cite just one example, Doug Muder's recent post reminds us that the current invective from teabaggers is Southern at its core:

It’s not a Tea Party.

The Boston Tea Party protest was aimed at a Parliament where the colonists had no representation, and at an appointed governor who did not have to answer to the people he ruled. Today’s Tea Party faces a completely different problem: how a shrinking conservative minority can keep change at bay in spite of the democratic processes defined in the Constitution. That’s why they need guns. That’s why they need to keep the wrong people from voting in their full numbers. 

These right-wing extremists have misappropriated the Boston patriots and the Philadelphia founders because their true ancestors — Jefferson Davis and the Confederates — are in poor repute.

But the veneer of Bostonian rebellion easily scrapes off; the tea bags and tricorn hats are just props. The symbol Tea Partiers actually revere is the Confederate battle flag. Let a group of right-wingers ramble for any length of time, and you will soon hear that slavery wasn’t really so bad, that Andrew Johnson was right, that Lincoln shouldn’t have fought the war, that states have the rights of nullification and secession, that the war wasn’t really about slavery anyway, and a lot of other Confederate mythology that (until recently) had left me asking, “Why are we talking about this?”

By contrast, the concerns of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and its revolutionary Sons of Liberty are never so close to the surface. So no. It’s not a Tea Party. It’s a Confederate Party.

Let's be clear on this: the most powerful members of Congress are overwhelmingly from the old Confederate south. They are deeply overrepresented in Washington, all the more so when voting population is considered. They are not here to work together, or fix things, to improve government, to promote democracy, nor to put the economy back on track. They are here to reestablish the old order, destroy what they hate, and maintain privilege and power for the few.

Democracy's Ills

How does that quote go again: "These are the times that try men's souls"? There is a frustrating duopoly at play; in our elections, in civil discourse, in our constitution, and certainly in our strained sense of democracy. We have come to learn, again, that our constitution is flawed and limiting. We, or most of us, say we support democracy, but we can't avoid the question as to why democracy and free elections have led us to the abyss. We speak of equality, think of ourselves, naively, as a classless society, and insist on such time-tested homilies as equal representation, or no taxation without representation (yeah, that's a good one). We have created or inherited a political system that we once urged, or sometimes forced, upon the world but which is now badly failing us.

On the one hand we continue to espouse boilerplate straight from civics class: freedom of expression, free markets makes for free people, a free press is the bedrock of a free society, all this freedom wrapped in a proud belief that minimum government yields maximum democracy --but it's all painfully juxtaposed against the urgently felt need to take back the public arena from the oligarchs, the corrupt, and religious fanatics. We, most of us, value freedom of speech; some of us still venerate the oh-so-learned Supreme Court for protecting our rights, but how many of us really believe Citizens United was a good decision? Or that denying the hyper-wealthy--or corporations--the right to buy elections, politicians, and the media is an affront to their free speech? 

On the other hand, do we know, or care to know, how much voter ignorance and apathy have contributed to our condition? I didn't vote for the jackasses that say we need to cut social security and food stamps from the poor because that's a good way to balance the budget. But millions did.

We may lament that people vote for selfish or irrational reasons, but we must remind ourselves that in the formative years of our republic, universal suffrage was seen as a horrible idea by the aristocracy and most of the founding fathers. The argument always given was that commoners, the illiterate, women, the melanin-enriched, the unpropertied, all of them would make poor voting choices. Specifically, they would vote themselves goods and services that were economically unsustainable, and would destabilize government. They usually left unstated their fear that the power and privileges of the upper class would be threatened by true democracy. 

So it might seem ironic that the most powerful and privileged in society, and among the best educated, are now the ones pushing and protecting policies, practices and legislation that are selfish, reckless, and demonstrably unsustainable. The middle class largely supports the same stabilizing policies of the past, including responsible taxation, support for the self-funding and efficient social security system, regulations that return us to the decades of stable banking we once enjoyed, and more.

And yet just enough people vote for politicians who have made it clear they don't want Americans to have better health care, have no intention of reining in Wall Street, will forever feed the military-industrial gravy train, and consistently vote for the interests of the wealthy and against the poor and working class. 

The real tragedy of American democracy is not just that so many politicians, mostly Republicans, actively support a Dixified nation with a small ruling class at the bidding of corporations. It is that many others, mostly Democrats, claim to support working class folks, but end up going along with the money train; it is they who will settle for scraps and claim progress; it is they who will support legislation so weak, toothless, and watered down as to be useless. They, not all, but too many of them, want you to believe they are fighting for middle America. 

What is depressing about this is though there are many politicians who want to and try to do the right thing, there always seems to be enough politicians, either outright reactionaries or compromised "moderates" who either bitterly oppose anyone who tries to do anything that most Americans actually support, or quietly insist-mostly at election time--that they are for you, but cannot or will not actually promote legislation that is, in fact, popular. Who do they think votes them into office? Why don't they get behind legislation that their base supports? You would think that far-right Republicans would abandon bills that even their Republican base is cool to, just as Democrats should be more enthusiastic about, say, a minimum wage increase. How politically popular does something have to be before Democrats will come out of hiding and publicly support it? It's as if they would rather dodge the attacks from Republicans and right-wing media, and chase Wall Street dollars, than respond to the voters who actually put them into office. It is little wonder that so many of America's poor and working class are disaffected and don't bother to vote. 

But hey, congrats to Harry Reid on filibuster reform; you too Diane Feinstein. It took you a while, but you finally decided that after years of record obstructionism that you should step in and actually do something about it. Too bad it took you five years to notice what Republicans were doing to the economy, the political process, and your party's president.

Who's this Jerry Mander guy?

Republicans have gone through through a lot of hand wringing after last November's election losses. Many operatives were criticized for not doing better. After all, the money just poured into Republican campaign coffers; "we paid for this election fair and square." But party faithful cannot complain too much, not when you consider how deeply unpopular and reviled Republicans in Congress are. It is a wonder they won as many seats as they did. Let's just say Republicans did well, though for the wrong reasons.

Republicans were never in the running for the White House, not really. Despite hopes, and indeed, firm convictions they would prevail, Republicans paid the price for nominating a deeply flawed candidate.

And though they lost a few seats in the Senate, Republican pols and voters remain dramatically over-represented. The reason why there are so many Republicans in the Senate-whether they actually control it or not, is simple enough; the reason has been with us since the very beginning of the republic. The US Senate is not designed to reflect proportionate representation. As every civics class ought to teach, only the US House of Representatives sends members in accordance with each state's population; big states have more representatives in the House than do small ones. It's only fair, you see.

The Senate, on the other hand, was designed at the outset to counter the potential for big-state tyranny. So each state sends two senators regardless of size. Sounds kind of, sort of, reasonable, maybe. Except that what we now have is small-state tyranny. One result is that a state such as Alaska, with population of about 750,000, or Wyoming, with population of about 570,000, have equal voting power with California, with over 38 million, or New York, with over 19 million. And wouldn't you know it, AK, WY, and several other small, rural states reliably send Republicans to the Senate.  Of course, there are small blue states that benefit as well, including Vermont, Delaware, and Hawaii. But taken together, Republicans win senate seats with fewer votes, sometimes far fewer, especially in the rural, ranching and farming states. The fact that millions more Americans actually vote for Democratic candidates than they do for Republicans, and have less to show for it, reflects systemic electoral misrepresentation that skews the Senate towards Republicans, rural farmland, and Dixie.

This disproportionate representation, you may say, is regrettable, but worth it because it helps offset the proportional representation in the House, which obviously favors large states. And besides, proportional representation is written in stone, or at least the US Constitution. So yeah, there's that.

Now we see, pace the Constitution, that Republicans are overrepresented in the US House as well. Color me not surprised.

Here's how Bill Berkowitz, writing in Alternet, puts it:

Tens of millions poured into a stealth redistricting project before the 2012 elections kept dozens of GOP Districts safe from Democratic challengers.

If somewhere in the recesses of your mind you were wondering how, despite President Barack Obama’s re-election victory and the Democratic Party’s gains in the Senate, Republicans continue to control the House of Representatives, think redistricting.

Redistricting is the process that adjusts the lines of a state’s electoral districts, theoretically based on population shifts, following the decennial census. Gerrymandering is often part and parcel of redistricting. According to the Rose Institute of State and Local Governments at Claremont McKenna College, Gerrymandering is done “to influence elections to favor a particular party, candidate, ethnic group.”

Over the past few years, as the Republican Party has gained control over more state legislatures than Democrats. And, it has turned redistricting into a finely-honed, well-financed project. That has virtually insured their control over the House. “While the Voting Rights Act strongly protects against racial gerrymanders, manipulating the lines to favor a political party is common,” the Rose Institute’s Redistricting in America website points out.

Dana Milbank writing on Jan. 4, also acknowledged the important role of gerrymandering:

The final results from the November election were completed Friday, and they show that Democratic candidates for the House outpolled Republicans nationwide by nearly 1.4 million votes and more than a full percentage point — a greater margin than the preliminary figures showed in November. And that’s just the beginning of it: A new analysis finds that even if Democratic congressional candidates won the popular vote by seven percentage points nationwide, they still would not have gained control of the House.

The analysis, by Ian Millhiser at the liberal Center for American Progress using data compiled by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, finds that even if Democrats were to win the popular vote by a whopping nine percentage points — a political advantage that can’t possibly be maintained year after year — they would have a tenuous eight-seat majority.

In a very real sense, the Republican House majority is impervious to the will of the electorate. Thanks in part to deft redistricting based on the 2010 Census, House Republicans may be protected from the vicissitudes of the voters for the next decade. For Obama and the Democrats, this is an ominous development: The House Republican majority is durable, and it isn’t necessarily sensitive to political pressure and public opinion.

According to the Jan. 4 final tally by Cook’s David Wasserman after all states certified their votes, Democratic House candidates won 59,645,387 votes in November to the Republicans’ 58,283,036, a difference of 1,362,351. On a percentage basis, Democrats won, 49.15 percent to 48.03 percent. 

This in itself is an extraordinary result: Only three or four other times in the past century has a party lost the popular vote but won control of the House. But computer-aided gerrymandering is helping to make such undemocratic results the norm — to the decided advantage of Republicans, who controlled state governments in 21 states after the 2010 Census, almost double the 11 for Democrats.

Gerrymandering has been with us from the republic's beginnings, and it certainly isn't just Republicans who jockey for advantage.  But the most recent redistricting results are ominous. The country is divided more than it has been in generations; Republican indifference to voter preferences, along with some clever insulation from the voters themselves, come at a time of breathtaking extremism in that party's politics.

"He who controls redistricting can control Congress." Karl Rove

Moyers on Plutonomy

Here is Bill Moyers taking a page from the late Edward R. Murrow when he says having a bias is not a bad thing as long as you don't try to hide it.

Their bias is my bias: Plutocracy and democracy don't mix. Moyers explains how we have now arrived at plutonomy and why it matters.




For teabaggers inclined to obsess over what our founding fathers and past patriots had to say about wealth inequality, I offer some insights.

The Greatest Speech, the Greatest Creed

Here is the most profound single speech I believe I have ever heard. Unfotunately, no America politician will ever give a speech like this one.

Weekend Linkage II

Chris Hedges, as always, is able to encapsulate the core issues confronting us. He reaches back into time to show that the forces arrayed against democracy never really go away. Read "How Democracy Dies: Lessons From A Master."

Here is a little something that many will find depressing, or perhaps perversely amusing. Working America has a jobtracker feature in which you supply a zip code, and it tells you which companies in that area are exporting jobs abroad, have warned of layoffs, or are in violation of various federal labor/health/safety laws. Very revealing.

The video below is one more reason Bill O'Reilly is an asshole. After watching a McDonald's ad in France, he compares gays to Al Qaeda. I guess he just can't get comfortable with people who are different than himself.

You stay classy, Bill.

This is Not Getting Enough Attention

Robert Reich, Cal-Berkeley professor and former Labor Secretary under President Clinton, has sounded what should be democracy's alarm bell. Corporate America is dominating the electoral process as never before. The big recent change was the Supreme Court's loathsome decision in Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission.

Much has been said about that decision, how it curiously equates corporations, including multi-billion dollar conglomerates, with persons, and thus able to spend unlimited amounts of money to, in effect, buy elections. However, Reich reminds us that the other kicker in all this is that groups that receive much of this funding do not have to say where they got it (as opposed to money that goes directly to politicians, who do have to reveal sources). In the process we are looking increasingly like a stereotypic banana republic where powerful elites and their rich cronies dominate the entire election process.

Be sure to read Reich's entire article, but I want to stress a few points he makes. One is that elections are becoming more opaque. As Reich says, "...only 32 percent of groups paying for election ads are disclosing the names of their donors. By comparison, in the 2006 midterm, 97 percent disclosed; in 2008, almost half disclosed." To compound the problem, there is every indication that foreign money is pouring into campaign coffers. Yes, it is illegal, but it is now harder to prove than ever before. (And it Republicans take control of Congress, what are the chances they will investigate that?)

Senate Democrats recently attempted to pass a bill that would compel disclosure. As has so often been the case, every Republican in the Senate voted against it. Corporate money is pouring into Republican coffers, so it is no surprise that the GOP responds so predictably to its benefactors. Reich notes that less than 10 years ago, campaign disclosure was supported by a large majority of senate Republicans.

It is not at all certain what citizens can do about this, especially the growing number of poor and unemployed. Reich says, "Right now we're headed for a perfect storm: An unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top, a record amount of secret money flooding our democracy, and a public in the aftershock of the Great Recession becoming increasingly angry and cynical about government. The three are obviously related."

Indeed they are.  Reich offers eight ways citizens can fight back, but this is an uphill slog that does not bode well for democracy, for the middle class, or for America. We are headed for oligarchy.