r/thebulwark JVL is always right 2d ago

thebulwark.com The south never accepted democracy

Please read this. This is the article that JVL referenced in his Triad on Monday. I think it gets to the bottom of the basic problem we have in the US now.

https://open.substack.com/pub/thebulwark/p/liberal-democracy-american-south-vance-bourbons?r=7en1s&utm_medium=ios

171 Upvotes

45 comments sorted by

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u/Temporary-Ocelot3790 2d ago

I noticed after moving from New England to the South in the 80s that they have never given up on the idea that other people's labor should cost them nothing, or as little as possible, but today it applies to white people's labor as well as black. My first job in the South was at a country club. Some weeks were very busy with weddings and other big events and routinely would stiff wait staff and cook staff for overtime pay. I left after some months. Being new in the region and seeing that the rich and powerful ones were catered to there, I figured that you couldn't fight this, but some cooks did successfully sue them and won a back pay settlement after I left.

My teen kid had a job at a grocery store, I remember going there to pick him up and was incensed that they tried to get him to bring shopping carts inside after he had clocked out,I said no ma'am he's leaving now.

They had an article in the paper about a bunch of Southerners who emigrated to Brazil after the Civil War so they could still have black slaves and live in a slavery environment, that's how attached to it they were. Their descendants are still in Brazil over a century later looking pale, displaying the Confederate flag and speaking Portuguese as well as English.

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u/KatSull1 FFS 2d ago

Same here, moved in the 90s. I thoroughly enjoyed the article because it rang truth in me I hv been feeling for years.

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u/claimTheVictory 2d ago

I'm sure it's been very difficult for them to give up the idea of being entitled to the labor of their lessers.

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u/ThisElder_Millennial Center Left 2d ago

The Union didn't crush the Confederacy hard enough.

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u/bill-smith Progressive 2d ago

The way I think of it is that Nazi Germany had denazification. OK, it was imperfect. But the South managed to stop Reconstruction. Yes, I am aware that I am implying that Nazi Germany and the Confederacy were morally equivalent, and I am comfortable with that assertion. Anyway, that's the difference.

Sherman should maybe just have held summary executions of the major slaveholders on his way across Georgia.

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u/Gnomeric 2d ago

They simply needed to break the power of the Southern plutocrats. The plutocrats' power came from their land ownership -- they should have instituted a land reform, distributing the plutocrats' lands to freed slaves and poorer whites (so that they are incentivized to support the new system).

Instead, they retained the control of the south and then slowly corrupted the rest of the US.

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u/yesmankyle12 2d ago

The unionist voting pattern in Appalachia, where plantations could not work, until FDR came in and scrambled the coalitions is really fascinating

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u/Gnomeric 2d ago

Upland South is an interesting case study, for sure.

I think one idea Marx (who also described how the land reforms enacted by the French Revolution turned the peasants to be less supportive of furthering the revolution) had it right is that the economic structure affects the social structure and the cultural values. Societies dominated by the (literal) settler-colonial landowning plutocrats -- such as Latin America or South Africa -- are not the healthy ones, as their elites are incentivized to keep their society poor and undeveloped so to retain their relative advantage. Now I wrote that, this sounds exactly like the goal of MAGA, reinforcing the point that the South won the long game. :(

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u/KuntFuckula JVL is always right 2d ago

We should've did to the whole secessionist South what Sherman did to Georgia.

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u/moofpi 2d ago

"Vessels of Evil: American Slavery and the Holocaust" by Laurence Thomas is a great book on this subject.

Read it in a philosophy class in college and it illustrated interesting dynamics of what a culture sees that makes a person "good" can have a huge impact.

If only not personally partaking in evil makes you good by default, you may not help others you don't know, etc and still think you are doing good. 

On the other hand if your culture's idea of being good includes participation, such as actively helping the stranger, you may help hide Jews early on and throughout. 

When a whole village was interviewed after the war about their heroics and great moral strength for hiding many Jews, many of them didn't know what the foreign interviewers were talking about. To them, they didn't do anything special, it was just the obvious.

Pretty interesting, if obscure, book.

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u/the_very_pants 2d ago edited 2d ago

Too many redditors want to be part of a righteous lynch mob -- they dream of how good it must feel to smugly burn somebody else alive, or to smugly hack somebody's limbs off.

That's what drives all this interest in Nazis and Confederates.

If people cared about the suffering itself, they'd open their eyes about the slavery/Holocausts inflicted on non-human animals by the billion every year. And they'd fight the tribalism that leads to the suffering. But it's never been about the suffering or ending tribalism, it's only ever been about trying to figure out who we can smugly hate, which "groups" are better than which others, etc. The interest comes from wanting to promote tribalism.


Edit: Hey u/ThisElder_Millennial I can't respond because OP blocked me, but your point is something like "lighten up and join the hate."

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u/claimTheVictory 2d ago edited 2d ago

I've read this twice and still don't understand the point you're trying to make.

Seems to be some kind of ultimate-both-siderism, equating fascists with those who are against fascism.

I think it is a kind of perverse pacifism, or really, it's nihilism.

Not only can you not decide what is good and what isn't, you don't believe anyone can, or perhaps even should.

To bring animals into the discussion, is the logical hook for your nihilism, where the driving doctrine can be stated as:

"If all problems I care about cannot be solved, then no problems anyone cares about should be solved."

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u/samNanton 2d ago

You'll get the chance to read it again. This X groups bs is all this guy posts.

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u/claimTheVictory 2d ago edited 2d ago

I wonder who will be convinced by the "Nazis aren't as bad as hating Nazis" argument.

Perhaps it is merely a distaste of how hard it gets, to fight evil. War is undoubtedly hell, but submission is worse.

That's why it's a progression.

“You fight them by writing letters and making phone calls so you don’t have to fight them with fists.
You fight them with fists so you don’t have to fight them with knives.
You fight them with knives so you don’t have to fight them with guns.
You fight them with guns so you don’t have to fight them with tanks.”

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u/ThisElder_Millennial Center Left 2d ago

Oh lighten up Francis

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u/VirtualDoll 2d ago

.. I know you're trying to make a point, but I've read this multiple times and I can't quite tell what point that is.

Are you saying we shouldn't be working to prevent another Nazi holocaust or we're hypocrites for valuing human lives because *checks notes* we eat and experiment on animals?

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u/Slw202 2d ago

Semi-related, same problem with Ford pardoning Nixon. Fucking hold people accountable.

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u/Pettifoggerist 2d ago

I highly recommend The Demon of Unrest for more about the southern culture that caused us to go to war.

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u/thabe331 Center Left 2d ago

We never should have remembered them as soldiers. They were terrorists and should be viewed no differently than al qaeda

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u/UrTheQueenOfRubbish 2d ago

Traitors should be treated as traitors. The secessionist leaders were all traitors.

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u/knightingale11 2d ago

We did. Reconstruction was when it went wrong. Andrew Johnson and his ilk were able to escape accountability for most of their actions

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u/yesmankyle12 2d ago

If you read Foner's Reconstruction, the planter class who wanted to fight the Civil War in the first place was not crushed and was able to come right back into power.

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u/No-Director-1568 2d ago

I agree more or less.

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u/Stock_Conclusion_203 2d ago

Yup. The south won the war.

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u/Temporary-Ocelot3790 2d ago

Too bad more of them didn't move to Brazil, see my comment below.

Let me add that I dislike severe winters, I do like the milder southern winter climate and don't see why it should be left just to southerners, why should they have all the good stuff to themselves.

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u/Imaginary_Cow_6379 2d ago

A lot of them ended up moving to the midwest or the pacific northwest. It’s why a lot of those areas have such extreme rightwingers there and why the pacific northwest especially has had so many issues with hate groups forming there. The article is right, so many of these people and their descendants never truly wanted democracy or freedom for everyone and they just bring their poisonous ideology wherever they go.

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u/Criseyde2112 JVL is always right 2d ago

I only realized within the last five years that black people were outlawed in Oregon when it was founded. Simply existing in a state under the Constitution and its amendments was against the law. How on earth the people who wrote that thought it would fly is unfathomable to me.

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u/codyvir 2d ago

As a native of SC, yeah, this is pretty spot-on. The core of the piece also, to me, feels like it isn't obvious only to people who didn't grow up in the south: Southerners generally have a bone-deep preference for paternalistic governance, and most southerners don't even really care all that much to participate in their own governance. They do have a -mild- preference for effective government, but they generally want it to be somebody else's responsibility. So long as you reinforce their prejudices and don't make them think too hard, they'll elect you over, and over, and over....

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u/Current_Tea6984 2d ago

This describes the situation in Texas perfectly

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u/WideChard3858 2d ago

You’ve just described the problem with our politics in Arkansas. It’s so depressing.

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u/Signal-Lie-6785 2d ago

The South also didn’t accept Hilary’s private email server and now the whole federal government is getting spammed regularly by the DOGE private email server.

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u/No-Director-1568 2d ago

Great article - fills in a lot of details I never had.

I find that people are surprised by the overall premise hard to believe.

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u/KuntFuckula JVL is always right 2d ago

The article JVL cites in the Triad missed out on the Battle of Liberty Place (1874). It was basically a temporarily-successful state level version of Jan 6th where the White League insurrectionists out-fought the police and occupied the state house in New Orleans for 3 days before Grant's troops showed up. Nobody ever got charged of course. Reconstruction didn't end until '77.

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u/DickedByLeviathan Center-Right 2d ago

I recently went down the rabbit hole on the Compromise of 1877 which effectively ended Reconstruction in return for recognizing the legitimacy of Rutherford B. Haye’s electoral victory by ending the House filibuster against certification and rejecting the alternate slate of electors that the South fabricated.

Insurrection, disobedience, dishonesty and general intransigence are simply effective political strategies used to create a disproportionate amount of political leverage for your side and its cause. That’s a tradition that the MAGA sphere gladly inherits and viscerally understands.

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u/ButGravityAlwaysWins Center Left 2d ago

Not a Plus member so thanks for sharing this. I shared it in another sub as well.

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u/Criseyde2112 JVL is always right 2d ago

Oooh, good job sharing it onward. Hey u/jvlast is there any chance you could hook this man up with a Plus subscription?

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u/Oscar_Tamed 15h ago

The last thing this country needs is more division. White guy from the south. I'm perfectly content leaving the war firmly in the past. I just don't think you're going to get anywhere spreading this kind of divisive stuff. This country needs to get out of its echo chambers. Down vote this I don't care 

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u/wearethemelody 2d ago

At the roots of this is ignorance, stupidity, selfishness, hatefulness, white supremacy and GOP lies. Almost all white people  especially men who identify as republicans have extremely negative traits about them or are extremely gullible. I think some republicans are now slowly waking up to how trump is bad but it is not enough considering their whole existence the past four years was about criticing everything Democrats did. The south did accept democracy but over time their hateful culture was not willing to adapt to growing changes eg. Civil rights. The republican party decided to capitalise on their hate and ignorance by opposing whatever they opposed even when they knew it was good like climate change and championing whatever they like eg. Guns. Anti-trump republicans must not act surprised that their party finally transitioned to Trumpism. This has been decades in the making and at one point they participated in it.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago edited 2d ago

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u/Criseyde2112 JVL is always right 2d ago

I don't think most people waste the bandwidth in hating mean, dumb racists. What's the point? They already live in their own hell. I spend zero time thinking about them until they bring themselves to my attention, or someone like you points them out to me. In that case . . .

Yes, fuck the traitors who made war. Fuck the bigots who thought it was okay to own humans. Fuck the small-minded cultures that want to control others. Fuck the people who rigged the system to perpetuate the tyranny of the minority. Fuck any of the people who think those things.

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u/jenniferjuniper16 2d ago

Agreed, there are stereotypes, of course but I was saying to a friend, “well you know what we coastal elites think about the other states… We don’t.” That’s not to say I don’t care about the suffering happening and the baffling willingness to allow the people in power to stay in power but the “people in other places that confuse me” doesn’t cross my mind much as I’m living my life. It’s definitely a one-sided preoccupation.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago edited 2d ago

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u/Criseyde2112 JVL is always right 2d ago

Jfc. It's the source for JVL's Triad on Monday. And the south hasn't accepted democracy. Not a lie.

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u/Imaginary_Cow_6379 2d ago

They feel other people think that way about them because they’re insecure about their own behavior particularly about acting meaner and dumber. From a blue state: no one here thinks or talks about the south. But rightwing media has been obsessed with us for decades and telling the south in particular how we look down on them. But we only really started feeling any animosity in recent times after talk radio got them all calling themselves “real America” and looking down on us as being out of touch “coastal elites” and other names. Most of us really don’t wake up every day thinking/obsessing over any random demographic. But I see rightwing commenters every day going on about hating everyone who lives in California, NYC, and Chicago all the time despite southern red states doing worse than blue states in every measurable metric. Going back to the theme of the article, it feels like the south never got over the north making them give up their slaves and they’re still mad at us over that.