Southern Conservatives Are America's Third Party

[Recursion]

Ladd has been writing some really interesting stuff for Forbes about the role of white supremacism in US politics and economics. Here's a recent one:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisladd/2017/03/16/southern-conservatives-are-americas-third-party/

All the while, an unacknowledged and unofficial third party has survived inside these alignments. A party of Southern conservatives, aligned originally with Democrats, has remained a distinct political entity, complete with their own institutions, practices and values. Elsewhere in America, Democrats and Republicans dueled their way through a two-party democracy. By contrast, Southern states never tolerated partisan competition. Southern states have always been governed by a single, distinct local party, an arrangement that continues today.

America is a three-party nation locked inside a two-party political process. Poles of American partisan alignment have been scrambled in recent decades by a rare event, something unprecedented in our history. Our Southern conservative shadow party just completed a decades-long shift in its official affiliation. It will take time for our system to absorb the implications of this change and establish a new equilibrium. This journey toward a new alignment of our political poles has no certain endpoint, no roadmap, and no promise of a happy ending.

Our constitution was shaped by a troubling contradiction born of political necessity. Our founders were forced to develop a political framework capable of encapsulating a Caribbean slave economy inside a wider classical-liberal project. From that effort emerged a governing framework that allowed the slave states to preserve their peculiar institutions. Influenced by their essentially defensive posture, slave states developed a highly insular brand of conservatism under a monolithic, single-party system.

Southern conservatism presumes the existence of a natural, inherited hierarchy. As Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens explained in his criticism of the US constitutional order, “They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.”

[Warpy]

1. They always were

For almost a hundred years, they refused to join the Party of Lincoln because, well, Lincoln and were called boll weevil Democrats because their votes could always be counted upon by the Republicans. Once Civil Rights legislation passed in the 60s, they flooded over to the Party of Lincoln. Southern culture has always been fixed within Restoration amber, the county gentry at the top and a strict social hierarchy keeping the natural servants, POC and poorer people, far below them. They've always wanted to restrict the right to vote to the "right" people and they've always mourned the loss of the Articles of Confederation that gave the states the freedom to raise their own armies, mint their own money, and write their own international treaties.

I really had high hopes for Judge Roy Moore. I thought for sure he had the gumption to start the southern bible party or some such nonsense, but he kept going back to the Alabama supreme court like the proverbial bad penny. Now that he's out for good, maybe it will be his last hurrah. It will push the stewardship of the country by divine right aristocrats, the rest of us well served by their generosity of spirit and high ideals of good governance. Yeah, right.

Someone will eventually come along and do this, it's inevitable. The Republicans are finding them as difficult to get along with as the Democrats had. They do not compromise. They only subvert.

[wildeyed]

2. They are f'ing crazy.

NC was run by business progressive Republicans and conservative Democrats for ages until we got swamped by this factions in the 2010 redistricting. They think NC will lose around 4 BILLION dollars in revenue due to their crazy bathroom paranoia law. They are completely divorced from reality, and willing to do ANYTHING to maintain their un-democratic hold over the state. And they are NOT bright. At all. Just a bunch of whiny men-children with degrees from mediocre colleges and room temperature IQs trying to FORCE everyone to accept their god-given dominance as white men. The national GOP and Kochs send in actual smart people to tell them what to do, but the state level people are just dumb. It's infuriating to put up with that combination of evil and incompetence. Courts need to step in on the partisan gerrymandering issue or it is all going to end in tears....

Business leaders need to do something and fast. The alliance THEIR party made with these morons is costing everyone too much money. They built this monster, now they need to step up and control it. The Dixiecrat faction does not have enough votes to actually win anything if they are not enabled by moderate Republicans. They could stop this now by allying with Dems on certain issues.

[wildeyed]

3. Yep, the Dixiecrat faction is a destructive force

but we still can't quite shake their electoral importance. We have been dealing with them on the state level in NC since 2010. They are really hateful and incompetent. Horrible for business and quite stupid to boot. We could vote them out legit if the courts would step in on the partisan gerrymandering issue. Much of their ability to cling to power in the statehouses has to do with how the districts are draw in their favor right now. They don't survive with nearly as much power if we fix that. They would still be a force, but not insurmountable.