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September 3 - September 19, 2023
In Goldwater’s time, people claiming to be embattled holdouts defending American liberty called themselves “Movement Conservatives.” A century before, their predecessors had called themselves “Confederates.”
They hated that the government had taken on popular projects since the 1930s. Highways, dams, power plants, schools, hospitals, and social welfare legislation cost tax dollars. This, they warned, amounted to a redistribution of wealth from hardworking white men to the poor, often to poor people of color.
Movement Conservatives embraced the same ideas that, a century before, had led South Carolina slave owners to attack the United States government.
That mudsill vision of the world stood against a very different set of principles that lay at the heart of American democracy: equality and self-determination. Those who embraced this vision believed that society moved forward because self-reliant individuals produced and innovated far more effectively than a small group of elites, whose wealth insulated them from the need to experiment. These two ideologies were incompatible, yet they were woven together into the fabric of America from its start. *
America began with a great paradox: the same men who came up with the radical idea of constructing a nation on the principle of equality also owned slaves, thought Indians were savages, and considered women inferior.
In the Founders’ minds, then, the principle of equality depended on inequality. That central paradox—that freedom depended on racial, gender, and class inequality—shaped American history as the cultural, religious, and social patterns of the new nation grew around it.
In the last half century, we have begun to pay attention to how the American paradox has kept people of color and women from the full enjoyment of their rights. But we have paid far less attention to the fact that it actually threatens all Americans. It has given a small group of wealthy men the language they need to undermine our democracy, and to replace it with an oligarchy.
at times when it seems as if people of color or women will become equal to white men, oligarchs are able to court white male voters by insisting that universal equality will, in fact, reduce white men to subservience. Both slaveholders in the 1850s and Movement Conservatives a century later convinced white American men that equality for people of color and women would destroy their freedom.
Over the course of a generation, both elite slave owners and Movement Conservative leaders came to believe that they alone knew how to run the country. They saw it as imperative that others be kept from power. They suppressed voting, rigged the mechanics of government, silenced the opposition press, and dehumanized their opponents. At the same time, quite logically, they did not see themselves as bound by the law. As the only ones who truly understood what was good for everyone, they were above it.
The Confederate States of America was based on the principle that the Founders were wrong. Elite slave owners would resolve the American paradox by shearing off the portion of it that endorsed equality. The idea that all men were created equal was an outdated fallacy that flew in the face of both natural law and God’s law.
The “cornerstone” of the Confederacy, as Vice President Alexander Stephens put it, was that “the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
In the West, Confederate ideology took on a new life, and from there, over the course of the next 150 years, it came to dominate America.
American settlers in the West had written racial hierarchies into their laws before the Civil War—taxing Mexican and Chinese miners more severely than white miners, for example—and while people in the East had been promoting equality during the war, most in the West were reinforcing racial distinctions.
Ignoring the reality that American soldiers and cowboys were often men of color and that the government provided settlers with land, protected them from Indians, and helped develop the western economy, Democrats celebrated cowboys as brave heroes who worked their way to prosperity as they fought for freedom and American civilization against barbaric Indians, Chinese, and Mexicans. Although in reality the West also depended on women, in the male-dominated world of the cowboy myth they were depicted as either submissive wives or prostitutes.
original American paradox of freedom based on inequality was reestablished. That restoration relegated people of color to inequality, but it also undercut the ability of oligarchs to destroy democracy. Black and brown people were subordinate, so wealthy men could not convincingly argue that they were commandeering government to redistribute wealth and destroy liberty. With that rhetoric defanged, white Americans used the government to curb wealth and power.
From the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt in the early 1900s to that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt thirty years later, Progressives regulated the economy, protected social welfare, and promoted national infrastructure. That government activism, though, privileged white men over women and people of color. Even the New Deal programs of the Depression, designed to lift the poor out of desperation while reining in runaway capitalism, carefully maintained distinctions between women and men, black and brown and white.
The new “liberal consensus,” as it became known, challenged the American paradox. Once again, oligarchs rolled out their corollary, that inclusion destroys democracy. And this time they had a new base of support in the West, to which resources and people had streamed during the war.
Between Goldwater and 2016 Republican nominee Donald J. Trump, every Republican presidential nominee except Gerald Ford (whose elevation did not come through usual channels) has associated himself with the region west of the Mississippi River. As party leaders gradually came to embrace the ideology of Movement Conservatives, they undermined democracy, using the same pattern their southern predecessors did. In 1968, Richard M. Nixon—once a congressman from California—abandoned federal support for desegregation with his “southern strategy,” and adopted the practice of building a base by
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Former actor and California governor Ronald Reagan deliberately assumed the mantle of the cowboy. Running for the presidency in 1980, he wore boots and a white Stetson, and warned that only the actions of a few good men were holding back a redistribution of wealth. He championed the idea that America was a land of equal opportunity at the same time that he promoted the myth of the welfare queen, a grasping black woman who sucked tax dollars from hardworking Americans. Once in office, Reagan began to shape policy according to the Movement Conservative view, a process that would gradually
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Entrepreneur billionaire Peter Thiel summed up the changing political climate when he wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
In 2016, Trump stripped off whatever genteel veneer remained on Republican ideology, actively cultivating the support of white supremacist groups and declaring of his supporters, “I love the uneducated.” A leaked tape in which Trump boasted of sexual assault revealed his conviction that women were objects for the use of wealthy men, and the willingness of Republican leaders to overlook that language as “locker room talk” indicated that they shared Trump’s belief. Trump supporters talked openly of secession and perhaps even of revolution if their candidate did not win.
The parallels between the antebellum Democrats and the modern-day Republican Party were clear.7
How the South Won the Civil War tells the story of the second rise of American oligarchy: the larger story behind the South Carolina delegates’ putting western Senator Barry Goldwater over the top to win the Republican presidential nomination in 1964 and its logical conclusion in the present moment. It is the story of modern America.
Wealth, family, education, connections, and religion all reinforced the idea that people belonged to the stations into which they were born. Kings and noblemen were born to rule those below them, peasants to labor for and serve those above. Women were in a category all their own: God had made them lesser than men in the very act of creation. So most women worked, gave birth, reared children, created, loved, worshipped, and died without moving the levers of power.
In what has become known as the Age of Enlightenment, men and women interested in the world around them embraced the scientific method and the search for knowledge to discover the natural laws of earth and the heavens, rather than falling back on culture, religion, or aristocratic rule. These thinkers began to focus on fact and reason, instead of old social and religious traditions, to make sense of the world. In part, the new ideas of Locke and the Enlightenment thinkers who followed him reflected the need of Europeans to make sense of the new information coming from the North American
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The Great Awakening was, in part, a backlash against the Enlightenment emphasis on reason and learning, but its emphasis on a personal relationship with God actually led evangelical adherents to a similar political stance as Enlightenment thinkers. Evangelical ministers rejected the cool intellectualism of such Enlightenment deists as Benjamin Franklin and championed individual grace. Their insistence that everyone was equal in the eyes of God taught followers to question authority, especially that of colonial officials who tended to ignore rural areas.
There was a profound contradiction between Jefferson’s declaration that “all men are created equal” and the fact that he and many of the founders enslaved other people. How did slave owners make sense of that crucial contradiction? They didn’t. In their minds, freedom and slavery depended on each other. Freedom did not stand in contrast to slavery; freedom required slavery.15
The land was inhabited by people far more adapted to it than the European newcomers, although those native tribes were themselves going through upheaval. Early fishermen had brought epidemic diseases, which decimated the coastal tribes and unsettled their economies, politics, and social webs, forcing them to trade and ally with the intruders to shore up their teetering systems. Europeans who previously knew Indians only by word of mouth, or from seeing captives exhibited in cities, discovered that these peoples had sophisticated societies. Settlers had to rely on them for supplies and
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they certainly had one of gender. Women’s lives in America were bounded by the expectation that they were unequal to men. They had no right to own property or to control their own lives; they and their children were the property of their husbands.
No one in the colony had any expectation that indentured and enslaved workers would be treated as equal to their masters. But the distinction between planters and workers was generally rooted not in race but in class. England had a long history of dividing the rich from the poor, and class markers had only gotten more pronounced in the years since the enclosure movement had created roving bands of homeless people. As folks who had been pushed off the land moved about the country looking for work, the English gentry began to consider them lazy, unprincipled, savage. Reformers warned that the
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They believed the poor made up a class whose members would always be subordinate to their betters. The most that could be done was to keep them out of trouble and working for their own subsistence. These ideas came to the colonies. And so, as Virginia workers started living longer, colonial leaders passed laws to tie slaves and servants more and more tightly into a permanent underclass.25
In the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion, the Tidewater elite set out to preserve their control over the colony’s government, and thus over its economy and society. To do that, they began to split the lower classes apart along racial lines. They pushed Indians off their land and enslaved those who fought back. From 1670 to 1715, colonists enslaved between 30,000 and 50,000 Indians. Entire tribes disappeared, and white farmers moved onto their lands.
In 1680, the General Assembly began to drive wedges between black slaves and white servants with a series of regulations establishing greater punishments for black slaves.
And there began the paradox. The very men who adhered most vigorously to the Enlightenment concept that all men were created equal held slaves. Indeed, their new, radical concept of freedom depended on slavery, for slavery permanently removed the underclass from any hope of influencing government. Virginia leaders had gotten rid of the problem of the poor in society: they had enslaved them. And, of course, they had gotten rid of the problem of women by reading them out of personhood altogether. What was left—ideologically, anyway—was a minority of people running the government, a body politic
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Since most white men could not conceive of a world in which men of color had rights equal to theirs—and they certainly didn’t think women did—they believed that the fact white men had equal rights meant that the nation was dedicated to the ideal of human equality.
Poor white men did not achieve actual economic and social equality with society’s leaders, but those leaders did not have to worry about challenges to their privilege. Their lower-class white neighbors got the benefit of believing they were on the same level as rich men, because they shared the same racial identity. They would not revolt, because preserving the distinction between themselves and slaves was more important than seeking political power.
From its founding, America has stood at the nexus of democracy and oligarchy. And as soon as the nation was established, its history of conflating class and race gave an elite the language to take over the government and undermine democracy.
While abolitionists argued that slavery was immoral, southern ministers pointed out that slavery had precedents in the Bible and in ancient Greece and Rome, and that the Founders themselves had held slaves. They rejected the Enlightenment idea of human equality, arguing instead that God’s law naturally created hierarchies in society, which should be modeled on a family structure based in paternalism. Increasingly, slaveholders bought into this vision and dehumanized their slaves, both brutalizing them in a constant demonstration of white men’s dominance and caricaturing them as lazy, stupid,
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Southern apologists also began to mythologize white women as pure beings to be protected from the world—a characterization that ignored the reality that most white women were wage workers—while also lumping them, too, at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
in the face of Great Britain’s abolition of slavery in 1833, they set out to protect and spread slavery throughout the Western Hemisphere.
On March 4, 1858, prominent South Carolina slaveholder James Henry Hammond
They started by censoring ideological attacks on slavery. When northern reformers tried to circulate anti-slavery literature to prominent southern white men through the federal mails in summer 1835, postmasters refused to deliver the packages, and mobs broke into the post offices, seized the mail, and burned it. The next year, when abolitionists flooded Congress with petitions asking it to curtail slavery in Washington, D.C., southern congressmen passed a “gag rule” in the House, automatically tabling all such petitions. Many people who didn’t care much at all about the morality of slavery
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Then slave owners stopped northerners from checking the spread of slavery.
The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act turned the Democratic Party into the party of slaveholders. In the 1854 elections, voters in the North threw Democrats out of office; only those in the most extreme districts managed to hold onto power. By 1855, moderate Democrats were gone, and slave owners had taken control of the national party.
Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner was sitting at his desk writing letters when South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks, a man famous for little aside from his violent temper, came up behind Sumner with a walking stick and beat him bloody as a number of Democratic senators looked on. Sumner had just delivered an inflammatory two-day speech against the Pierce administration’s attempt to force slavery on an anti-slavery majority in Kansas, laying out the case that the nation was under siege by an oligarchy that was destroying the civil rights that American citizens had won in their
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the Supreme Court handed down the Dred Scott decision, which gave slave owners everything they wanted. It declared that African Americans were not citizens and “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” and that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories, because the Constitution required the protection of property, including slaves. Therefore, the Missouri Compromise, which had protected freedom in the Northwest, was unconstitutional.
According to the Confederacy’s Vice President, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, the nation’s Founders had made a grave error by thinking that “all men are created equal.” Addressing an audience on March 21, 1861, he explained that “our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea . . . its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”
The new federal taxes were overwhelmingly popular. Paying them signaled support for the government and democracy. Even conservative newspapers declared that “there is not the slightest objection raised in any loyal quarter to as much taxation as may be necessary.”
The war tied the government to the American people, but it did far more than that. It expanded the definition of who was included in “all men are created equal.” On January 1, 1863, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in the lands still under the Confederacy’s control. He freed them out of military necessity, since he was trying to weaken the South by taking its manpower, but he went a step further, asking freed slaves to “to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence; and . . . in all cases when allowed, [to] labor faithfully for reasonable wages.” He
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Republicans had brought to life an economy based on the theory of free labor and had destroyed an oligarchic society based on wealth accumulated through enslaved labor. To kill the old system once and for all, Congress wrote and sent off to the states for ratification the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ending slavery or involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime. It was the first amendment that increased, rather than decreased, the power of the federal government.
