Plantation America

…is what we're entering. It's why the elites no longer seem to care if people are employed, or desperate. It's why a significant portion of the elite is determined to repeal the healthcare law, now that the Supreme Court has upheld it. The hoi-polloi must be driven down, like the slaves of yore.

Sara Robinson (Alternet, 06/28/12) offers an intriguing theory: the wealthy now most articulate, most politically active, increasingly dominant, are from a different aristocracy than men like FDR, or even George H.W. Bush. They have not, she points out, inherited the Puritan-based values of social justice and noblesse oblige, derived mostly from the Northeast. Instead, like the younger Bush and Mitch McConnell, they inherit their ideas from the plantation aristocracy of the Tidewater South, and ultimately from the even more brutal plantation society of the West Indies.

The plantation heritage emphasizes the 'divine right' of the elite to lord it over their slaves--and everyone else, brutally, if necessary. It also rejects the idea that the elite has an obligation to aid those less fortunate, or the later idea that equality is a good: it's not: it's an evil, in their eyes, to be beaten down (literally). Further, freedom, for them, is only individual, and only realized fully by elites, because they should have the freedom to suppress everyone else.

You could go further back and draw parallels between the Puritan vs Plantation aristocracies to the European feudal regimes vs the latifundias lorded over by the Roman Senators towards (and after) the break up of the Roman Empire. The process of Senatorial takeover parallels our own: yeomen peasantry, urban proletariat, and the middle class were all driven into serfdom, under the control of the few Senatorial families monopolizing all wealth. Anyone not of Senatorial rank was treated like a serf.

In feudal society, there was at least the idea that nobility had an obligation to protect and look after their subjects, although this often degenerated into something more like the late Roman system. Its degeneration led to the French Revolution and the English Civil War, but also to social democracy in most of Europe.

It is the southern, plantation ethos that pervades the Tea Party, or rather, its funders, like the Koch brothers and Karl Rove. They are not constrained by ideas of justice, the rule of law or fairness. The Kochs, for example, believe they have a god-given right to pollute the air, water and land and shouldn't have to pay for the damage they do to anyone else; that's their justification for adamantly opposing any kind of environmental regulation: they call this "freedom."

Looked at this way, the contest between conservative and liberal/progressive, between Republican and Democrat, is a contest between two elite cultures, or tribes. The older, more established northeastern ethos appears tired, and lacking conviction. The brash, southern and western tribe pours its resources into gaining dominance.

It doesn't look good.