Death of a Nation Read online

  This objection, however, can be answered by recalling how the antebellum Democrats regarded the old plantation. Democratic senator James Chesnut regarded his slaves as having it so good on his South Carolina plantation that they cost more than the work they produced. Asked if he ever had runaways, he quipped, “Never! It’s pretty hard work to keep me from running away from them!”22

  Chesnut’s wife, the spirited Mary Boykin Chesnut, wrote in her diary in 1861, shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War, “Now if slavery is as disagreeable to Negroes as we think it, why don’t they all march over the border where they would be received with open arms?”23 Her point was that the slaves who wanted to leave could have left; the white men were all at the front and there was no one except women and children to stop them.

  Her deeper implication was that in reality many slaves preferred the security of the plantation to the shock and responsibilities of freedom. The plantation, she suggested, had become not merely a prison of the body but also a prison of the mind. It held its population in debased psychological confinement even when there was the opportunity to get up and go. I believe this insight is what drives the modern Democratic Party. The Democrats realized that, long after slavery was ended, they could create new types of plantations that would so degrade and imprison the minds of their inhabitants that very few would want to leave.

  Still, there are massive differences between the old slave plantation and the political life of today’s Democrats. The old plantation was rural; today’s Democrats are largely urban. Slavery was largely though not entirely a Southern institution; today’s Democrats have their base in the North and on the coasts. The plantation was sustained through an ideology of states’ rights; today’s Democrats are the party of centralized government that opposes states’ rights. If we must draw on analogies from the past, today’s Democrats seem closer to Tammany Hall and the urban machines of the North than to the old rural slave plantation. Didn’t Franklin D. Roosevelt nationalize those urban machines to create the model of governance for the modern Democratic Party?

  Yes, but the urban machines were themselves based on the slave plantation. Historians rightly credit Martin Van Buren as the man who invented the Northern Democratic machine. Yet he was the close ally of and immediate successor to Democratic Party founder and Tennessee slave-owner Andrew Jackson. Based on his observations of the rural plantation—and the similarities he noted between slaves in the South and newly arriving impoverished immigrants in the North—Van Buren adapted the Democrats’ plantation model to urban conditions.

  Thus he helped create new ethnic plantations based in the cities, populated by immigrants who were dependent on and exploited by the Democratic Party in the North in somewhat the same manner as the slaves were by the Democrats in the South. These urban machines ripped off the taxpayer not only to enrich corrupt machine bosses but also to buy votes in exchange for promises of employment and basic provisions. In sum the urban machines symbolized by New York’s Tammany Hall were themselves mini welfare states, precursors to the Leviathan welfare state Democrats would later establish in the twentieth century.

  As Van Buren’s adaptation of the slave system to create the urban machines suggests, this is a story of how the old plantation was creatively modified to produce the modern progressive plantation. I’m not saying the Democrats are the same as they were two centuries ago; this is a story of change as well as of continuity. Democrats like Van Buren didn’t just extend the rural plantation model from the early nineteenth century to the present. Rather, they transformed it to changing conditions, in response to new demographic realities created by immigrant waves, and also in response to the singular catastrophe that left the old plantation model in ruins.

  The old plantation was destroyed by the Civil War. Prior to that, the plantation was the model of Democratic governance and Democratic political domination. Democrats had concocted a whole ideology—the positive-good school of slavery—to uphold and defend the plantation. As I will show in the next chapter, this Democratic apologia for slavery as an institution to be cherished and expanded was radically different from the founders’ shared understanding of slavery as a necessary evil that should be curbed until it could be eliminated.

  The founders hoped that slavery would disappear and they expected it to. In 1782 Jefferson wrote of “a change already perceptible . . . The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust . . . the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation.”24 Nothing could be further from the vision of the Democratic Party, whose most “moderate” faction saw slavery as a matter of moral indifference and an institution that should be continued indefinitely.

  Interestingly the Democrats’ prime apologist for slavery, George Fitzhugh, was a self-proclaimed socialist who contrasted the happy inhabitants of the Democratic plantation with what he took to be the exploited laboring class of the capitalist Republican Northern states. Fitzhugh’s arguments seem chillingly familiar because his beloved plantation still shapes the ideology of his twenty-first-century Democratic successors.

  So does the pro-slavery ideology of Democratic presidential candidate Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln’s supreme antagonist. Douglas was a Northern Democrat, and contrary to today’s conventional wisdom that views the plantation as a purely Southern creation, Democrats both in the North and the South protected it. Douglas and Fitzhugh were also full-blown white supremacists who railed against blacks in a manner unthinkable of the founders.

  When Lincoln in his House Divided speech alleged a four-man conspiracy to nationalize slavery, he named just one Southern Democrat, Roger Taney of Maryland, and three Northern Democrats: Stephen Douglas of Illinois, former president Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire and the current president James Buchanan of Pennsylvania. A few years earlier, Buchanan said that at a time when slavery was besieged throughout the country, slaveholders “have no other allies . . . except the Democracy of the North,” meaning the Northern Democratic Party.25

  “The great support of Slavery in the South,” said Whig senator and later Lincoln’s secretary of state William Seward, “has been its alliance with the Democratic party of the North.”26 These are the same Northern Democrats that tried to thwart Lincoln during the war. Their goal was to force him to reconcile with the Confederacy and to restore slavery. Lincoln termed them the “fire in the rear,” more dangerous to the nation than even the Confederate army. Eventually, through Lincoln’s efforts, the ruin of the plantation in 1865 became also the ruin of the national Democratic Party.

  So the Democrats had to reconstruct themselves after the war. This reconstruction—very different from the Reconstruction attempted by Republicans to integrate blacks into the economic and political life of the country—involved not an abandonment of the plantation scheme but its reinvention, both in the North and in the South.

  The Democratic urban machine, of course, outlasted the war and continued to hold immigrants in its iron clasp. But for the postbellum Democratic Party of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sharecropping replaced slavery, and segregation and racial terrorism enforced Democratic control in the South, not just of blacks but also poor whites. Essentially the Democrats reinvented the plantation using a new tool of enslavement: white supremacy.

  REBUILDING THE PLANTATION

  Progressive Democrats led by Woodrow Wilson sought to rebuild a new type of plantation for the twentieth century. They were quite familiar with the old plantation, being just a single generation removed from it. Contrary to the history books, which assiduously camouflage this fact, progressives are the ones who invented white nationalism and white supremacy in their modern and most virulent forms for the purpose of keeping poor whites in thrall to the Democratic Party. Progressives, in other words, were America’s original hate group, and their opponents, the conservative Republicans, were the original champions of the notion that “blac
k lives matter.”

  The other signal contribution of progressivism was to introduce the idea of the centralized state as the Big House, with racial terrorism and eugenics as the macabre mechanisms for controlling the population of their new plantation and maintaining quality control for its labor. Through progressivism, Wilson inaugurated, one might say, the “birth of a nation” that departed radically from the American founding, a new birth represented by the ominous symbol of the night-riding Ku Klux Klan, which served as the domestic terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.

  Yet it was not Wilson but his progressive successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in the 1930s and 1940s institutionalized progressivism in the operations of government and thus created the foundation for the modern Democratic Party. FDR began by replacing the Democratic urban machines with the labor union movement and local Democratic Party bosses with a national boss, namely himself. He introduced the idea of a national plantation—Tammany on the Potomac—with a progressive “brain trust” and progressive administrators as its overseers.

  FDR also introduced a concept that seems to secretly inspire Democrats to this day: the 100 percent marginal tax rate. In 1941, FDR proposed a 99.5 percent tax rate on anyone earning over $100,000 a year. In 1942, he went even further, signing an executive order taxing all personal income over $25,000 (which is $300,000 in today’s money) at 100 percent. Even his Democratic Congress balked and lowered the top rate to 90 percent, though it crept up to a high of 94 percent during World War II.

  FDR insisted that Americans who earned enough to live comfortably should not be allowed to keep any more income beyond that point.27 Why not take everything they earned above this limit? Although presented as an ideal rather than a policy proposal, FDR’s vision—gather up everything you’ve earned above a certain point and turn it in to the government—amounts to nothing less than American serfdom. FDR was the first to seek to implement the Democratic vision of a national plantation. Thus he laid the foundation for what successive generations of Democrats to this day have pursued.

  FDR and his team also gave the plantation a fascist facelift—deliberately introducing elements of Mussolini’s Italian fascism into the New Deal—while at the same time drawing on models of Nazi conformity, what the Nazis termed Gleichschaltung. (Hitler, for his part, created his own plantation, drawing on schemes that he self-consciously lifted from the Democratic Party and from American progressives.) Some of the fascist elements first introduced by FDR, both in policy and in strategy, are also evident in today’s Democratic Party.

  Moreover, as Democratic presidents did in the antebellum period, FDR relied on Northern Democrats to play the role they played before the Civil War, namely to ally with Southern Democrats to protect the infrastructure of racism that continued to sustain FDR’s national Democratic plantation. Thus while FDR didn’t share Hitler’s form of racism, he was not above making a Faustian pact with the worst racists in America to get his New Deal agenda passed. FDR and the Democrats’ shameful complicity with fascism and white supremacy are ignored by progressive historians, and virtually no textbook even mentions them.

  By the 1930s, we can see in FDR’s version of the plantation the familiar outlines that define the Democratic Party today. Today’s Democrats have the same attachment to the centralized state, the new Big House, and they display the same fascist streak when, for example, they use the instruments of the state against their political opponents. But we cannot stop with FDR; our story would be incomplete without showing how Lyndon Johnson again modified the plantation in the 1960s, and how Bill Clinton and Barack Obama further expanded it in recent decades.

  CONVERSION STORIES

  LBJ was a lifelong bigot who has somehow in progressive historiography been transformed into a convert to the cause of civil rights. From the recently released JFK Files, we have good reason to suppose LBJ was once a Ku Klux Klan member. An internal FBI memo refers to “documented proof” that LBJ was in the Texas Klan during his early political career.28

  If true, this is hardly surprising, and it means LBJ now joins Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman and Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black as high-level Democrats who were also Klansmen. Yet we are asked to believe that this leopard magically changed his spots. Apparently a long list of other Democratic bigots, including West Virginia Klansman and Dixiecrat Robert Byrd, who became Obama’s and Hillary’s mentor, the “conscience of the Senate,” were also converts to the cause of black equality and advancement.

  Yet where are their conversion stories? One might expect that when someone undergoes a wrenching transformation from being a white supremacist to an enemy of white supremacy, they would have quite a story to tell. Whittaker Chambers certainly did, when he made the traumatic transformation from communist to anti-communist. Chambers records his intellectual volte face in his autobiographical magnum opus Witness. Yet there are no such Democratic conversion stories.

  This is the dog that didn’t bark, the clue that tells us that people like LBJ and Robert Byrd never underwent any big transformation. There was no dark night of the soul, no road to Damascus. They merely transitioned from an earlier incarnation of the Democratic plantation to a newer one. LBJ, for instance, remained the priapic plantation boss he was when he started his career. His transformation was purely tactical; he pushed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act not so much to combat an upsurge of white racism but rather in response to the need for a new approach in the wake of rapidly declining white racism.

  White racism and white supremacy declined dramatically in the aftermath of World War II—Hitler did more to undermine it than even the civil rights movement, which benefited from the discrediting of fascist doctrines of Nordic supremacy—and this meant LBJ could no longer count on a solid South of white racist Democrats. There were quite simply fewer and fewer of them.

  Attracted by the message of free markets, anti-communism, patriotism and upward mobility, non-racist whites in the South had started to move rapidly toward the Republican Party. The Democrats were losing their racist hegemony in the region, and LBJ saw that this represented perhaps the greatest catastrophe for the Democratic Party since Lincoln shut down the old Democratic plantation. Something drastic needed to be done.

  If the Democrats intended to retain their majority, LBJ saw they needed to get more black votes. This was quite a change for a Democratic Party whose history was largely based on exploiting black labor and suppressing the black vote. But LBJ saw the opportunity to create a new type of plantation in which blacks could be exploited in a different way. On this plantation they had a different casting role, not as exploited workers who did not vote but rather as exploited voters who did not work. In other words, LBJ recognized the importance of turning blacks into a constituency, which Democrats had never before done in their party’s history.

  This was LBJ’s own Southern Strategy—a strategy that required LBJ to turn against his former Dixiecrat allies. It goes unmentioned in progressive historiography, in contrast with Nixon’s oft-mentioned Southern Strategy, which is largely a myth. Far from campaigning on a racist platform—no one has ever cited a single explicitly racist campaign appeal made by Nixon—Nixon campaigned for the non-racist vote of the rapidly urbanizing Peripheral South, leaving the racist vote of the Deep South to George Wallace, the Democratic segregationist who won it.

  The Republican campaign slogan from the Nixon era—which tagged the Democrats with being the party of “acid, amnesty and abortion”—was clearly not about race, but referred instead to the hippie drug lifestyle, to the Vietnam War and to the permissive 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion decision. Nixon’s voters were, as in Merle Haggard’s famous 1969 song, Okies from Muskogee who refuse to take drugs or dodge the draft and “like living right and being free.” Whatever this so-called redneck anthem is about, it isn’t about racism or white supremacy.

  True, blacks went from being Republican voters to Democratic voters, and th
e South went from being solidly Democratic to now mostly Republican, but I prove these transformations had little to do with race. Rather, blacks switched during the 1930s for the economic benefits of the New Deal, and the South became Republican in the 1980s because of the Reaganite appeal of anti-communism, free markets, patriotism and social issues like family values and opposition to abortion.

  Far from the parties switching platforms, as progressives contend they did, I show that the ideology of the Republican Party today is essentially the same as it was during the time of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln defined slavery as “you work, I eat,” and that is the core philosophy of today’s Democratic Party, no less than the Democratic Party of Lincoln’s day. By contrast, the core philosophy of today’s GOP is identical with that of Lincoln: “I always thought the man who made the corn should eat the corn.”29

  The landmark immigration law of the mid-1960s, which opened the door to 25 million new immigrants, mostly from Asia, Africa and South America, created the foundation for the Obama plantation, one that encompasses not only blacks but also Latinos and other minorities. Today’s Democratic plantation has come a long way from its roots in the rural antebellum South. It’s much bigger now and includes African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans and to some extent even Asian Americans. Today’s Democratic plantation is grimly visible in the urban black ghettos, the Latino barrios, the Native American reservations.

  Obama presided over the Democrats’ move toward a multicultural plantation, complete with a sustaining ideology of identity politics that reconciles each ethnic group to its political captivity, seeking to create the modern equivalent of the contented slave. Of course today’s enslaved, while free in principle to leave the plantation, in practice rarely do so. Drawing on the work of psychologist Martin Seligman, I explain this through the concept of “learned helplessness.” The Democrats have created learned helplessness among their captive constituencies, and this keeps them bound by invisible cords to the plantation lifestyle.