Not my point.
My point is that regardless of what all those examples you posted may have done in other areas, they kept in place a structure which (because, being the elite of their particular states, they were intelligent enough to know this) guaranteed that the underclass would remain an underclass. They may have advocated for some charitable reforms, but they made sure to keep the laws in place to prevent them from actually acting on their own initiative for their own benefit. That’s the difference between a progressive and a demagogue.
You’re ignoring the reality on the ground when those laws were passed. It wasn’t as if these states were teeming with factories and the laws were enacted to take away the rights of their workers.
But back to the OP, you really can’t argue that the social ills we’re discussing in this thread were caused by right-to-work laws. Georgia’s right-to-work law wasn’t passed until 1947. Do you think the South’s social ills only developed since then?
The fact that the South went Democratic for a long time doesn’t, in itself, make it liberal, it’s true, but like spoke- said, there was always a big populist strand in Southern politics. It was, for a long time, a racist populism, but it was a populism none the less.
Populism isn’t liberalism. Populists may advocate for liberal policies, but they also advocate for regressive policies at the same time. Populism and racism in the South were inextricably tied. It’s not as if the racism was merely an appendage to an otherwise liberal philosophy.
Forget it, spoke-. Remember: Southerners are stupid, and stupid people vote for Republicans, and Republicans impoverish the populace. These are the axioms you must accept in order to post to Great Debates; attempting to stand against them will mark you for a pile-on.
Have fun!
No they weren’t. Not originally, anyway. One of the fundamental political goals of the People’s Party was to try to get poor white farmers and poor black farmers to see their common interest and vote together.
Aw hell, I’ve been at the bottom of bigger GD pile-ons than this. And once even in Cafe Society. I ain’t skeered.
Besides, some of us stupid Southerners vote Democratic. (Not that we have any illusions that Democrats can magically cure poverty…)
Actually, that pretty much was the case.
The American South was perhaps the region of the country most receptive to the rhetoric of the Progressive Era, and indeed many of its politicians, some mentioned above, became genuine progressives. This movement had a tremendous and lasting impact on the relationship of government to its citizens.
However, the dirty little secret of the Progressive movement is that it was not progressive at all in terms of race. Consider Woodrow Wilson, an open and unapologetic bigot who resegregated the federal government and the District of Columbia. Yet his internationalist stance and his economic positions were impeccably liberal.
Senator Carter Glass of Virginia was a true progressive Democrat as well, one of the architects of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. He was a foe of railroad and oil trusts, and was considered a working man’s hero. Yet he, too, was a segregationist, and an enthusiastic one. He imposed poll taxes and literacy tests on black voters when he helped rewrite the Virginia state constitution.
So yes, liberalism can coexist with racism. I’m surprised that this is a controversial point, given that it has happen so often in the past. Now, granted, liberals shouldn’t be racist, and most now aren’t, but that’s another matter entirely.
Wow, is that a petulant misstatement of the matter.
The issue is that we are presented with putatively significant differences between “red states” and “blue states” on a host of economic, health and other factors. spoke has forcefully asserted that this is simply a matter of endemic poverty. spoke has no evidence to support this hypothesis, and also contends that southern “red” states have not typically endorsed conservative political ideologies.
I’m fairly certain you are the first to introduce intelligence, and I’ve clearly said that we don’t know the direction of whatever effects we are looking at. Nevertheless, these states, spoke’s opinions notwithstanding, are typically conservative and they are also signficantly worse off on a lot of markers.
Perhaps these two things are completely independent of one another. That is, these states are endemically and perpetually impoverished, leading to all of the bad outcomes we have talked about. At the same time, but for completely different reasons, they tend toward conservative political choices. That doesn’t particularly strike me as a likely explanation.
I’m all ears if you’d like to actually offer something useful.
Please note my post above, concerning southern liberal Democratic racist politicians.
I think this is a subject worth looking into, and I’d love your take on it.
Hentor, the unsupported hypothesis is the one in the OP- the one you are championing without evidence. I am simply offering points in rebuttal.
Would you really call southern Democrats historically liberal, in the modern sense of the word? I don’t think they were particularly progressive.
As I understand it, the populism of the south in the late 1800’s incorporated the ideas that poor southern whites and blacks were in the same boat, but this died out within a few decades.
However, I could see an argument, prior to the Republican Southern Strategy of the 70’s through to the present, that racism verus other politics were driving voting decisions. Since then, however, it seems to me that race-based politics and politically conservative ideologies have converged fairly uniformly in the south. Thus, voting racism and voting conservative have been pretty much one and the same in the south during the last four decades.
Do you agree or disagree? Perhaps it would be easier if we limited the discussion to the period of time since that confluence of ideologies.
What unsupported hypothesis is there in the OP?
Sorry. My mistake. The unsupported hypothesis was only implied by the OP. You helpfully spelled it out later: that voting conservative yields the “outcome” (your word) of the social ills we’re discussing.
I have been rebutting your hypothesis by showing:
- That the South is not the consistently conservative place you believe it to be; and
- Enemic poverty is an alternative hypothesis which better explains the social ills under debate.
Hentor, I am talking about 20th-century Southern politicians who had undeniable liberal credentials. I cited two, and I can cite more if you like.
These men, especially Wilson, largely remain heroes for their progressive stances, with their racism mostly explained away as an “unfortunate historical legacy”.
Would you deny that Woodrow Wilson was a liberal, especially in the context of his times? Would you deny that he was a racist, and even more racist than most people of his time? I think history is pretty clear on both matters.
For that matter, you might want to look at Strom Thurmond’s record as a Democratic governor. He too had a good record as a “progressive” - why, he even pushed through a repeal of the poll tax. That didn’t stop him from going all Dixiecrat in 1948.
Well, we were discussing populism, not progressivism. The two are distinct movements and there are certainly differences between populist politicians and progressive politicians.
As far as progressivism goes, racism flowed natural from its premise that government should be ordered along scientific lines. To progressives, it was a scientific fact that blacks were inferior, and therefore our laws and government should be set up in a way to reflect the white man’s superiority. Racism was not merely a tactic they cynically used to attract votes; it was a natural offshoot of their philosophy.
Let me correct you again on this issue. My wording was “Why doesn’t voting conservative yield better outcomes.” Clearly the items of the OP are outcomes of something.
Rebutting doesn’t mean simple gainsay. You’ve done nothing to show item 1 whatsoever, other than cherry picking politicians who are not conservative from all the representation of the red states.
I’ve already said that #2 is a reasonable hypothesis, but it doesn’t serve to answer all the questions. Why do red states remain red states if they also experience poorer outcomes, due to poverty or not?
Here is where you are flawed. Red states and blue states are not static. You are merely looking at the last two elections, which is not a very significant span of time. As I pointed out earlier, plenty of red states were heavily Democratic in the recent past and plenty of blue states were heavily Republican. Your idea that these states are bastions of decades-long rule by one party ignores history.
That’s your mistake. Modern liberalism is necessarily anti-racist, because that is in large part how liberalism defines itself. But liberal movements in the past weren’t usually based this way. 18th-century liberalism, for instance, was philosophical. Liberalism or progressivism from about 1870 through WWII was mostly economic.
It was easy for a southern Democrat to be a New Dealer, because that was mostly an economic platform. Civil rights were secondary, to say the least.
And that is why a study could become useful. What happens when a state changes its political allegience - does it become better or worse on these rankings. It is changes that provide potentially useful information, not snap shots.
Hentor asks why states stay Republican if they experience poorer outcomes - the fallacy there is in the poorer compared to what question. It isn’t relevant if they are experiencing poorer outcomes that other states, but instead if they are experiencing poorer outcomes that they would were they voting Democrat. And snapshot figures simply cannot tell you that.
Personally, I can’t understand voting Republican (a certain amount of tongue-in-cheekness here). But you cannot tell much of importance from these numbers.