Early takeaways.
1. Poll models are existentially wrong.
For weeks prior to elections, we read of poll results. They were wrong in 2022, wrong in 2020, and wrong in 2016.
They're wrong.
Something is amiss in them, one thing simply being that younger generations don't really care to talk to pollsters.
This might be, overall, a good thing.
2. Conservatism retains a strong appeal, but Trump doesn't.
Trump caused the Republicans to lose the House and Senate in 2018. He lost the Presidency in 2020, and never secured the popular vote in the first place ever.
The midterm election always sees a return of the party of power, something that may be a good thing, democratically, or not, but it's a fact. This year there's real doubt that will happen, and Trump is the number one reason why.
Trump, whose appeal to anyone completely escapes me, loves Trump only the way that Trump and his acolytes can, and he's going to announce next week that he's running for the Oval Office. In normal times, the GOP would send a delegation to Mar-a-Lago, invite Trump to go fishing and require Lindsey Graham to go along to listen to Trump's weird, weird diction in the same way that Uncle Colm is used by the girls to talk to the police in Derry Girls. But these aren't normal times, so he's going to go ahead and run and the Republicans, including Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, will fall right in line.
An opportunity exists here for other Republicans to take advantage of this and push for the Presidency. The problem with that, however, is Trump.
The ultimate irony here is that the elections from 2016 forward have demonstrated that there is a strong base for a conservative political party, including a conservative political party that includes populism. People are, in many areas, voting culturally, and voting culturally for a return to Western values. There's nothing wrong with that, and the concept that these have been under attack by the left is correct.
But linking that movement, to Trump, will kill it.
3. Wyoming has become the Post Reconstruction South.
Eh?
Bear with me.
In 1860, as we all know, the Southern states attempted to leave the United States and form their own country over the issue of slavery.
Most Southern whites, throughout the South, were yeomen. Small independent farmers.
The Civil War was about one issue and one issue only, race based slavery. But slavery impacted everything in the South, most particularly its economy.
It's sometimes claimed, and indeed has been recently, that only a small percentage of Southerners owned slaves prior to the Civil War. I recall hearing that myself when in school, and even recently apparently somebody in the Internet claimed that only 1% of Southerners owned slaves in 1860. A pretty detailed analysis of that shows that's actually incorrect, and a whopping 30.8% of free Southern families did, a pretty high number. You can knock the percentage down by addressing only individuals, rather than families, but frankly that's unfair and inaccurate in an era prior to female suffrage. And it's also been knocked down by including the entire Southern population, but you can't really count the enslaved in this analysis and have it make any sense.
At any rate, the reason that we note this is that about 69% of Southern families didn't own slaves, but that 30.8% that did dominated the culture and the region's economics. Owning slaves was thought to be a necessity by planters, the large industrial farming class, just as serfs were in fact necessary to the feudal system. The planter class absolutely dominated the economics and the politics of the South, even though the majority of Southerners were not in the class and in fact, as noted, were yeoman.
Not all yeoman were poor, as is sometimes claimed, and some of them owned slaves as well. But the planters, who were the wealthy class in the South, completely dominated its economy and politics. It would not be proper to take a Marxist view of this and assume that they dominated it simply because they were wealthy, but their wealth had the practical impact of making them the only really educated class and the only class that had time for leisure in the sense that Josef Pieper has written about. This meant that their own self-interest became the interest of the entire region and were regarded as such. When barefoot Southern farmers hit the road to fight against the North in the Civil War, they were pretty convinced that their interest and the planters were the same.
They were not.
That became pretty evident during Reconstruction, but the domination of the planter class actually never waned. White Southern yeomanry had more in common, economically, with the recently freed slaves than they did with white planters. For a time it briefly looked like they'd act accordingly. And during Reconstruction, they found themselves nearly violently at odds with the planter class. Yeoman who had always made use, for example, of the woods as commons for the grazing of cattle and for hunting found themselves suddenly fenced and locked out, and nearly resorted to arms over it.
To a degree, what prevented that from really developing is that while the yeomanry did not feel itself aligned with the planters at first, planter propaganda, the nature of being occupied by the North, and the shared experience of the Civil War won them over against their own interests. The monied and powerful classes of the South backed the concept of "The Lost Cause", a noble struggle for "Southern Rights", which wasn't about slavery at all, but about something else, never mind that it couldn't be rationally defined as it didn't exist. All Southern officers were noble, all the enlisted men stalwart loyalists, sacrificing themselves to the cause. The myth lasted so long that the dedication of Stone Mountain in the 1970s could still be regarded in the Oval Office as a noble thing, and not a monument to treason. Southern yeoman remained in second class status and following Reconstruction were basically heavily marginalized along with Southern blacks. The entire region declined into second class economic status as it clung to an old economy benefiting mostly the already wealthy. Education became second rate.
That all started to change during the Great Depression, but it really took into the 1970s for it to break. We'll omit that part of the story, as that would be secondary to what we're looking at now.
Wyoming is now the New Post Reconstruction South.
How so?
Consider this. Plantation economics had originally made the South one of the wealthiest parts of the United States. Cotton actually was the second crop subject to the plantation system. Tobacco was first, and tobacco made the south wealthy. Cotton followed and added to that. The North wasn't poor, but in the pre industrialized country, agriculture was king and the South had market agriculture, producing tobacco, cotton, and corn based alcohol, all for sale. Nothing like it existed in the North. Going into the Civil War, they still believed that this was the case.
It wasn't.
Wealth had moved to industry by 1860 and the North had taken advantage of it. It was much more economically developed, and as a result, much more of the wealth had gone down hill to its population. It also had an economy which acknowledged and accepted government assistance, which made for good roads and canals. It was more affluent, better educated, and much better informed. The South fooled itself into believing the opposite and entered into a war it couldn't win as a result. After the wear, the class that had controlled that wealth maneuvered to keep it, and did so successfully, keeping the South in a state of existence that, but for slavery, closely mirrored that which had existed before the war.
So what does this have to do with Wyoming?
Quite a lot.
The original wealth of the South came from simple farmers, true yeoman, the class that Thomas Jefferson hoped thought necessary to democracy and hoped to see flourish in the country even though he was a planter. The conversion to a planter based economy took some time.
That's true of Wyoming, to a degree, as well.
The first European cultured people to enter Wyoming weren't Americans at all, but rather Quebecois. French culture people were pretty prominent in the state early on, and it was really the fur industry they built that caused the early private fort system to come about. The government followed in the 1840s following the Mexican War, when the Army first marched into the purchased Ft. Laramie in order to guard the trails to the Pacific Coast that were developing. The first really Wyoming based economic endeavor to some about after trapping was the livestock industry, which didn't enter the state until the 1870s, for the most part.
But even as early as the 1880s petroleum was seen as the state's future. By the 1890s, it was common for newspapers to put remote oil prospects on the front page, even as the livestock industry was dominating the actual economy and providing for most of the state's employment. Coal had an even earlier appearance, being first mined by the Union Pacific railroad to fuel its trains.
It was really World War One, however, that gave Wyoming an oil extraction, and at that time refining, economy. And much of that was locally centered. Refineries sprung up all over the state in this time period. Casper saw not only three refineries develop, but major structures as well. The Oil Exchange Building was completed in 1917. The Pan American Building sometime after that. The Ohio Building in the 1940s. The Sinclair Building, now only a memory, was built during this time period as well. The big club, where all sorts of business deals were made, was The Petroleum Club.
So we based our wealth, after 1917, on the extractive industries.
We did nothing wrong whatsoever by doing that.
But times have really changed, and they're in trouble.
We can't and won't accept that.
The US of 2022 isn't the US of 1917, or 1922, or even 1962, or 1982. But we basically are looking back to 1982, or so, economically, culturally and politically to an era when things were better for us.
And this requires us, apparently, to now believe in The Lost Cause.
At one time if you talked to Southerners, everybody's Civil War ancestor was a colonel of epic heroism, not a deserter from the Confederate armies, even though a huge number of Southern soldiers became just that. And they didn't fight for slavery, but for their culture.
We haven't been able to adjust to the fact that Trump lost the popular vote, twice, so we now have that as our Lost Cause Myth. The brilliant super genius "very good genes", as Trump would have it, didn't lose, the election was stolen.
Never mind the clear evidence that Trump was planning to steal the election prior to the election occurring. Never mind the destruction of the U.S. Post Office as part of that. Never mind the effort to undermine COVID voting protocols. Now, listen to people like Chuck Gray and you'll learn that 10,000 mules were employed in a nefarious plot.
I don't know how many Wyomingites really believe that, but probably about the same number, percentage wise, of Southerners at one time that believed that Uncle Euclid was a Colonel in the Confederate Cavalry, and not a barefoot infantryman in who deserted. There were likely always doubts. But like Homer Stokes in Oh Brother! Where Art Thou, there are underlying issues that people really have in mind. "That ain't my culture and heritage".
The ultimate problem is that this is going to, long term, marginalize us economically and politically. Just like it did the Post Reconstruction South.
4. Democracy can work for the left.
As we've noted elsewhere, the real starting point in the attack on American democracy was by the left going towards a Court oriented aristocracy. If Americans wouldn't reform and usher in the new liberal era on their own, the Courts could rule and force them.
The left was pretty comfortable with that.
Now the Courts have stripped that role away from themselves and returned issues that never should have been determined solely by nine ancient people with Ivy League law degrees to the people, effectively telling them they'll just have to figure these things out for themselves.
And low and behold, they actually can.
No comments:
Post a Comment