There is one important difference between the old Democratic plantation and the new one. The old one was based on forced black labor; the new one is based on the dependent black, Latino or Native American voter. This voter ideally does not work but rather lives off welfare and government provision, which becomes, of course, his motive to sustain the providing party in power. Democrats use coalitions of dependent ethnic minorities in order to generate an electoral majority, thus placing progressive Democrats in charge of the Big House. From there they loot the national treasury in the shameless fashion that the old Tammany bosses looted city hall.
Progressive Democrats benefit themselves and live high on the hog—like the Clintons and Obamas, who went from nothing to multimillionaires, from minor overseers to plantation big bosses—all the while declaring as their motive the tireless pursuit of social justice. These Democrats proclaim themselves the benevolent supervisors of needy, impoverished minorities whom in fact they keep needy and impoverished. These minorities, deprived of education and the skills for advancement, rely on the Democrats to provide for them, thus reducing themselves to dependent subordination and sustaining the progressives in power.
Yet despite these differences, the new plantation bears a striking resemblance to its ancient predecessor. In his classic work The Peculiar Institution, historian Kenneth Stampp identified the five distinctive features of the old slave plantation: dilapidated housing, which the slave-owners termed slave quarters; broken families, the product of slave rules that abolished the institution of marriage and permitted the sale of family members at the master’s whim; a high degree of violence to police the plantation, necessary of course because slavery was based on captive labor; no opportunity for decent education or advancement, notwithstanding the Democrats’ insistence on slavery as a “school of civilization”; and finally the plantation’s pervasive atmosphere of hopelessness, despair and nihilism.30
We can verify the existence of Democratic plantations today by finding these exact five features in inner-city Baltimore, St. Louis, Oakland or Detroit; in the Latino barrios of California and south Texas; and on Native American reservations like the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. Other features of the plantation—a class of people who devoted themselves to idleness, leisure, gambling and duels provoked by petty slights—can also be found in today’s ghettos and barrios. In this respect, the inhabitants of these modern ethnic enclaves resemble not so much the old slaves as the old slave-owners.
RACISM’S NEW FACE
In my earlier books I have discussed the racist past of the Democratic Party, but I did not directly answer the question: where is the racism of the Democrats today? Here I show that racism remains the core of the Democratic project, but to see this we must recognize how racism today takes a quite different form than it has in the past. Today’s Democrats don’t publicly call blacks “niggers,” nor do they lynch or segregate them as they used to.
Today’s Democrats, however, are just as indifferent to the plight of blacks as their predecessors, and they create black dependency and exploit black suffering with the same casual indifference as in the past. Today, too, the progressive Democrats have generated a “positive good” apologia for minority enslavement. While benefiting both financially and politically from the new plantation, the progressives insist they are doing it entirely for the benefit of its inhabitants.
Yet as I show in the last section of the book, there is one group that the Democrats have not managed to enslave: working-class whites. This is a group that used to be largely in the grip of the progressives. They were part of FDR’s labor coalition. But now they have broken loose, and many of them voted for Trump. I call this group “holdouts.” Trump is their hero, and this white working class is attracted to his populist American nationalism, both on economic and on cultural grounds.
So the Democrats—desperate to conceal their own racism—now seek to discredit working-class whites as bigots and to portray Trump’s American nationalism as a thinly disguised resurrection of white nationalism. This is why the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally was so important for them: it confirmed their image of Trump as the apostle of white supremacy and of neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen in MAGA hats as the new face of the Republican Party. Yet as I will show, the Charlottesville rally was organized by Jason Kessler, a man of the left who used to be an Obama supporter and Occupy Wall Street guy.
My interview with America’s leading white nationalist, Richard Spencer, reveals that contrary to his portrait in the progressive media, he is actually no conservative, no Republican, no man of the right. In fact, his positions on ethnic nationalism, white supremacy, immigration and eugenics show him to be a relic of history, a progressive Democrat in the Woodrow Wilson mode. Yet today’s Democratic Party has jettisoned the whole eugenic and segregationist agenda of early progressivism in favor of a new plantation model. Spencer is a political activist who has been left behind as his fellow progressive Democrats have evolved into something else.
Yet according to the left-wing media account, Spencer is the second most dangerous man in America, after Trump, and his ideas could not be more relevant. The entire portrait of white nationalists as conservatives—with Trump and the GOP as their exemplar—is a progressive lie and a deflection. White nationalists like Spencer are decoys of the left, valuable in that they corroborate the big lie of racism and fascism being on the right and draw attention away from the left’s own racist exploitation of every ethnic minority group.
Still, I do want to explain why some of these white nationalists—insignificant though they may be as a cultural and political force—nevertheless count themselves in the Trump camp. The short answer is that Trump’s American nationalism at least makes room for all citizens, while the ethnic nationalism that defines the Democratic plantation today is based on affirming every ethnic group (including minorities who are illegal aliens) except whites.
White nationalists who would ordinarily feel at home in a party based on ethnic nationalism find themselves demonized in today’s Democratic Party. They are the one ethnic group that is unwelcome at the multicultural picnic. The only role for them in the progressive morality play is as confessors and self-flagellators, a role that some white progressives willingly perform, but one that many white nationalists consider unseemly and degrading. So these people have nowhere else to go except to a party that at least counts them as fellow Americans.
Yet if they are in Trump’s camp, it does not in any way follow that Trump is in theirs. While Trump is interminably accused of white supremacy for his positions on national security and immigration, the lines that he draws are clearly not racial. On immigration Trump distinguishes the legal immigrant from the illegal alien. But most legal immigrants today are nonwhite; they come from Asia, Africa, South America. Trump has said he wants more skilled immigrants, but he has never said he wants more white immigrants from New Zealand and Iceland and fewer from Barbados and Mumbai.
This is confirmed in a telling conversation between Trump and his former adviser Steve Bannon. Discussing the situation of an Asian Indian worker who took his programming skills back to his native country, Trump said, “We’ve got to be able to keep great people in the country. We have to be careful of that, Steve. I think you agree with that, Steve?” Steve did not necessarily agree.31 But Trump’s position shows that he had no reluctance to go to bat even for a brown-skinned guy who in his view made a contribution to America’s economy and prosperity.
Similarly, on national security, Trump’s resistance to Muslim terrorists and Mexican criminals seeking to infiltrate this country is on behalf of all Americans, not just whites. All Americans—white, black and brown—are jeopardized when a truck bomb goes off in Times Square or when illegal Mexican gang members go on a crime spree. “I’ve been greedy,” Trump has confessed to his supporters. “I’m a businessman . . . take, take, take. Now I’m going to be greedy for the United S
tates.”32 And this is an excellent summation of the man.
I close by showing what Trump can do to dissipate the residual force of white nationalism in American politics while also beginning the much bigger and more important task of dismantling the Democratic plantation. I argue that Trump’s American nationalism, correctly defined, offers a remedy for ethnic nationalisms of all stripes. If constructed on the Lincoln model, it provides a policy framework for replacing the dependency and hopelessness of the plantation with ladders of opportunity for every American. Far from causing the death of the nation, Trump and the conservatives can come together to show the way for America’s restoration, revival and hope.
2
Dilemma of the Plantation
The Antislavery Founding
We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.
—Thomas Jefferson on slavery1
When San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick first refused to stand for the national anthem, he was asked by NFL media reporter Steve Wyche to explain. “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” he said.2 Kaepernick, of course, is the inspiration for the nationwide NFL protests in which players take a knee, or lock arms, or just stay in the locker room during the national anthem. Many fans are outraged and some are boycotting NFL games, resulting in a measurable drop in viewership.
Subsequently, some players who back Kaepernick have attempted a revisionist history of the movement he represents. “It baffles me that our protest is still being misconstrued as disrespectful to the country, flag and military personnel,” frets 49ers safety Eric Reid.3 Reid insists that the protests are all about police brutality and the criminal justice system. Yet why aren’t NFL players protesting outside police stations? Why choose to spurn the national anthem unless the objection is to what the national anthem represents?
What the anthem represents is patriotism. It was written by Francis Scott Key in a burst of nationalistic fervor after watching the bombardment of the British fleet during the War of 1812. Key’s song was a popular tune for Union troops during the Civil War and became the national anthem in 1916, more than a century after it was written. Its words celebrate American exceptionalism and call upon Americans to rally to the cause of “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
Kaepernick’s progressive admirers across the country know exactly what he is protesting. Noel Ransome in Vice writes that Kaepernick “took a knee for all of us” in order to expose “the harsh reality of white supremacy.”4 Ransome makes it clear that the problem is not confined to the justice system but is endemic to American history, American institutions and American life.
Leading progressives insist the problem began with the American founding. Speaking on the two hundredth anniversary of the Constitution, former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall refused to “find the wisdom, foresight and sense of justice exhibited by the Framers particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start.” Marshall urged that instead of jingoistic celebration, Americans should seek an “understanding of the Constitution’s defects,” its immoral project to “trade moral principles for self-interest.”5
Such views are now commonplace. “Jefferson didn’t mean it when he wrote that all men are created equal,” fumed historian John Hope Franklin. “We’ve never meant it. The truth is that we’re a bigoted people and always have been. We think every other country is trying to copy us now and if they are, God help the world.” Franklin argued that by betraying the ideals of freedom, “the Founding Fathers set the stage for every succeeding generation of American to apologize, compromise, and temporize on those principles.”6
A recent article in Rolling Stone, written in the wake of the Charlottesville controversy, sought to document “The History of White Supremacy in America.” In line with the progressive zeitgeist, the article located the roots of the problem in the American founding, noting that “Article 1 of the Constitution says slaves are three-fifths of a person,” proving that “the United States was founded on white supremacy.”7
To examine whether this progressive critique is correct, we have to resolve “the seeming inconsistency, not to say hypocrisy, of slaveholders devoting themselves to freedom,” which historian Edmund Morgan terms “the central paradox of American history.” Morgan is not the first to notice the paradox; it was the premise of the British Tory writer Samuel Johnson’s sarcastic jibe at the American founding. “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”8
The best way to answer this question is to turn to a debate on this very topic between Abraham Lincoln and the leading Democrats of his day. They debated it with a seriousness and rigor that surpasses anything written on the subject today. We can hardly do better than to begin with them.
Were the founders white supremacists? Did they write slavery and white supremacy into the Constitution? These were the specific issues examined by Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney while writing the notorious Dred Scott decision upholding slavery in the territories. Taney emphasized that in answering these questions he was not giving his own personal point of view.
True, Taney was a Southerner and a Democrat—a protégé of Andrew Jackson—but many years previously he had freed his own slaves, and he vehemently objected to the portrayal of him in the Republican press as pro-slavery in his personal beliefs. Taney insisted he was merely interpreting the Constitution according to the intentions of its framers. His objective was to discover what they thought.
Taney reasoned as follows. The founders said in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” But their actions showed that they could not have believed it. After all, some thirty of the fifty-five framers of the Constitution who gathered in Philadelphia were slave-owners. So was Thomas Jefferson, who drafted the Declaration. Moreover, far from outlawing slavery, the founders permitted it and even added a fugitive slave clause that entitled masters to the return of their runaway slaves.
If the founders actually meant to include blacks in the Declaration of Independence, Taney wrote, this would make their actions “utterly and flagrantly inconsistent with the principles they asserted,” and they would deserve “universal rebuke and reprobation.” Therefore, Taney reasoned, they cannot have meant to do so. “It is too clear for dispute,” he concluded, “that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this Declaration.” Rather, in line with a “fixed and universal” opinion, the framers according to Taney regarded blacks as “beings of an inferior order.”
One can see right away that except for a slight difference of emphasis, Taney’s reasoning in Dred Scott is identical with that of contemporary progressive critics of the founding. Like him, they agree that the framers were white supremacists who had no intention of including blacks in the Declaration of Independence. This is significant because of what came out of Taney’s reasoning, namely his disturbing conclusion that the right to own slaves is “expressly affirmed” in the Constitution and that blacks have “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Moreover, “The Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”9
Was Taney’s constitutional reasoning sound? If progressives today are right about the framers and the Constitution, it follows that Taney was also right about them, because his logic is the same as theirs. And if Taney was right, then Dred Scott was right in affirming that blacks have no constitutional rights and Congress has no power to restrict slavery in the territories. Slave-owners have the same right to take their slaves into the territories as they do to, say, exercise their free speech or practice their religion there.
Historians are unanimous that Dred Scott also set into motion t
he events that led to the Civil War. In the words of political scientist Harry Jaffa, “It gave an energy, a confidence, and an intransigence to the pro-slavery cause that ended—if it did end—only at Appomattox.”10 Let’s recall that the pledge to outlaw slavery in the territories was the main plank of the Republican Party platform in the 1860 election. Dred Scott essentially invalidated the winning party’s platform by declaring it unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court’s conclusion in Dred Scott—in effect affirming a constitutional right to own slaves—was widely hailed by Democrats both in the North and the South. It emboldened the Southern Democrats to press their case for secession. Absent Dred Scott, the South may not have seceded and the Civil War might have been averted. So if the ruling was legitimate, it seems to follow that the secessionists were right to break away from the union because of their reasonable fear that Lincoln and the Republicans would overturn their basic constitutional rights.
So we are in a remarkable situation today where progressive Democrats agree with Taney that the founders excluded blacks from the Declaration of Independence. They embrace Taney’s reasoning for adopting that view. Yet they reject the pro-slavery conclusion Taney drew from that premise. Thus while they pull down Confederate statues—including at least one Taney statue removed in his native Maryland—they find themselves intellectually in bed with Taney and the Confederacy. This is not entirely surprising, however, because Taney was a Democrat. So were Jefferson Davis, Alexander Stephens and the leading men of the Confederacy. It seems, then, that modern Democrats are on board with the constitutional reasoning employed by their pro-slavery, secessionist counterparts more than a century and a half ago.
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