The Conning of the Average White Southerner: A Venerable Tradition

For OpEdNews: Andrew Bard Schmookler - Writer

<em>The polls have shown that, like no other group in the country, white Southerners are resolutely against Obama's efforts to reform our health-insurance system. (It's also the case that it is precisely in parts of the South that private health insurance is least competitive, and that the highest percentages of uninsured people are also found in some parts of that region. )

A good bit of the anti-reform public sentiment in the South is doubtless due to the influence of various forces at the top of the political hierarchy that have the ear of white Southerners. These include the major spokespeople of the Republican Party, and talk radio demagogues like Limbaugh and Beck.

Millions of white Southerners have been persuaded that the issue is one of defending grandma from heartless government Nazis wanting to pull the plug, and one of defending the country from Obama's "socialist" agenda.


And so these white Southerners have been raising a hue and cry to prevent the nation from enacting legislation that would prevent their being dropped from their insurance if they get sick, or if they lose their job. They are throwing their weight against the establishment of a new competitor, created by the government, to keep the insurance industry honest by providing coverage without bloated bureaucratic costs and excessive profit margins. (This would be an option available to the public but forced on no one, and, like the popular and successful Medicare program, would involve insurance that leaves patients to choose their own doctors and allows patients and doctors to make medical decisions.)

A bizarre sight, to see people so worked up to fight for interests not their own.

To those average white Southerners, I say: You're being conned. And it is an old story.
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You are being conned and it's the same basic con that you've had before. Your manipulators get you all hot and bothered about this and that and get you to line up in support of the very people who are stacking the deck against you.

The slaveholders and the post-war aristocrats and other economic powers worked this con. After slavery they used race to prevent workers from organizing across race lines. Divide and conquer.

Leading up to and through the Civil War, that was their strategy too. In the North and the Midwest, there were the forces of “Free Men, Free Soil,” opposing slavery's expansion into the new territories. In the South, the slave states formed what Northerners came to call the “slavocracy,” and “the slave power.”

Slavery was the overriding interest of the South in the decades leading to the Civil War. It was the occasion of a whole series of battles—almost all the battles that defined the era—battles that were political, mostly, but that also (as in Bloody Kansas and, later, Harper's Ferry) involved real fighting and the real spilling of blood.

It was all about slavery: struggles over the admission of Texas, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Fugitive Slave Law, the Dred Scott decision, the beating on the Senate floor of a Senator from Massachusetts by a Congressman from South Carolina" It was all about slavery.

And who was slavery good for? Not for the average Southern white, many of whom lived in real poverty and whose labor was kept cheap by the availability of slave labor. No it was good for that small, ruling class of wealthiest men who dominated the political landscape—the owners of the great plantations, the slaveholders.

The average white Southerner aligned himself with the slaveholders, and after the war the wealthy ruling class, even though it kept them in poverty relative to their counterparts elsewhere in America for well over a century. Aligned—at great cost. For while it wasn't the average white person who benefited from slavery, it was the average white person who did most of the fighting and suffering in a horrendous, deeply traumatic war.

They'd been conned into it by a ruling class that sold them on a bunch of ideas they were taught to regard as more important than their own personal interests, or even perhaps life itself. Some of these ideas were about race, and white superiority and purity. Some were about the defense of “honor.” Such ideas motivated more than a million white Southern men to put everything on the line, and suffer greatly, so that they wouldn't have to remain part of a country which would limit what territories slavery could expand into.

(BTW, the idea of abolishing slavery in the South, which was already part of the Union, was not anything Lincoln contemplated doing. He thought, indeed, that any such move would be unconstitutional.)


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http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Conning-of-the-Average-by-Andrew-Bard-Schmoo-090908-303.html

oh yes

............ to the current ascendency of evil in America.

http://www.nonesoblind.org/blog/?page_id=19

Are you one of those of liberal inclination who think that all moral judgments are just a matter of personal choice? Like students I’ve had who’ve said, What the Nazis did at Auschwitz isn’t something that I, personally, would approve. But within their world view, it seemed right, and so it was right for them!”

This tendency toward moral relativism, indeed, is liberalism’s most damaging contribution to the current ascendency of evil in America. When all that people are willing to judge is that terrible thing called judgmentalism,” standards of right conduct get eroded.

And so America saw a wave of vandalism in its cities, of babies born into situations unhealthy for their nurturance, of kids willing to cheat on their tests.

...of Republican wingnut insanity....shoot yourself in the foot and blame the liberals and socialists.

Only works if you want to be a CEO or one of God's buddies....nothing is more important than being "up there" with the big boys.

So it seems.