How Present Day USA is like the Antebellum South

(from Bitterly Divided: The South's Inner Civil War, by David Williams)

1. "Both major parties, Whig and Democrat, centered more on personalities than issues, and both represented slaveholding (i.e., wealthy) interests." (p.20)

2. Wage levels in the South were lower than in the North because slave labor was available. (It still is in other countries.) (p. 22)

3. The South was very dependent on imports of manufactured goods. (p. 23)

4. Slaveholders (i.e., the power elite) encouraged resentment of poor whites against blacks. (p.24)


"The more things change, the more they stay the same."

Slavery was a unique and particularly onerous situation.

Though there are some similarities to Slavery, it's probably really more like Endentured Servitude. But if we don't get some FUNDAMENTAL changes, Slavery could be our grand-children's future.

In such societies, the poor and dispossessed, in fact anybody outside the very wealthy really, suffer from a disproportionate lack of influence in the role of setting the legislative agenda. These countries are said then to be suffering from "democratic deficits" where ostensibly democratic institutions fail to respond to popular will.

Discouraged people don't vote, and the poorer people are, the less likely they are to vote, and that represents good news and bad news for the wealthiest interests, good in that it represents less of a challenge to the authority of the elite but bad in that if too many people stop participating, then the risk for popular revolt or rebellion grows as faith in government institutions disappears.

Military dictatorships, like Nazi Germany or Pinochet-era Chile, are simply government institutions run by the elite where people do not have faith in government and where the elite uses military power to keep the people from rebelling.

The US has, so far, not deteriorated down to the level of a brutal "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" that regularly uses military force to suppress demonstrations, but it isn't exactly the picture-perfect example of a healthy democracy either.