before Jim Crow.
We fight historical, and currently, unseen forces that represent a corporate bondage timeline.
The capitalist idea of production is based on the old plantation politics and culture that it set up to prop up the most undemocratic state in the union at the time, South Carolina.
from The 1619 Project:
This anti-democracy idea goes way back to South Carolina's John C. Calhoun and Southern economic elites using the 3/5 person clause in the founders' Constitution to enable Southern property owners dominant representation in our first 12 presidencies.
The government Calhoun proposed was an alternative system that gave political minorities a final say over majority action. In this "concurrent government," each "interest or portion of the community" would have an equal say in approving the actions of the state. Full agreement would be necessary to "put the government in motion."
To Calhoun, this wasn't just compatible with the Constitution, it was the realization of the founding vision for the American Republic. In his view, and against the arguments of James Madison and other key framers, the Constitution did not establish the principle of majority rule. Calhoun believed that it established a system in which power was vested in "the whole -- the entire people -- to make it in truth and reality the Government of the people, instead of a Government of a dominant over a subject part." each elected branch -- the House, the Senate, the executive -- had its part to play in creating this consensus..."the blended and harmonious whole, the true and perfect voice of the people."
The problem, in Calhoun's eyes, was that the will of the majority as expressed in the House of Representatives and election of the president, had too much power... The government Calhoun envisioned would protect this [slavery] system by defending "liberty" ... of the master ... those who claimed a right to property and a position at the top of a racial and economic hierarchy. This liberty Calhoun stated, was "a reward reserved for the intelligent, the patriotic, the virtuous and deserving -- and not a boon to be bestowed on a peoplel too ignorant, degraded and vicious, to be capable either of appreciating or of enjoying it."
Even before Brown, William F. Buckley, Jr.said, "the white community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race... It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and lived by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority."
Calhoun's ideas would return with Brown v Board of Education as segregationists announced "massive resistance". Their hysteria during Obama's time in office echoes -- they held the government hostage to debt and the ACA, McConnell's hyper-obstructionist rule was the high profile example of the nullification strategy to rob Obama of a SCOTUS appointment. And now the Senate filibuster. And now state legislatures holding voting majorities illegitimate if they don't support Republican candidates. It has been the Republican goal to limit the majority agenda or wreck the system itself.
These homegrown methods
-- assaulting the legitimacy of nonwhite political actors,
casting rival political majorities as unrepresentative,
driving to nullify democratically elected governing coalitions -- are downstream of ideas and ideologies that came out of the defense of human bondage and racial segregation.
As long as there are enough Americans who do not trust democracy to protect their privileges... who see in political equality a threat to their power (and corporate standing), these ideas will have a path to power. To secure democracy against privilege and vice versa are the conflict of American life. This shouldn't last, but it will as long as the republic stands.
When fascism establishes itself, it will not announce itself to us. But we'd better know its history in the U.S.
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