Destabilized Saturday Edition #5
LBJ's multitudes, home insurance market drama, and the perfect packaging
A point I wanted to make more explicit than I did in Why is America So Divided? is that the political culture of the Deep South, and to a lesser degree Tidewater, was one of plutocracy (rule by the richest few), individualism and an unregulated economy (low taxation, low public investment), and racial hierarchy (then: enslavement; now: systemic racism). Significantly for our purposes, the dominant political culture in the South today is directionally the same; the differences are matters of degree.
In Yankeedom, and especially its New England home base, the culture is similarly consistent with its founding, with the exception that the religious extremism of the Puritans has been largely superseded by Enlightenment scientific rationalism. Other than that evolution, the prioritization of the community over the individual, the belief that representative governments – rule by the people – can improve society, and the commitment to local control (exemplified by town meeting, which is still how decisions are made in many smaller towns) are still present in Yankee society.1
The incompatibilities of the Deep South and Yankeedom worldviews are striking.
Rule by the richest few vs. rule by the people of the community.
Prioritizing individualism vs. prioritizing the common good.
Unregulated capitalism vs. faith in local government to make things better.
Extreme racial hierarchy vs. a less extreme racial hierarchy combined with a long-term cultural trend toward racial equality.2
These values directly conflict with one another. They are contradictions that can’t be resolved, only ignored or tolerated. As long as ignoring them or tolerating them is an option, stability can be maintained.
As we know, it was LBJ’s Great Society, especially the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, that accelerated the transformation of the major party coalitions. It’s striking when you look at the various Great Society programs how aligned they are with the values of Yankeedom3 and, therefore, how opposed to the values of the Deep South (despite the fact that LBJ was, for most of his career, a reliable segregationist). As a massive victory for the values of Yankeedom, it’s not surprising the Great Society triggered a furious right-wing backlash.
Starting in 1968, the conservative backlash to the Great Society and the civil rights movement saw Republicans win five of the next six presidential elections as the conservative wing took over the party.4 Clinton won the two after that, but Republicans won back and maintained control of the House for the 12 years from 1994 and 2006; and other than a fleeting 51-49 Democratic Senate majority after Jim Jeffords of Vermont switched parties in 2001, Republicans also controlled the Senate over that stretch. The Reagan coalition ended up dominating American politics from 1968 through 2006,5 a 38-year run that lasted two years longer than the New Deal coalition’s dominant run from 1932 to 1968.
Interestingly, the Great Society programs mostly survived the right-wing backlash they triggered, with the notable exception of direct-support anti-poverty programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which was thrown out by the Clinton-Gingrich 1996 welfare reform bill. This relative continuity, including repeated bipartisan reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, created a sense among elites that these issues had settled into a consensus. However, the Voting Rights Act being dismantled by the Republican-dominated federal judiciary in recent years, as well as Trump’s various attempts to limit immigration based on race and religion, suggest the consensus may have been illusory.
It looked for a while like 2008 marked the emergence of the young, racially diverse, center-left Obama coalition as the new dominant force in American politics. It could still turn out that way, but Trump’s 2016 victory, and the rapid takeover of the Republican Party by antidemocratic forces, threw that assumption into doubt.
This analysis really requires its own post, but for now I’ll just say that the parameters of today’s politics are the purest manifestation since the 1860s of the clash between the incompatible values of the original American nations. The culture clash of the late 1960s had similarities, but then the warring sides cut across the two major political parties, while today the two sides are coterminous with the parties – in many ways have become the parties.
That change has put the clash of incompatible cultural and political values at the forefront of partisan competition and campaigns, making every election a contest for nothing less than who gets to define what America is. Democratic elections can’t bear this level of strain for very long. It will be a significant source of instability in the coming years.
My Work
From Eisenhower to Trump – “Divergent positions on civil rights and racial equality triggered the realignment of the party coalitions after WWII. But, crucially, it turned out voters who were liberal on racial issues tended to be liberal on other cultural issues, as well (and the reverse was true for voters who were conservative on racial issues). As more liberal-minded people gravitated to the Democratic Party based on its embrace of racial equality, Democrats naturally became the party that more enthusiastically and universally embraced other liberation movements of the late 20th and 21st centuries, including women’s rights, gay rights, Muslim civil liberties, immigrant rights, Indigenous rights, Trans rights, and many others. That, in turn, drew in more voters who agreed with the Democratic Party’s embrace of legal and cultural equality for all people.
“And so on, in a self-reinforcing cycle.”
Why is America so divided? – “Countries are “imagined communities,” in Benedict Anderson’s unforgettable phrase, which means they’re brought into being in large part by stories about the cultural inheritance and sacred symbols citizens share in common. Stories are the mechanism that allow us to collectively imagine ourselves as members of the same national community. In order for a country to be cohesive, therefore, its stories must accentuate citizens’ shared history, values, religion, challenges, and victories in a way that produces feelings of affinity with one another and also pride in being a member of the community.
“Ideally national stories are also true. An untrue story has a degree of brittleness that transfers to the country it brings into being. This means even if a subgroup within a country does horrible things to another subgroup, the reality of those events can’t take up too much space in national stories without undercutting the feelings of affinity and pride necessary to hold the country together. A country faces a choice if and when this happens: either teach the truth and risk weakening the bonds of nationhood, or preserve national cohesion by telling a story that elides ugly, divisive truths.”
Interesting Reads
Note: This week Interesting Reads is focused on home insurance, which will be an issue of growing significance in the near future.
Another Big Insurer Stops Writing Homeowners Policies in Florida
Tweets of the Week
Extreme Weather Watch
Creeping Authoritarianism Watch
Some would argue the Puritans’ Calvinist work ethic, unfriendliness to outsiders, and sexual modesty are still present in Yankeedom, as well.
That the Great Society was a liberal transformation is not a new observation. This is me trying to make sense of these various threads, how they connect, and what the tapestry looks like when they’re woven together.
The one exception, 1976, was driven by the Watergate scandals and the fight for control of the Republican Party between its moderate (Ford) and conservative (Reagan) factions.
Some would say 2008 but that’s wrong. Reagan’s coalition was an exhausted force by the 2006 midterms.