The Times They Are A-Changin’

Ton of good ‘splaining going on in this piece from The Bulwark…

“The South did not become Republican so much as the Republican Party became Southern.”

Liberal democracy has never put down deep roots in the South in the way it did across the rest of the country. The region never really abandoned its warped electoral politics and inclination to single-party cronyism, a Southern political instinct that helps explain how Democratic dominance transformed so completely into Republican one-party rule following the civil rights era. Inequality continues to define economic life in the region.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/liberal-democracy-american-south-vance-bourbons?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Times have not changed in most of the ol’ South.

My phone kicks me out more frequently than the ipad.

If you have some extra time…

Scholars do not dispute the essential facts about the racial violence that occurred in Wilmington, North Carolina, more than a hundred years ago, although interpretations of the event by the city’s current residents reflect the racial divide that is their common heritage. On November 10, 1898, an armed mob of whites led by some of Wilmington’s most respected and influential citizens destroyed the state’s only daily African American newspaper by burning the building in which it was housed. They then turned their fury and guns on the city’s black population, killing at least nine blacks, according to the contemporary white press, scores according to the oral tradition within the African American community. The mob then drove others, perhaps hundreds–men, women, and children–from their homes into surrounding swamps in search of safety. Over the next two days, while Wilmington’s black citizens unsuccessfully appealed to the federal government for protection, groups of armed whites forcefully expelled from the city both black and white political and business leaders opposed to conservative Democratic rule and white supremacy. Led by the city’s white elite, armed whites used the threat of paramilitary forces to remove from office Wilmington’s duly elected, biracial city government, replacing it with representatives of the old elite in what has been called the only successful coup d’etat in the United States.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/30884

Melton McLaurin received his Ph.D. in American history from the University of South Carolina in 1967 and taught at the University of South Alabama prior to joining the UNCW department of history as chairperson in 1977. From 1996 until 2003 he served as Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, retiring in 2004. He is the author or co-author of nine books and numerous articles on various aspects of the history of the American South and race relations . Among his best know works are Separate Pasts, Growing Up White in the Segregated South (University of Georgia Press, 1987), which won the Lillian Smith Award for nonfiction, and Celia, A Slave (University of Georgia Press, 1991), which was chosen as a New York Times notable book for that year. His current research interests are autobiography and history and race relations in the era of segregation. Dr. McLaurin was writer/director of the video documentary The Marines of Montford Point: Fighting for Freedom (2006), narrated by Louis Gossett, Jr., which chronicles the story of the nation’s first African American Marines. Dr. McLaurin also is the author of The Marines of Montford Point: America’s First Black Marines, published by UNC Press ( 2007), which contains additional material on the Montford Point Marines, and the creator of a website on the Marines of Montford Point.

The only part of the supply-and-demand equation Dodo has heard of is demand.

Dodo has no choice. He owes too much money to Putin. Secret Service or not, Putin would get to him. He may never go back to Trump Tower because his apartment is too high up.

Bourbon rule across the South is a good starting place for understanding the challenges facing the region. The Bourbons—Southern Democrats of the planter and professional classes who opposed Reconstruction—came to dramatically shape American politics from the 1870s into the early twentieth century. For decades, this small elite fomented discord among poor whites to keep their political energies focused on their peers rather than their de facto rulers. As Reconstruction began to falter in the mid-1870s, Bourbon power brokers gained control in Southern states like Alabama and Georgia. By the 1890s, the Old South was aggressively reasserting itself. In 1896, the Supreme Court enshrined the principle of “separate but equal.”

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/liberal-democracy-american-south-vance-bourbons?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Scarcity mentality. Maggers’ belief in “never enough” and resulting jealousy over the wrong people getting their stuff, and them not getting everything, is going to result in nobody getting anything. The takeaways will be from them too. 

“AMERICAN HISTORY IS A CONSTANT war between Northern Yankees and Southern Bourbons, where whichever side the hillbillies are on, wins,” Vice President JD Vance said on a podcast during the runup to the election last fall. “And that’s kind of how I think about American politics today, is like, the Northern Yankees are now the hyperwoke, coastal elites.”

Solitary is a punishment worse than death.

Imprisoned crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried reportedly landed in solitary confinement after he praised the GOP in a jailhouse interview with Tucker Carlson in an apparent ploy to win a pardon from Donald Trump.

Bankman-Fried ended up in solitary after he failed to obtain permission for the interview from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, The New York Timesreported Friday. The interview took place on a video call in a side room of the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center on Thursday, which was Bankman-Fried’s 33rd birthday.

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/crime/bankmanfried-republican-trump-pardon-tucker-carlson-b2711286.html