I started reading Brian Klaas’ “Corruptible”. Great book on the nature of power and who seeks it. It definitely has a lot of relevance to the work I’ve been doing here on the nature of zero-sum systems, so I’ll probably have insights as I get through the book.
It’s not surprising that there’s all these “Harris In Trouble” headlines. I called it last year: Harris is a hack, albeit a very talented one. She’s a one-trick pony who’s good at rallying her Too Online K-Hive towards whatever outrage she can, and that’s about it. She doesn’t have any great policy ideas, she just rehashes them from others. She’s not a stellar manager; she mismanaged her own campaign because she was too busy being a “Democratic Rising Star!”, which is the Democratic party’s own special sub-genre of “Famous For Being Famous”.
If Harris locks down the 2024 nomination, it’ll only be because either (A) Biden died and she competently finished out his term, or (B) the rest of the party couldn’t agree on a solid alternative and didn’t want to gamble against Trump. Absent the shine of incumbency, unless she comes up with something real quick, she doesn’t have anything else to win a nomination on.The Bulwark complained last Thursday about how childish the Trumper-evangelical culture is being, and how all the fearmongering really just reveals how vulnerable they feel.
And I say… duh.
Of course the Southern White Power Complex feels vulnerable.
Look, nearly 250 years ago, they made a deal with the North to form the United States. That deal was that the slaveholding elite would get to keep its depraved, authoritarian way of life in exchange for not making itself a military threat to the North on the American continent1.
They fought a whole civil war because abolition threatened to undo that way of life. When they lost, they promptly fought an insurgency to establish a one-party state that lasted for another century. And eventually, America decided it had had enough. The deal was over, the South needed to stop being so damned authoritarian. Rather than accept defeat, they waged another insurgency. They remade the entire conservative movement and the rest of rural America in their image.
The reason why they’re so obsessed with fighting the culture war is that they’ve been losing a cultural war for two and a half centuries. Because the other side of that deal they signed, was a promise of liberty, equality, and justice for all. They didn’t mean any of it when they signed it2, but everyone else took it seriously.
To them, the deal fell apart a long time ago. They know they’re outnumbered. They know that the rest of the culture wants to tear down the authoritarianism and minoritarianism that have allowed so few to rule so many for so long. They act like they’re in a civilizational struggle because they are in one; they don’t want their way of life to get overwritten by the rest of us.
The vulnerability isn’t some petty schoolyard taunt the way the Bulwark means it — the way snarky LGBT allies have taunted homophobic crusaders for decades about how their anti-gay fervor means they must be closeted self-hating gays. It’s real. Their way of life is under threat because it should be.
A lot of people want to make this more complicated than it is, because the SWPC did a good job fooling a lot of people that it was “conservative” for the last several decades. They want to argue about the merits of busing, affirmative action, housing policy, immigration, etc. because they want to believe that society has “moved on”. And maybe that was true for a time, in the way that a lot of narratives, false or not, create their own reality.
But when you’re looking at a culture, you don’t have to go deeper, you just have to connect the lines. Calling the SWPC Southern, White, and a Power Complex doesn’t mean that every single rural or Southern American or their entire culture is just flat-out racist. That’s reductive. But it does mean that politically, a certain section of the country has acted pretty consistently for its entire history, and a few generations of everyone pretending to be colorblind doesn’t erase two and a half centuries of authoritarian, minoritarian, insurgent intransigence, especially not when they show up at the fucking Capitol and stage another insurgency on behalf of their latest authoritarian clown-tribune.
It wasn’t that they could have beaten the North — the Civil War exposed those honor-obsessed morons for the industrial backwater they were — just that they’d be a thorn in the North’s side and undermine its ability to control trade along the Eastern Seaboard.