So. Jim Crow, hunh? There they were, sacrificing Black bodies to boost up an oligarchy, just as they did during Slavery. Laws so toxic that The Nazis reused them.
And now: DeSantis and Abbott and Stitt in Oklahoma and so many others play that same “game,” just updated for the modern era.
That update? Now-openly abuses Women, it openly abuses Trans people, it attacks the rest of the LBGTQIA+ folx. At best, it ignores the Poor, the Chronically Ill and so many more. Even “own the libs” is deployed for this effort — to gain, for a few, such power that the waves of economic pain can never touch them and theirs.
“Why should I care about the economy”, the Deep South GOPers say, “if they can never vote me out of office? If they can never stop the flow of funds to my cronies?” A tune that now finds ugly echoes in the debt ceiling fight.
For the record shows these asshole’s ancestors as Not Being About Shit:
By the 1850s, a growing group of incredibly wealthy men, born into slaveholding families of great privilege, were brazenly identifying themselves as aristocrats or oligarchs — they simply did not believe in the benefits of “pure democracy.” As the National Era reported, these Southerners deemed popular suffrage the “root of all the mischief” regarding the preservation of slavery.
The fire-eaters of the slave South, therefore, envisioned something more than just a slave-ridden version of the United States. They actually advocated a return to hereditary privilege, caste systems, and rule by the wealthy few. Some even argued in favor of primogeniture. All hoped that these measures would help curb the “scourge of democracy.”
And it played out again during Jim Crow. From what I can tell, White Supremacists literally sacrificed a growing economy to make a few wealthy over the literal bones of Black folx and Poor Whites.
I’m summarizing a LOT of history and analysis, so I’m certain you can poke holes. And yet, the core fact remains that it’s a tiny number of people who “win” when schools are terrorized into pulling books, and state officials gaslight the reasons.
It’s not the Parents brainwashed into supporting this. It’s not even the Alt-Right forces who shoot up the place if you don’t.
It’s the assholes who George Wallace they way into power. Who cannot thrive unless standing on a mountain of pain and suffering. The same playbook, of American Pain.
We must dismantle it.
Open Thread.
DeSantis: WTF does he care about the “economy”? (Open Thread)Post + Comments (156)