World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [103]
9 And starting in the sixties, as the Democratic Party became increasingly associated with civil rights, lower-class whites in the South jumped to the Republican Party in droves.
10
Even today, many poor and lower-middle-class whites feel more solidarity with Bill Gates or George W. Bush than with African-Americans or Hispanic-Americans of comparable economic status. Indeed, as many have observed, large numbers of working-class whites in the United States oppose welfare and increased government spending on social services, often voting against what might be expected to be their economic self-interest. It is widely suspected that racism (together with a thriving ideology of upward mobility) plays a role in this pattern.
To summarize, there is always an inherent instability in free market democracy. None of the Western democracies today faces this instability in its most explosive form: when the wealthy minority is also a hated, ethnic “outsider” group. Even so, every one of the Western democracies has alleviated the potential conflict between the rich few and the poor many through a host of devices, past and present, such as extensive social safety nets and redistribution, gradual expansion of the suffrage, upward mobility, and even racism. It is important to recognize, as we export free market democracy to the non-Western world, that many of these stabilizing devices do not exist in the developing world, that some of them are unsavory, and that others are, practically speaking, unreproducible.
The next section will cast a further shadow. As already mentioned, market-dominant minorities have existed in the West in the past. On the relatively rare occasions when a Western nation had to confront the problem of rapid democratization in the face of widespread poverty and a deeply resented, perceived market-dominant minority, the consequences were as terrible as any the world has seen. I will focus on just two examples here, one from the United States, the other from Western Europe.
The American South
In the United States after the Civil War, newly emancipated blacks represented a majority of the population in a number of Southern states including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. In all these states—not unlike postapartheid South Africa—whites were a starkly market-dominant minority, terrified to the point of hysteria at the prospect of black majority rule. Thus, the first year after the Emancipation Declaration, “a great fear of black insurrection and revenge seized many minds,” writes C. Vann Woodward in The Strange Career of Jim Crow. “[T]he black race,” warned Southern politicians, if mobilized, “will be in a large majority, and then we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything. . . . We will be completely exterminated, and the land will be left in the possession of the blacks, and then it will go back into a wilderness and become another Africa or St. Domingo.”
11
Southern whites responded to the threat of black majority rule by effectively disenfranchising blacks. They did so, moreover, in the name of capitalism and white supremacy. (Else, in the words of Alabama’s James S. Clark, “our lovely State, with its few Caucasian inhabitants, would be converted into a kind of American Congo.”)
12 To be sure, these Southerners faced the problem of the newly enacted Fifteenth Amendment, supposedly prohibiting discrimination against blacks in the suffrage. Led, however, by Mississippi, where impoverished blacks constituted 70 percent of the population in 1870, all the Southern states found elaborate ways to prevent blacks from exercising their right to vote. There were even, as late as the mid-twentieth century, delegations from the American South to South Africa to learn “tips” on how to disenfranchise and subjugate an ethnic majority.
The basic