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For subscribers
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September 24, 2022
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The Dixiecrats: College students at the 1948 Southern Democratic Convention.Bettmann/Getty Images
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In my Tuesday column on the political incentives within the Republican Party, I made an analogy to the struggle over civil rights in the midcentury Democratic Party. I brought up the Dixiecrats and mentioned their opposition to labor rights as well as civil rights.
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Most Americans tend to think of Jim Crow almost exclusively in terms of racist oppression of Black Americans, but the Jim Crow system was as much about the preservation of a particular economic order as it was about the racist subjugation of Black people. In fact, the two were intertwined. By disenfranchising, segregating and terrorizing Black people, Southern elites could fragment and segment the entire working class as well as maintain a large pool of exploited, low-wage labor.
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Yes, most ordinary white Southerners were also invested in a racist social order. But the degree of that investment — the extent to which it was either challenged or nurtured — was structured by the reality of institutional white supremacy. Jim Crow helped produce racists (and reproduce racist ideologies) as much as it was produced by them.
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But that’s a bit of a sidebar. The larger point is that Southern elites were both virulently racist and fanatically opposed to organized labor, especially the broad-based industrial unions that tried to organize across racial lines. By even attempting to organize Black workers alongside white ones, unions like the Industrial Workers of the World in the early part of the 20th century and the Congress of Industrial Organizations during the period of the New Deal threatened to undermine the entire Jim Crow system, which rested on the total domination of the economic order by capital as well as racial segregation. (The C.I.O.’s postwar effort to unionize the South, “Operation Dixie,” failed for many reasons, not the least the ferocious opposition of white business and political elites in the region.)
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The anti-union South Carolina governor (and later U.S. senator) Strom Thurmond, the Dixiecrats’ candidate for president against Harry Truman in the 1948 election, embodied these two pillars of the Jim Crow system. A staunch segregationist who condemned civil rights laws as a “totalitarian” imposition on states’ rights, Thurmond was also, his biographer Joseph Crespino writes, “one of the Senate’s most determined foes of labor unions and one of its greatest friends to business interests. His disdain for labor bosses became interchangeable with his loathing for civil rights.”
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If we understand Jim Crow as a system of labor suppression as well as racial oppression, we can see more clearly how key elements of the Jim Crow order survived the end of formal segregation and racist disenfranchisement. “In the end,” writes the labor scholar Michael Goldfield in “The Southern Key: Class, Race, & Radicalism in the 1930s & 1940s,” “the civil rights movement, for all its heroic struggles and important successes, was not able to confront the economic roots of white supremacy.”
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Which is to say that the economy of the South would retain its low-wage, exploitative character, and its politics would remain, for the most part, in the hands of powerful business interests. And while the region would see real economic growth and the rise of a Black middle class, it would also continue to see vast inequality structured by race hierarchy, with segregated Black communities bearing the brunt of disinvestment, deindustrialization and capital flight.
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My Tuesday column was on the structural forces and internal incentives that have pushed ambitious Republicans to make common cause with MAGA election deniers.
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There is no equivalent to northern Black voters in the Trumpified Republican Party. Put differently, there is no large and pivotal group of Republicans who can exert cross-pressure on MAGA voters. Instead, the further the Republican Party goes down the rabbit hole of “stop the steal” and other conspiracy theories, the more it loses voters who could serve to apply that pressure.
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My Friday column was on the cadre of hyperpartisan, pro-Trump judges who threaten to fatally undermine rule of law, and what to do about them.
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The issue with this convention, as we’ve seen in the legal drama over the classified materials found in President Donald Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago, is that it isn’t equipped to deal with the problem of hyperpartisan, ideological judges who are less committed to the rule of law than to their presidential patron. In particular, this way of thinking about federal courts isn’t equipped to deal with the problem of Trump judges.
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And in the latest episode of my podcast with John Ganz, we discussed the 1992 crime thriller “White Sands.”
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Michelle Chen on international labor solidarity for Dissent magazine.
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