tbentley.com

Before the Civil War, armed white men on horseback formed “slave patrols” to search for, intercept and aprehend any slave found where they felt that slave did not belong. Any free-roaming slave was a potential danger, ready to foment insurrection, murdering their white masters in their beds, raping their white wives and sisters and daughters.

After the Civil War, those bands of armed men became “black patrols”; the blacks were now freemen, but were still seen  as naturally inferior, a threat to the white man. The black man had to be kept “in his place” by any means possible.

This did not end with the coming of Reconstruction; rather, those same vigilante bands were transformed into  “gun clubs,” performing essentially the same function: keeping the black man down. Wade Hampton’s Red Shirts were a politically connected outgrowth of the gun clubs, performing essentially the same functions. When Reconstruction law demanded the disbandment of the gun clubs, they immediately reformed “band clubs,” musical organizations: one such club proudly advertised its “three 24-pound flutes”.

Whites still felt it necessary to use physical force to “protect” the white way of life. Whites were fearful now that blacks would not only be violently viscious when allowed freedom of action; but blacks now threatened the whites’ economic security, as southern economic society had been decimated by the War. Blacks, formerly slaves, remained “the other” for the white man–particularly for the poor white man, and there were a great many of those. So a means had to be developed to keep this threat at bay.

So Benjamin “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman ran fo the Governorship of Souith Carolina on a platform of keeping the black man down by legal methods. The result came to be known as Jim Crow.

In 1896, Tillman’s factotum in the State Senate, one Coleman “Coley” Livingston Blease, introduced into the South Carolina Legislature the first law demanding the segregation of blacks from whites on all public transportation.

Coley Blease went on to occupy Tillman’s seat in the office of Governor in 1911. While in office Blease made a point of praising lynching as a justifiable means of taking revenge justice.

In 1913 Blease appeared before the US Conference of Governors, and said: “Whenever the Constitution comes between me and the virtue of the white women of the South, I say to hell with the Constitution!” He never shrank from endorsing the vigilantism of lynching–though always condemning, with a wink and a nod, “the violence of a few.”

In 1929, this same Blease, now U.S. Senator, introduced a bill to produce registration and identification cards for all non-native-born person in the United States.  “A very dangerous bill,” according to The Nation magazine at the time, “…an infamous proposal, spelling police espionage and blackmail.”

Lynching, segregation, vigilantism–all are means of identifying “the other” and protecting oneself from the unknown, the feared.

Now comes Trey Gowdy, US Representative from South Carolina’s 4th District (Greenville/Spartanburg) introducing the SAFE Act — Strengthen and Fortify Enforcement Act– which essentially turns every local law enforcement agency into a vigilante posse, licensed to enforce national immigration laws and policy, in their own way and using such methods as they choose.

“The SAFE Act represents a common sense approach to the enforcement of our nation’s laws. Utilizing the law enforcement infrastructure existing in every state and community across this country to support enforcement efforts increases accountability and effectiveness, while using resources wisely,” says Gowdy, on his web site.

What this would do would be to encourage racial profiling to the extreme, creating a new class of people to be reviled and legally threatened, harrassed and intimidated.

It’s unfortunate that this law has already been approved and passed out of the House Judiciary Committee.

While the Orwellian-named “SAFE Act” will probably never get past the Senate — so long as that body is controlled by the Democrats — it is chilling to consider that the same fears of “the Other” are even today being manifested, and from the same area of the country that brought us all the joys of Jim Crow.

Sources:
“Editorial Paragraphs,” The Nation, Vol CXXVIII, Feb. 13, 1929, New York, N.Y., pp175-176.
The Governorship of Coleman Livingston Blease of South Carolina, 1911-1915, by Ronald Dantan Burnside. Unpublished PhD thesis, Indiana University, 1963.
“The Appeal of Cole Blease of South Carolina:Race, Class and Sex in the New South by Bryant Simon, in The Journal of Southern History, Vol 62, No.1 (Feb. 1996), pp 57-86.
Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War by Nicholas Leman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2006.

Ezra says it like it is:

The classic definition of chutzpah is the child who kills his parents and then asks for leniency because he’s an orphan. But in recent weeks, we’ve begun to see the Washington definition: A party that does everything possible to sabotage a law and then professes fury when the law’s launch is rocky.

On Tuesday, Rep. Paul Ryan became the latest Republicans to call for HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to step down because of the Affordable Care Act’s troubled launch. “I do believe people should be held accountable,” he said.

Okay then.

How about House Republicans who refused to appropriate the money the Department of Health and Human Services said it needed to properly implement Obamacare?

How about Senate Republicans who tried to intimidate Sebelius out of using existing HHS funds to implement Obamacare? “Would you describe the authority under which you believe you have the ability to conduct such transfers?” Sen. Orrin Hatch demanded at one hearing. It’s difficult to imagine the size of the disaster if Sebelius hadn’t moved those funds.

How about congressional Republicans who refuse to permit the packages of technical fixes and tweaks that laws of this size routinely require?

How about Republican governors who told the Obama administration they absolutely had to be left to build their own health-care exchanges — you’ll remember that the House Democrats’ health-care plan included a single, national exchange — and then refused to build, leaving the construction of 34 insurance marketplaces up to HHS?

How about the coordinated Republican effort to get the law declared unconstitutional — an effort that ultimately failed, but that stalled implementation as government and industry waited for the uncertainty to resolve?

How about the dozens of Republican governors who refused to take federal dollars to expand Medicaid, leaving about 5.5 million low-income people who’d be eligible for free, federally-funded government insurance to slip through the cracks?

The GOP’s strategy hasn’t just tried to win elections and repeal Obamacare. They’ve actively sought to sabotage the implementation of the law. They intimidated the people who were implementing the law. They made clear that problems would be exploited rather than fixed. A few weeks ago, they literally shut down the government because they refused to pass a funding bill that contiained money for Obamacare.

The Obama administration deserves all the criticism it’s getting for the poor start of health law and more. Their job was to implement the law effectively — even if Republicans were standing in their way. So far, it’s clear that they weren’t able to smoothly surmount both the complexities of the law and the political roadblocks thrown in their path. Who President Obama will ultimately hold accountable — if anyone — for the failed launch is an interesting question.

But the GOP’s complaints that their plan to undermine the law worked too well and someone has to pay border on the comic. If Republicans believe Sebelius is truly to blame for the law’s poor launch, they should be pinning a medal on her

Does this explain the revulsion of some at collectivism?  That is, does colective action appear to be an instance of the bystander effect?

…is an example of “normalcy bias”.  It’s a cognitive error that will not admit to the presence of impending doom.

NY Times:

Fig. 1: Summary of relative genetic and environmental influences on political traits from the “Trends in Genetics” report by Peter K. Hatemi and Rose McDermott.

 The chart illustrates the authors’ estimate of the relative proportion of genetic (purple) and environmental (green) influences, and the level of combined (brown) genetic and environmental influences.

Note to self:

Preston Brooks, the Representative who beat Senator Charles Sumner with a cane near death in 1854, was from Edgefield;  Martin Gary, founder of the KKK, was from Edgefield; Benjamin “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman was from Edgefield; Strom Thurmond was from Edgefield.  (map)

This is actually a pretty clever riposte to B.H. Obama’s incredulous “Get a drink with Mitch McConnell?  REALLY?”

I thought it quite gratuitous for the President to go out of his way to belittle the minority leader of the Senate.  Not how to win friends and influence people.  McConnell could have railed against the insult; he chose instead a rather clever comeback.  Or his staff did.  This was a twitter foto; does McConnell tweet?  Really?

Well, my rant about Kindle and footnotes turnfs out to have been somewhat incomplete. Brad Plumer of the Washington Post informs me that, at least in the case of the WonkBlog Book Club’s choice, Fear Itself,  there are footnotes that are linked to the text.

Footnotes are active links, yes–which is terrific and extremely handy. Not sure about the index. And yeah, the Kindle table of contents had what appeared to be page numbers, but apparently they were all wrong, which is too bad. Normally everything else is just by location.

Aha!  Paul Krugman has already noted the Advance of the Robots ()

Smart machines may make higher GDP possible, but also reduce the demand for people — including smart people. So we could be looking at a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots.

And then eventually Skynet decides to kill us all, but that’s another story

And here:

This is an old concern in economics; it’s “capital-biased technological change”, which tends to shift the distribution of income away from workers to the owners of capital….

If this is the wave of the future, it makes nonsense of just about all the conventional wisdom on reducing inequality. Better education won’t do much to reduce inequality if the big rewards simply go to those with the most assets. Creating an “opportunity society”, or whatever it is the likes of Paul Ryan etc. are selling this week, won’t do much if the most important asset you can have in life is, well, lots of assets inherited from your parents. And so on.

I think our eyes have been averted from the capital/labor dimension of inequality, for several reasons. It didn’t seem crucial back in the 1990s, and not enough people (me included!) have looked up to notice that things have changed. It has echoes of old-fashioned Marxism — which shouldn’t be a reason to ignore facts, but too often is. And it has really uncomfortable implications.

But I think we’d better start paying attention to those implications.