Which Way Southern Man?

I just read the latest article about Yang Gang at Identity Dixie and I am like …

“It’s an ages old struggle, that which we call class warfare. One need look no further than pharaonic Egypt to find historical context to support the fact that men have always stratified themselves into hierarchies in order to benefit societies as a whole. Even before the invention of the wheel, Egyptian farmers would donate their idle time between harvest and flood seasons to the state in order to build their king his pyramids and monuments.

Why would men of agency and free will submit themselves to a king, a state, a corporation, a feudal system, a military empire, or any other form of hierarchy? Why did those Egyptian farmers toil to build the Pharaoh his pyramid in exchange for nothing more than grain and beer?

The answer is security. Classes stratify over time as a means of institutional management, as a means of establishing cooperation among men for the benefit of all. And, for all of the profound intellectual exchange of ideas that have occurred in the dissident right over the last few years, I find it stunning that so many people, who speak in terms of “alphas” and “betas,” have energetically embraced a meme (YangGang) that so clearly reduces the individual to less-than-beta serfdom. (inb4 just a meme, bro)

I criticize the failings of corporate capitalism just as earnestly as anyone, but I cannot deny that at least on economic terms, it is the one system that succeeded in creating a massive prosperous working and middle class in the West, and that this working and middle class has experienced more economic freedom than any other proletariat or bourgeois classes in history. …”

This is stale 1980s conservatism.

There is nothing traditionally Southern about this way of thinking at all.

The Southern social order that had existed since colonial times was shattered in the War Between the States. It was replaced by this worldview which our forefathers would have recognized as the Yankee mindset: radical individualism, free markets, free labor, wage slavery, etc.

The central theme of Southern history from the founding and development of the Southern colonies through the War Between the States was slavery and the South’s relationship to the wider South Atlantic System and its orientation toward Britain in the global economy. We have spent years discussing this at length on this website. Michael Cushman wrote an entire book about it.

The essential difference between the North and South was slavery. This was the crux of the issue and the source of an entire worldview which had grown up in the South as a result of the domination of our economy by the plantation complex. Antebellum Southerners prided themselves on embracing a more Greco-Roman ethos and culture. It was a patriarchal and paternalistic culture that celebrated leisure over work which was made possible by a racial redistribution of wealth.

Now try to wrap you mind around this because I am going to try to explain the last 150 years of Southern history to you as briefly as possible: when slavery was abolished in 1865 and replaced by free-market capitalism, the Southern economy tumbled into poverty and really didn’t even begin to recover until the 1930s when FDR was president and investment in the Southern economy began to undermine the old sharecropping system and replaced it with the mechanization of agriculture. There is no such thing as sharecropping in the South anymore.

Those people who were sharecroppers (there were more Whites than blacks) were displaced by the mechanization of agriculture. Many of them moved out of the South to places like Detroit and Chicago where in the 20th century they worked in Northern industry before it became the Rust Belt. Both Detroit and the Mississippi Delta are now an economic wasteland for a reason. It is because the world economy has moved on from the 19th and 20th centuries without finding any solution for all the people it left behind. This is the going to be the primary challenge of the 21st century.

Yang is trying to explain to you that there is a new and emerging mudsill caste:

“In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill. Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand. A race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes. We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves. We found them slaves by the common “consent of mankind,” which, according to Cicero, “lex naturae est.” The highest proof of what is Nature’s law. We are old-fashioned at the South yet; slave is a word discarded now by “ears polite;” I will not characterize that class at the North by that term; but you have it; it is there; it is everywhere; it is eternal.”

Yes, that sounds harsh to modern ears, but the new mudsill caste isn’t human.

It is all the machines we are creating to do work. Agrarianism is never coming back because technological progress has eliminated the need for such a large human labor force. The same is true of industrialism due to automation. There will also be fewer service jobs in the future.

What do you DO with all these people? The South prided itself on NOT HAVING CLASS CONFLICT because its economy was organized along racial lines. Blacks were the menial laborers. The White planter class lived a life of luxury BY REDISTRIBUTING WEALTH UPWARD FROM SLAVES.

The menial laborers today though are increasingly your washer and dryer, microwave, that Roomba robot, your automobile, the self checkout at Walmart, the Kiosk at McDonald’s, the robots in the Amazon distribution centers and so on and son. What is going on here is that scientific and technological progress is creating a new class of laborers and generating enormous wealth that right now is being sucked by into the stratospheres of the American ruling elite while the middle and working class is being reduced into a dying lumpenproletariat. Fortunately for us, none of is necessary.

Instead of doing that, we could simply redistribute the wealth through UBI so that it benefits everyone in society and reduces social tensions. This is not unlike what the old Southern planter class did under slavery. It was the foundation of their social order. In fact, there is no reason why Yang’s Freedom Divided could be raised by future generations as the planet becomes a wealthier place.

In the future, everyone can be master, not a slave, or a wage slave. I don’t know how else to explain it you more simply, but I am floating above you all with Yang:

Yang understands how all these old paradigms are bunk. There is a solution which allows you to attain your end whether it is capitalism, socialism, nationalism or conservatism. All of these conflicting worldviews can be reconciled in the long run when UBI is implemented.

I’ve already explained how UBI could be used to unscramble America’s racial demographics into homogeneous or heterogeneous zones, rebuild social cohesion and detoxify race relations. Similarly, UBI could be the foundation of the broader distribution of wealth desired by socialists. In the future, conservatives liberated from wage slavery could have the leisure to pursue their cultural pursuits and rebuild a more intelligent version of Christendom than the one that exists today.

Imagine a world in which mixed race people would have the money to settle in Brazil. Blacks would have the money to settle in Africa or the Caribbean. Europeans could return to Europe. The people who wanted to be cosmopolitan could do so. The funny thing is, few people but Yang grasp how have more money and distributing it more equitably really solves everything.

Note: “Journalists” still don’t grasp this. There is no intelligence or education in most of what we call the mainstream of American politics.