Post by warrior1972 on Jul 11, 2015 16:58:09 GMT -8
If you want to know what Southern heritage is all about, don't follow the debate over the Confederate flag.
Follow the money, says Michael Lind, a historian and native Southerner.
While the Confederate battle flag may be coming down in places like South Carolina, there is one part of the Old South's heritage that is becoming more popular.
"Southernomics," an economic policy honed in the Old South, is spreading across the United States, says Lind, author of "Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States."
The Old South didn't just give the nation the Confederate flag, "Gone with the Wind" and mint juleps. Its leaders refined the practice of exploiting workers, busting unions and being stingy with investments in public services. Each tactic was designed to create a desperate and powerless workforce that could be exploited by Northern and overseas businesses, Lind and other historians say.
The Old South gave us more than Rhett and Scarlett, it gave the nation a ruthless form of capitalism, some say.
White supremacy was never the driving force behind Southernomics -- then or now. Greed and class domination were, says Lind, a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, a left-leaning think-tank, and a contributor to POLITICO magazine.
"You have to address race, but you can't address race only," Lind says of the flag debate. "You have to address class and the economic system. Even if you got rid of racism, the Southern economic model still exists. It's unchanged."
That model is a part of Southern heritage that few people talk about. But it as much of a part of the Old South as the region's stately antebellum mansions, some historians say.
"You could draw a line from the antebellum South to the economics of the South today," says Jerald Podair, a history professor at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.
"From the time of the Southern plantation owners, there have been a small group of people in the South who hold the power economically and they don't really distribute the wealth that's created in a democratic way," says Podair.
www.cnn.com/2015/07/10/us/conderate-flag-southern-economics/