Heather Cox Richardson guides us through the history of one strain of American bullshite in her How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Fight for the Soul of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), right wing American bullshite. Richardson begins her brief history of this right wing strain of American bullshite by arguing that historically the United States has been characterised by a cultural paradox at its heart, the paradox that a nation that preached that “all men are created equal” in its "Declaration of Independence” enshrined inequality in its "Constitution" by not granting Blacks, free and slave, and women, full citizenship and voting rights. This paradox, Richardson argues, has resulted in a culture war between two broad strains of American culture, one which emphasised and emphasises democracy and another which emphasised and emphasises the oligarchy of “the best and brightest” (themselves, of course).
Richardson traces right wing oligarchic culture to a host of empirical factors. American oligarchic discourse was initially embedded, she argues, in economies of extraction associated with, for example, tobacco, cotton, and mining, particularly in the American South and American West. These extractive economies of scale which required high levels of investment, were, as a consequence, oligarchic since they were dominated by economic and political elites. Ironically, as Richardson rightly notes, many of the White men who became economic elites have the government to thank for their elite status because many received governmental welfare handouts in the form of land, like the oligarchs who built America’s railroads in the West, subsidies, or because “consumers” worked for the federal government and used at least part of their federal pay cheques to buy goods in department stores like the one owned by Barry Goldwater's family in Arizona allowing that family, in the process, to have many of the comforts of a modified English manor house. By the way, it is also worth noting, as Richardson briefly does, that the federal government has long subsidised the lifestyles of the West and South through its building, for example, of dams, its water projects, and its rural electrification programmes or “investments", things, by the way, as Richardson notes, that tied Southerners and Westerners together. She notes that simply because these oligarchs had big money they also had, as a consequence, immense political power and economic, political, and cultural authority, an observation so obvious and so well documented in time and space that it shouldn’t even be controversial anymore.
It is, as Richardson points up, on the cultural level where things really get interesting. Richardson argues that big money and big power in combination did not always enable elites to tamp down or suppress the democratic strain in American culture. The oligarchs found that something else was needed in order to manipulate or drug the masses. They found it in culture, specially ideological and demagogic cultures associated with classism, racism, and sexism. America’s elites were able to leverage, Richardson argues, ideologies of class superiority, racial superiority, and gender superiority to maintain their positions of privilege, power, and control despite democratic impulses associated with the Civl War, World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. This ideology, Richardson notes, eventually had as its premise the notion that the liberty of White men declined or dissolved whenever the government tried to improve the lot of, for example, the disenfranchised and often terrorised, including Blacks, Chinese, Hispanics, First Peoples, women, or dissidents, economic, political, and cultural outsiders all in an America dominated by White oligarchic authoritarianism. Along the way, as Richardson notes, the oligarchs and their minions were able to turn the Republican Party from a party of free labour and anti-slavery into one that mirrored their ideology, an ideology characterised by elitism, racism, and misogyny, things that were all hidden hidden away thanks to their use of the cultural mythologies of gentility, White victimisation, and the lost cause of the South, and the individualist Cowboy culture of the West.
Richardson’s synthesis, which draws from a host of other studies including her own on Reconstruction, the Republican Party, and the Indian wars, is an excellent brief introduction aimed at the general intelligent reader on something that is at the heart of American economic, political, and cultural life today, the battle for the “soul” of America between the forces of oligarchy and the forces of democratisation. Needless to say, the former, who now, as they did in the past, suppress the vote of those who tend to be more culturally and ideologically democratic, rig the electoral map for their own benefit through their control of state legislatures and the drawing federal and state electoral districts, their lobbying, their packing of the courts, and their writing of legislation through bureaucracies like ALEC, are winning at the moment just as they have ultimately won in the past. They have won despite losing what increasingly looks in retrospect like one battle in the seemingly never ending civil war between the forces of authoritarian oligarchy and greater democracy, the Civil War. It is, of course, this fact, the fact that the forces of oligarchy never give up, keep coming back, much like the terminator of Hollywood film lore, despite setbacks such as the Civil War, the New Deal and the LBJ era reforms, is why the South, at least for the moment, and thanks to its alliance with the West, has won the Civil War. From my vantage point, it looks like they will continue to win the battles of this long civil war for the soul of America for the foreseeable future given their control of large swathes of the White American South and American West, the realities of the electoral college map, and the authoritarian right's cynical almost any means to the end of achieving power macchiavelianism.
Hold on to your hats. It is going to be a bumpy ride.
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