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We Can't Blame the South Alone for Anti-Tax Austerity Politics – Jacobin magazine

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We Can’t Blame the South Alone for Anti-Tax Austerity Politics

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Noam Maggor

The South of slavery and Jim Crow is often cast as the major historical reason for the US’s stunted welfare state. But the most fanatical resistance to taxation and redistribution came from the Northern ruling class.

Newspaper editor Horace Greeley in the early 1860s. In 1872, Greeley, long associated with the antislavery cause, turned against Reconstruction and led a breakaway faction of so-called “Liberal” Republicans who condemned what they saw as the overweening statism of the Reconstruction experiment. (US National Archives and Records Administration)

The obstacles the Biden administration now faces in its efforts to pass a radically scaled down version of its “Build Back Better” bill have reignited an old debate in US political history: Why have tax increases and robust social investment proved so difficult to implement in this country? In recent years, a number of historians, including Ariel Ron and Robin Einhorn, have sought to answer the question by pointing to the legacy of American slavery. They argue that widespread hostility to taxation and government spending grow out of a long-standing American commitment to white supremacy and that the connection was forged in the slave South.

Ron, in a recent piece for Slate, drew a straight line between the proslavery politics of Southerners such as John C. Calhoun in the decades prior to the Civil War and the obstructionist tactics of today’s Republican Party. Concerned above all with protecting the institution of slavery from interference by national authorities, Ron argues, Calhoun and other Southerners became staunch opponents of federal activism. A government that had the capacity to build infrastructure and shape the economy, they feared, might also emancipate the slaves. Republicans in Congress today, Ron suggests, are operating from the same antidemocratic priorities and commitment to racial hierarchy. Not coincidentally, their electoral heartland is composed of the former states of the Confederacy, and they are similarly working to protect white elite power from redistributive government action. As Ron puts it, “Calhoun died in 1850, the Confederacy in 1865. Yet the politics of austerity endure.”

Einhorn has advanced a similar diagnosis. Rather than looking for the roots of American austerity politics in places like Pennsylvania or Massachusetts — in events like the Boston Tea Party — she argues, “we should be digging in Virginia and South Carolina.” Slaveholders saw little need for robust public spending on infrastructure or education. They perpetually worried about the prospects of nonslaveholding majorities wielding the power to tax their human property and thus did their best to cut down the government’s revenue-raising authority. To this day, she writes, the weakness of the American state’s fiscal powers is “part of the poisonous legacy we have inherited from the slaveholders who forged much of our political tradition.”

These accounts are part of a larger scholarly fashion for tracing today’s ills back to the South. In this view, the ghost of Calhoun continues to loom long after Appomattox, and the venom of slavery is inescapably passed down decades after Emancipation.

Tea Party Yankees

This interpretation is not without merit. The rearguard objections of scholars such as Sean Wilentz and Gordon Wood notwithstanding, slaveholders indeed had foundational influence on the legal and political institutions of the United States at the country’s inception. Slaveholders’ fears of an overweening federal government are in part responsible for the particularly decentralized and rigid political order of the United States. Commentators are not wrong to point out that these structures had resilient effects.

But there are major problems with what has become a monocausal and flattened interpretation of US history. Yes, Southern politicians helped make progressive taxation and robust government spending complicated to enact, but proslavery ideology was not the only and certainly not the most important source of anti-tax politics in the United States. Such claims skip over some of the most important episodes in the political development of the United States — including the enthusiastic embrace of laissez-faire among Northern elites after the Civil War as well as staunch support in the South for the creation of the progressive federal income tax — the government’s most important source of revenue in the twentieth century.

In other words, New York Times and Slate readers hardly need to venture all the way to Dixie to uncover deep-seated American strains of antidemocratic and anti-tax politics. To understand our current politics of austerity, we are better served to explore not the defeated ideology of slaveholders but the triumphant politics of liberal elites in the Northeast.

Indeed, the ink had barely dried on the Confederacy’s surrender when affluent New Yorkers and New Englanders — manufacturers, merchants, and financiers — began to campaign against the political power of the poor in the industrial North. In the aftermath of the war, urban workers became ever more adept at using the machinery of government to raise taxes, increase municipal budgets, and alleviate poverty — developments that, in reaction, triggered one of the foremost anti-taxation, counter-majoritarian, “small government” movements in American history. As historian Alex Keyssar has documented, the campaign was endorsed by the country’s leading intellectuals and public figures, often Ivy League–educated, who openly voiced deep hostility to tax hikes stemming from universal suffrage. Many of these men had fought against slavery, but they nevertheless decried the extension of the franchise to non-propertied citizens and their ability to redistribute private wealth via taxes.

The hostility of these urban elites to “universal manhood franchise,” though not free of racism and ethnic prejudice, had little to do with the legacy of slavery or with white supremacy per se. It was instead grounded in their analysis of the new massive inequalities generated by industrial capitalism. In a choice between political democracy and an economic system that produced unprecedented disparities, these men stood firmly with the latter. Writing in exclusive organs such as the North American Review and Atlantic Monthly, they lamented the “severance of political power from intelligence and property” and the rise of a “political system in which power was . . . lodged in the hands of the proletariat.” Driven by their overblown fears of a “communistic attack on property” via taxation and labor rights, they called for the universal right to vote be reversed.

The most prominent effort to eliminate voting rights of the propertyless took place in New York state in 1875, when the bipartisan “Tilden Commission” proposed a constitutional amendment to curb “the excesses of democracy.” Faced with an increase in spending, taxes, and municipal debt, as Sven Beckert has shown, the commission proposed to move control of city governments to boards of finance that would be elected exclusively by property holders. The commissioners asserted that “the choice of the local guardians and trustees of the financial concerns of cities should be lodged with taxpayers.” Business organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce and the New York Stock Exchange rushed to advocate for this proposal and were soon joined by organs such as the New York Times, Harper’s Weekly, and the Nation. Despite the support of these powerful institutions, working-class New Yorkers and the labor movement were able to defeat the measure, which would have disenfranchised large portions of the electorate. Elites then turned to other, more mundane methods to “purify the ballot box” — registration laws, literacy tests, prolonged residency requirements. In ways that anticipated the encasing of the market in our own neoliberal age, they insidiously worked to insulate government policy from democratic control. In this context, it was Northern publicists who often lectured to their white brethren in the Reconstruction South (who, of course, needed little advice) that “wise, capable, provident, and frugal rule” could never be compatible with universal suffrage.

Taxing the Rich

As historian Amy Stanley has explained, antidemocratic and anti-tax convictions among the affluent stemmed not from their stubborn commitment to slavery but, perhaps surprisingly, from its abolition. Advancing their own version of liberty in a post-emancipation society, elite Northerners came to see any form of government assistance or support for the poor as nurturing a form of dependence, reminiscent of the subservience of slaves in bondage, that had no place in a free society. Any type of public support threatened to remove the stigma associated with economic reliance and destroy the dependent’s “habit of industry.”

Whereas earlier rank-and-file conceptions in the age of Lincoln associated free labor with broad access to property and opportunity, these self-styled elite “reformers” now defined it narrowly as one’s choice to buy and sell one’s labor in the marketplace. They defined freedom of contract as the antithesis of bondage and the epitome of liberty. Laissez-faire was thus the brainchild not of enslavers but of slavery’s bourgeois opponents. It led these social groups not only to embrace social Darwinism — the application of Charles Darwin’s ideas of natural selection to society — but, ironically, to greater support for police forces and punitive government action against the poor. These policies were implemented not only in the cities of the North, where vagrancy laws criminalized poverty, but also in the postwar South, where federal authorities denied public relief to former slaves if deemed fit to labor and compelled them to sign exploitative contracts with their former masters.

Given the immense industrial fortunes that were accumulated in places such as New York and Boston in those decades, it is not surprising that support for a progressive income tax began to emerge on the country’s agrarian periphery, in the West and the South. As scholars such as Monica Prasad and Elizabeth Sanders have demonstrated, the political drive for an income tax drew support from radical farmers’ movements of the late nineteenth century — the Grange Movement, the Greenback Party, and the Southern and Northern Alliances. The Populist Party enjoyed strong support everywhere but the Northeast. It included an income tax in its 1892 Omaha Platform, alongside other demands designed to regulate corporations and combat inequality. Industrial interests warned that income taxes would lead to the growth of an “inquisitorial” government and set the country on the road to socialism. These early efforts to pass a federal income tax began a twenty-year struggle.

In 1893, Southern and Midwestern Democrats in the House introduced a federal income measure that was soon declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The justices from the Northeast voted against the tax; justices from the South voted in favor of it. In 1913, a constitutional amendment enabling income tax finally passed, with the Southern states, alongside other agrarian states, leading the way. As Einhorn herself has meticulously documented, opponents of the income tax in the South deployed the “Lost Cause” of the South argument in their attempts to crush the amendment. Harking back to the antebellum years, they warned voters that an empowered federal government might step in to challenge Jim Crow.

But these tactics failed. Of the first nine states to ratify the amendment, seven had been slave states (Alabama, Kentucky, South Carolina, Mississippi, Maryland, Georgia, and Texas). This was hardly an unambiguous victory for “democracy” in a segregated South, but it demonstrates that Calhoun’s anti-statist theories mattered less than the severe impoverishment of the region in those decades. It also shows that Southern oligarchs did not speak for the region as a whole. “Southern” traditions were as varied and contradictory as those of the North.

The long-term implications of the amendment were profound. Efforts in the 1920s to replace the income tax with regressive sales taxes failed. As a result, when the United States embarked upon the creation of the New Deal state, it was financed heavily by an income tax, whose base was gradually broadened to include a wider population of taxpayers, even as its progressivity remained intact. As economist Thomas Piketty has pointed out, the top federal income tax in the United States averaged 81 percent between 1932 and 1980, far surpassing the rates of continental European countries such as France and Germany. These decades of high redistributive tax policy, while far from perfect, belie notions of the United States as irredeemably anti-statist in ways that had been dictated by the founding generations.

In light of a long and dynamic history filled with reversals and ironies, it is doubtful that hostility to taxation and government spending in American politics can be pegged on any particular period or region. The impact of the slave South on the development of American institutions has been profound, of course, as has been the resilience of racism. But, as historians have demonstrated, these legacies evolved in complicated ways over time.

When politicians today whittle down social spending, and as they preach for fiscal responsibility and against a culture of “entitlements,” they draw on a rich vocabulary that owes as much, if not more, to the liberal Northeast than to “the South,” to industrial capitalism than to plantation slavery. To displace our challenges to the supposed lasting influence of the Confederacy does a disservice to our public debate, blinding us to how political alignments, not historical legacies or immutable ideological commitments, drive policy.

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Virginia Democrats advance efforts to protect abortion, voting rights, marriage equality

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November 14, 2024

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RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Democrats who control both chambers of the Virginia legislature are hoping to make good on promises made on the campaign trail, including becoming the first Southern state to expand constitutional protections for abortion access.

The House Privileges and Elections Committee advanced three proposed constitutional amendments Wednesday, including a measure to protect reproductive rights. Its members also discussed measures to repeal a now-defunct state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and ways to revise Virginia’s process to restore voting rights for people who served time for felony crimes.

“This meeting was an important next step considering the moment in history we find ourselves in,” Democratic Del. Cia Price, the committee chair, said during a news conference. “We have urgent threats to our freedoms that could impact constituents in all of the districts we serve.”

The at-times raucous meeting will pave the way for the House and Senate to take up the resolutions early next year after lawmakers tabled the measures last January. Democrats previously said the move was standard practice, given that amendments are typically introduced in odd-numbered years. But Republican Minority Leader Todd Gilbert said Wednesday the committee should not have delved into the amendments before next year’s legislative session. He said the resolutions, particularly the abortion amendment, need further vetting.

“No one who is still serving remembers it being done in this way ever,” Gilbert said after the meeting. “Certainly not for something this important. This is as big and weighty an issue as it gets.”

The Democrats’ legislative lineup comes after Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin, to the dismay of voting-rights advocates, rolled back a process to restore people’s civil rights after they completed sentences for felonies. Virginia is the only state that permanently bans anyone convicted of a felony from voting unless a governor restores their rights.

“This amendment creates a process that is bounded by transparent rules and criteria that will apply to everybody — it’s not left to the discretion of a single individual,” Del. Elizabeth Bennett-Parker, the patron of the voting rights resolution, which passed along party lines, said at the news conference.

Though Democrats have sparred with the governor over their legislative agenda, constitutional amendments put forth by lawmakers do not require his signature, allowing the Democrat-led House and Senate to bypass Youngkin’s blessing.

Instead, the General Assembly must pass proposed amendments twice in at least two years, with a legislative election sandwiched between each statehouse session. After that, the public can vote by referendum on the issues. The cumbersome process will likely hinge upon the success of all three amendments on Democrats’ ability to preserve their edge in the House and Senate, where they hold razor-thin majorities.

It’s not the first time lawmakers have attempted to champion the three amendments. Republicans in a House subcommittee killed a constitutional amendment to restore voting rights in 2022, a year after the measure passed in a Democrat-led House. The same subcommittee also struck down legislation supporting a constitutional amendment to repeal an amendment from 2006 banning marriage equality.

On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers voted 16-5 in favor of legislation protecting same-sex marriage, with four Republicans supporting the resolution.

“To say the least, voters enacted this (amendment) in 2006, and we have had 100,000 voters a year become of voting age since then,” said Del. Mark Sickles, who sponsored the amendment as one of the first openly gay men serving in the General Assembly. “Many people have changed their opinions of this as the years have passed.”

A constitutional amendment protecting abortion previously passed the Senate in 2023 but died in a Republican-led House. On Wednesday, the amendment passed on party lines.

If successful, the resolution proposed by House Majority Leader Charniele Herring would be part of a growing trend of reproductive rights-related ballot questions given to voters. Since 2022, 18 questions have gone before voters across the U.S., and they have sided with abortion rights advocates 14 times.

The voters have approved constitutional amendments ensuring the right to abortion until fetal viability in nine states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Ohio and Vermont. Voters also passed a right-to-abortion measure in Nevada in 2024, but it must be passed again in 2026 to be added to the state constitution.

As lawmakers debated the measure, roughly 18 members spoke. Mercedes Perkins, at 38 weeks pregnant, described the importance of women making decisions about their own bodies. Rhea Simon, another Virginia resident, anecdotally described how reproductive health care shaped her life.

Then all at once, more than 50 people lined up to speak against the abortion amendment.

“Let’s do the compassionate thing and care for mothers and all unborn children,” resident Sheila Furey said.

The audience gave a collective “Amen,” followed by a round of applause.

___

Associated Press writer Geoff Mulvihill in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, contributed to this report.

___

Olivia Diaz is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative.

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Trump chooses anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary

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November 14, 2024

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NEW YORK (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump says he will nominate anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, putting him in charge of a massive agency that oversees everything from drug, vaccine and food safety to medical research and the social safety net programs Medicare and Medicaid.

“For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social site announcing the appointment. Kennedy, he said, would “Make America Great and Healthy Again!”

Kennedy, a former Democrat who ran as an independent in this year’s presidential race, abandoned his bid after striking a deal to give Trump his endorsement with a promise to have a role in health policy in the administration.

He and Trump have since become good friends, with Kennedy frequently receiving loud applause at Trump’s rallies.

The expected appointment was first reported by Politico Thursday.

A longtime vaccine skeptic, Kennedy is an attorney who has built a loyal following over several decades of people who admire his lawsuits against major pesticide and pharmaceutical companies. He has pushed for tighter regulations around the ingredients in foods.

With the Trump campaign, he worked to shore up support among young mothers in particular, with his message of making food healthier in the U.S., promising to model regulations imposed in Europe. In a nod to Trump’s original campaign slogan, he named the effort “Make America Healthy Again.”

It remains unclear how that will square with Trump’s history of deregulation of big industries, including food. Trump pushed for fewer inspections of the meat industry, for example.

Kennedy’s stance on vaccines has also made him a controversial figure among Democrats and some Republicans, raising question about his ability to get confirmed, even in a GOP-controlled Senate. Kennedy has espoused misinformation around the safety of vaccines, including pushing a totally discredited theory that childhood vaccines cause autism.

He also has said he would recommend removing fluoride from drinking water. The addition of the material has been cited as leading to improved dental health.

HHS has more than 80,000 employees across the country. It houses the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Medicare and Medicaid programs and the National Institutes of Health.

Kennedy’s anti-vaccine nonprofit group, Children’s Health Defense, currently has a lawsuit pending against a number of news organizations, among them The Associated Press, accusing them of violating antitrust laws by taking action to identify misinformation, including about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines. Kennedy took leave from the group when he announced his run for president but is listed as one of its attorneys in the lawsuit.

__ Seitz reported from Washington.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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In Cyprus, Ukrainians learn how to dispose of landmines that kill and maim hundreds

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November 14, 2024

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NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) — In a Cypriot National Guard camp, Ukrainians are being trained on how to identify, locate and dispose of landmines and other unexploded munitions that litter huge swaths of their country, killing and maiming hundreds of people, including children.

Analysts say Ukraine is among the countries that are the most affected by landmines and discarded explosives, as a result of Russia’s ongoing war.

According to U.N. figures, some 399 people have been killed and 915 wounded from landmines and other munitions since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, equal to the number of casualties reported from 2014-2021. More than 1 in 10 of those casualties have been children.

The economic impact is costing billions to the Ukrainian economy. Landmines and other munitions are preventing the sowing of 5 million hectares, or 10%, of the country’s agricultural land.

Cyprus stepped up to offer its facilities as part of the European Union’s Military Assistance Mission to Ukraine. So far, almost 100 Ukrainian armed forces personnel have taken part in three training cycles over the last two years, said Cyprus Foreign Ministry spokesperson Theodoros Gotsis.

“We are committed to continuing this support for as long as it takes,” Gotsis told the Associated Press, adding that the Cyprus government has covered the 250,000 euro ($262,600) training cost.

Cyprus opted to offer such training owing to its own landmine issues dating back five decades when the island nation was ethnically divided when Turkey invaded following a coup that sought union with Greece. The United Nations has removed some 27,000 landmines from a buffer zone that cuts across the island, but minefields remain on either side. The Cypriot government says it has disposed of all anti-personnel mines in line with its obligations under an international treaty that bans the use of such munitions.

In Cyprus, Ukrainians undergo rigorous theoretical and practical training over a five-week Basic Demining and Clearance course that includes instruction on distinguishing and safely handling landmines and other explosive munitions, such as rockets, 155 mm artillery shells, rocket-propelled grenades and mortar shells.

Theoretical training uses inert munitions identical to the actual explosives.

Most of the course is comprised of hands-on training focusing on the on-site destruction of unexploded munitions using explosives, the chief training officer told the Associated Press. The officer spoke on condition of anonymity because he’s not authorized to disclose his identity for security reasons.

“They’re trained on ordnance disposal using real explosives,” the officer said. “That will be the trainees’ primary task when they return.”

Cypriot officials said the Ukrainian trainees did not want to be either interviewed or photographed.

Defusing discarded munitions or landmines in areas where explosive charges can’t be used — for instance, near a hospital — is not part of this course because that’s the task of highly trained teams of disposal experts whose training can last as long as eight months, the officer said.

Trainees, divided into groups of eight, are taught how to operate metal detectors and other tools for detecting munitions like prodders — long, thin rods which are used to gently probe beneath the ground’s surface in search of landmines and other explosive ordnance.

Another tool is a feeler, a rod that’s used to detect booby-trapped munitions. There are many ways to booby-trap such munitions, unlike landmines which require direct pressure to detonate.

“Booby-trapped munitions are a widespread phenomenon in Ukraine,” the chief training officer explained.

Training, primarily conducted by experts from other European Union countries, takes place both in forested and urban areas at different army camps and follows strict safety protocols.

The short, intense training period keeps the Ukrainians focused.

“You see the interest they show during instruction: they ask questions, they want to know what mistakes they’ve made and the correct way of doing it,” the officer said.

Humanitarian data and analysis group ACAPS said in a Jan. 2024 report that 174,000 sq. kilometers (67,182 sq. miles) or nearly 29% of Ukraine’s territory needs to be surveyed for landmines and other explosive ordnance.

More than 10 million people are said to live in areas where demining action is needed.

Since 2022, Russian forces have used at least 13 types of anti-personnel mines, which target people. Russia never signed the 1997 Ottawa Convention banning the use of anti-personnel mines, but the use of such mines is nonetheless considered a violation of its obligations under international law.

Russia also uses 13 types of anti-tank mines.

The International Campaign to Ban Landmines said in its 2023 Landmine Monitor report that Ukrainian government forces may have also used antipersonnel landmines in contravention of the Mine Ban Treaty in and around the city of Izium during 2022, when the city was under Russian control.

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