The Puzzling Disappearance of Liberal/Progressives

One of the things I have puzzled over in the last few years is how Republicans specifically and conservatives generally managed to take over politics here in the south. A little background is probably in order before I get too far into this. During my youth in this area, the sixties and seventies, Democrats dominated the south. Republicans sometimes ran for office but were not really electable in most cases as the Democratic party primary was actually the deciding factor in most all elections.

There is a lot of literature and discussion about how the Republicans managed to flip this in the south. Most of it has to do with the fact that the Civil Rights movement was a breaking point for both parties. Southern Democrats overwhelmingly favored segregation and militantly opposed the idea that "seperate but equal" was unacceptable. It was an article of faith that Jim Crow was both fair and correct and Southern Democrats or "Dixiecrats" always voted in step with this foundational idea. Interestingly, northern Democrats were often those pushing the hardest for the demise of Jim Crow policies and the Dixiecrats often found themselve supported by and cutting deals with Northern Republicans to protect this policy. There was a kind of quid pro quo where Dixiecrats helped Northern Republicans with corporate friendly legislation in return for supporting Dixiecrats when it came to fighting integration.

This made for a coalition of opposite parties that organized around social and fiscal conservative policies while the more liberal or progressive members of the southern Republicans (what few there were) and Northern Democrats were pushing for more liberal or progressive policies in both areas.

The Civil Rights movement broke these coalitions up when the Dixiecrats found themselves without support from Northern Republicans after Martin Luther King and others managed to shine a light on the injustices being perpetrated against blacks in the south. Jim Crow policies never took hold in the north and I expect a lot of northerners simply willfully ignored it in the south until King and others like him brought the effect of these policies to light. Knowing blacks were treated like second class citizens was one thing, seeing law enforcement in Selma and Birmingham attack peaceful marchers with mounted police swinging clubs and turning police dogs loose to attack them on the evening news was something different altogether.

It was this publicity that finally broke the old coalitions. Dixiecrats lost the battle and the Voting Rights Act and others like it were the proof. Whether Johnson actually realized it or not, signing this act did turn the south over to the Republican party; at least it put that possibility in play in a way that simply hadn't existed before. The Dixiecrats were shocked that their Conservative supporters in the North turned a deaf ear when this was going on. Conservatives in the north were in turn shocked over the actions that the Dixiecrats took in violent response to the marchers.

I can assure you that southerners weren't shocked by these actions. It was a fact of life here for much of the time since the Civil War until 1965. The matter of degree to which southerners were willing to go to maintain this system may have surprised Northern Republicans but southerners understood it all too well.

There are still strains of that same racial bias and double standard in the south. The difference is that it is much less prominent and has much less general support than it used to. Don't make the mistake of assuming it doesn't exist; it just went underground and is not discussed publicly. The other difference is that this type of thinking is no longer carried out under the Democratic banner; the Dixiecrats are long gone. They are now staunch Conservative Republicans. This is not to say that all Conservative Republicans are racists because this is simply not the case. However, all racists in the south whether openly avowed racists or closet racists, are now Conservative Republicans in the south. What there is left of them have switched parties and are now Republicans.

While all of this has been well covered and is demonstrably true it never really satisfied my curiosity of how Republicans had managed to completely rout Democrats in the south. If one were to believe that all southerners have a strain of latent racism in them that keeps this coalition together it would make sense. I happen to know that this is not the case. While there are racists in the south, they are not in the majority and have not been for quite some time. While I know this to be true it doesn't explain how the vast majority of people in the south now vote Republican.

Something else is at work here. Something else changed after the late sixties and seventies that turned politics upside down in the south. I can well remember the liberal/progressive wing of the Democratic party even at the height of the Civil Rights movement. It wasn't just the Kennedy's, there were southern progressive Democrats and Republicans as well.

I think what changed was not a political change but a working class change. For much of this century since the New Deal most of the progressive political clout was centered around unions and the working class. When unions were more synonymous with the working class this was easier to see. Since unions have declined so precipitously since Reagan it isn't any wonder that their political clout has declined as well. However, this begs the question of what happened to the people within this class? If the middle class, the working men and women of the nation, were the base of the liberal/progressive wing of both parties; what happened to these people?

To understand this question one has to understand that it is an economics question; not a political question. The working class liberal/progressives were basically squeezed out of existence by a basic change in our economic system. The Reagan revolution brought about the weakening of organized unions along with a requisite strengthening of corporate influence but it also killed the middle class in a way that was more accidental than intentional.

With the advent of globalization and the international search for ever cheaper labor, we managed to lose most all of the manufacturing jobs that supported the middle class; at least the blue collar middle class. I believe this was mostly an unintended consequence. Business owners and Corporate Interests wanted cheaper labor but they didn't foresee some of the side effects that it would produce when we started chasing it around the world.

We have largely become a service industry based economy because the only jobs that couldn't chase cheaper labor were those that were completely rooted in one place. Hairdressers, hotel employees, retail people, food service employees, and construction personnel have to work here because the work itself is here. We haven't figured out how to do IT haircuts or IT plumbing repairs; at least not yet anyway.

What we have figured out how to do is bring in illegal immigrants to take as many of these jobs as possible. This keeps the profit margin high for business owners while at the same time cutting their labor costs dramatically. That's another story for another day however. The fact remains that the service industry jobs we have left are not jobs that require enough specialized skill and training to be jobs that pay very well.

Therefore, what we have left is a working class made up of ever increasing management level professionals such as engineers, managers, and business degreed professionals who are largely college educated and white collar. This group has never found itself beset by cheaper immigrated labor on a massive scale; at least not so far. They also have little in common with the old blue collar professionals who protected their interests by joining organized labor groups. These are the only jobs left in our economic system that pay well enough to produce a middle class outside of the class of business owners large and small. None of these groups have the same interests in protecting blue collar jobs. Many of them make more money by exporting labor costs to the cheapest areas of the world where they can find labor.

Along with this group there is another group that I like to call the Libertarian middle/upper class that has the same basic interests and requirements. This group is composed of lawyers, doctors, medical professionals, and licensed contractors who own businesses of their own. The basic difference between this group and the management level professionals is that they are doubly protected from foreign competition or replacement by cheaper immigrant replacement by strictly artificial means. This group, who are often the loudest proponents of free markets, isolate themselves from free market effects by means of licensing boards that control who is allowed to compete with them.

Doctors are licensed by boards completely controlled by professional organizations run by doctors. Lawyers are licensed by boards completely controlled by lawyers. Contractors are licensed by boards completely controlled by other contractors. I could go on with this comparison through many different levels of professionals but I think the pattern is by now pretty clear to see. Licensing boards, ostensibly set up to protect the public are in fact a total and complete means of protecting this group from any competition with cheaper labor. They are in fact the direct opposite of a free market; a closed monopoly mutually run for members only benefits.

This is largely the modern base of the Republican party; especially in the south. Add in the very richest large corporation board members and owners and it is a formiddable combination.

It is currently opposed by only three groups, none of which is large AND powerful.

The first is the dying labor union membership. This group has been declining rapidly in the last few years but they still exist on a small scale.

The second is a group of minority voters who are on the bottom of the economic scale. This group is a little larger in number but it seems badly splintered and ineffectively led by leaders who have their own interests at heart rather than the group itself.

The third group is by far the largest group of Americans but completely disorganized and seemingly unaware of why things are the way they are. This group is the employees of these service industry businesses. They are opposed and controlled in large part by the business owners large and small that they work for. Their wages are low because the relative skill sets are usually easily replaced by new employees. The relatively large number of available employees v number of jobs available has been overwhelmingly in favor of the owners for quite a long time now. It is also an industry that is increasingly abused by owners who bring in immigrant labor both legal and illegal to keep wages artificially low.

Add in the clever use of right wing talking points about people who don't work and won't work being the base of the Democratic party and social conservative hot button issues and quite a few members of all three of these groups actually votes against its own interests every election by voting Republican.

It isn't so much that Liberal/Progressives disappeared after Reagan. It is more true that the jobs that supported them in large numbers disappeared and have been replaced by jobs that actually produce more organized conservative Republican leanings. One thing that Trump's recent election touched upon was that a lot of people aren't happy with the direction our country is presently going. The part of this iceberg that people aren't accurately seeing is the part that it still submerged. The constantly growing numbers of service industry workers being squeezed from both ends of the spectrum will at some point become self-aware and react by forming their own coalition. When they do, it will be larger than all the rest put together.