Is It Illegal for the South to Rise Again

On this anniversary of Lincoln's birthday, I welcome invitee author and psychoanalyst David Lotto, Ph.D., who teaches and writes extensively most race in America, its history, and our emotional ambivalence near the subject.
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Tea Party Pro Gun Rally, 2013

Source: Fibonacci Blue/flickr

Racism has a long history in this country. From the colonial era until the Ceremonious State of war its chief manifestation was through the institution of slavery. The degree to which racism, equally opposed to other factors, such as economical motivations, was responsible for the enslavement of African Americans in this land is debatable but not the focus of this paper. Certainly it is difficult to imagine that the institution would have become what it did if white people were the only ones bachelor to be made into slaves.

The political, economic, and social consequences of racism certainly did not terminate with the emancipation announcement. Some of this volition exist discussed later in the paper. Withal, in recent years, perhaps starting in 2008 with the election of the beginning African American president, at that place has been an increased awareness of the issue of racism. While many accept seen the fact that a black human was elected president every bit an indication that racism, and its consequences, are in decline, there are other events that point to the opposite determination. In the past twelvemonth, possibly the most visible evidence for questioning the exclamation that racism has diminished is the occurrence and accompanying media attention given to the killing and physical assaults on African-Americans past whites, mostly, only not exclusively, by police officers. The "Black Lives Matter" movement, and information technology's more militant adjunct "No Justice No Peace" are reactions to the white on black violence. Although they have not yet reached the level of protest or organized opposition of the Civil Rights and Black Power in the 1960's and 1970's, these movements have gathered a pregnant amount of support and take kept the issue in the public eye.

This paper volition focus on a different expression of racism, the ascent of racism in the political arena.
A characteristic of the Tea Party, which almost all who have written about it have commented on, is the intense hostility directed at President Obama. In 2013 Obama was the target of more than 30 potential expiry threats a day. He is the most threatened president in history. The rate of threats against him is four times higher than it was for President Bush-league.

The Southern Poverty Constabulary Center (SPLC), which tracks correct-wing detest groups, issued a report in 2012 which said that the tiptop in the number of hate groups was 1274 in 2011. There was a substantial increase in the number of hate groups starting in 2008 following Obama'due south election, although this was as well the start of the real estate crash recession. The SPLC institute that the largest increase was in groups "whose ideologies include deep distrust of the federal government"[i] SPLC president Richard Cohen, responding to the recent massacre at a black church building in Charleston Due south Carolina, said that the shooting was "an obvious hate crime by someone who feels threatened by our land's changing demographics and the increasing prominence of African Americans in public life"[ii]

In 2010 Harvard historian and New Yorker staff reporter Jill LePore, wrote a book about the Tea Party titled: The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party'south Revolution and the Battle over American History. In Apr of 2010, in the course of her inquiry, she attended a Tea Party event featuring Sarah Palin. She reports that someone was wearing a T-shirt saying: American Non Racist. At that place was also an African American musician, a warm-up human action for Sarah'south speech, who started his performance by shouting: "I am not an African American I am Lloyd Marcus an American. When they call you a racist because y'all disagree that'south another 1 of their nasty tricks." He so called to the audience "are you racists?" And the crowd responded "no".[three]

Overt racism is no longer politically correct and is not adequate in public discourse, even inside the Tea Party. At the least, for a public figure, there is mandatory deniability. In the mainstream earth you lot just tin can't say or practise openly racist things, equally Donald Sterling, the former possessor of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball game team, recently learned. In this paper I am suggesting that racism, although largely underground, is a powerful cistron fueling both the intensity and popularity of the Tea Party and its fellow travelers.

As LePore says: "Whatever else had drawn people into the move - a bailout, healthcare, taxes, Pull a fast one on News, and in a higher place all, the economy - some of it, for some people, was probably discomfort with the United states' offset black president, because he was blackness"[iv].

Rick Perlstein, who describes himself every bit someone who has spent the concluding 16 years in total-fourth dimension report of the right, argues in his article in the Nation on the Tea Party that: "All antigovernment rage in America bears a racial component, because liberalism is understood, consciously or unconsciously, as the ideology that steals from difficult-working, taxpaying whites and gives the spoils to indolent, grasping blacks."[v]

Heather Cox Richardson in a recent article traces some of the history of this American political trope. Pres. Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor, was the outset prominent political leader to make this argument in his veto letters of several bills designed to provide educational and economical benefits to poor people, whites as well as the newly emancipated slaves. He claimed that these bills would "simply requite a handout to lazy blacks, paid for by hard-working whites"[vi]. This theme has continued to be an important part of right fly ideology from the Reconstruction era to the present. It fuels the opposition to any and all programs that may involve providing benefits for those in need paid for past public funds supplied by "hard-working taxpayers". From the demise of reconstruction in the South, to Ronald Reagan's welfare queen who had:

"80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards" and who "is collecting veterans benefits on four not-existing deceased married man's. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She'south got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names."[vii]

To the Tea Party hatred of Obama, the refrain remains the same.

Another footling-known just telling incident from our history. In 1898 a coalition of blacks and white populists won the municipal election in Wilmington, North Carolina. A local White Citizens Council was organized. A black owned newspaper was destroyed by fire, at least fifteen blacks were murdered, and the elected officials were driven from part. In a comment peculiarly irrelevant to our present situation 1 white homo declared: "Nosotros… will never once more be ruled past men of African origin."[8]

Survey data indicates that Tea Partiers rated blacks (and Latinos) as lazier, less intelligent, and less trustworthy than even non-Tea Party conservative Republicans did.[ix]

The Tea Party conspicuously is driven past other factors in addition to racism; it is the latest manifestation of a long history of correct-wing rage directed at many different targets. Richard Hofstadter's famous 1964 article The Paranoid Style in American Politics provides a expert history, upwardly until that time, of organized correct-wing rage, fright, and baroque belief systems. Well-nigh often in that location would be a designated enemy who was identified as the source of dire threat. Starting in Colonial Times these enemies included, in chronological social club, Native Americans, Catholics, Bolsheviks, Germans, Japanese, Russians, International Communism, and now Islamic terrorists.

In February of 2022 at that place were forty-8 members of the Tea Party caucus in the Business firm of Representatives, all of whom were Republicans. 30-iii, more two thirds, were from states that were role of the Confederacy or in which slavery was legal at the time of the Ceremonious State of war. The rest are from the southwest, Midwest, or the western mount states that had not even so been granted statehood by the finish of the war. Merely 5, including the chairperson Michelle Bachman from Minnesota and two from California, were from states which remained in the Spousal relationship.

The intergenerational transmission of trauma is a topic which lately has generated a peachy deal of interest. As Vamik Volkan has written, one way that groups have suffered the trauma of losing a state of war react, is to bequeath, nearly often unconsciously, a mission of redemption to their descendants.[ten] Robert J. Lifton refers to this miracle, where a group which has experienced trauma finds pregnant and significance for their lives as engaging in a "Survivor Mission".[xi] One manner to fulfill the mission is to remain faithful to the behavior, values and ethics for which their ancestors fought and to bring vindication. Some have referred to this type of phenomenon as a failure to mourn, equally when the attachment to the old means is never relinquished, i is never free of the past, and and so i is non able to move on to something else. Thus, the rallying cry, non heard as ofttimes as in the past, only perhaps notwithstanding in the hearts of many, that "the Southward volition ascension once more", is transmitted down through the generations and gets enacted and expressed through the Tea Party.

The proposition here is that the Tea Party is a manifestation of this arising. LePore suggests that some in the Tea Party have "some discomfort about a black president". I think that the feelings involved are ofttimes far more intense than discomfort and that information technology is more than "some" Tea Party members who feel this style. For many, and not simply Tea Partiers, the reality of a black president is just intolerable. For them his ballot has come to symbolize that whites are no longer the dominant political group equally they have been throughout our history. They are aware of what Richard Cohen calls the "changing demographics", namely, that in 2011, for the first time in our history, non-Hispanic whites accounted for less than one half of total births.[xii] Although, in 2012, not-Hispanic whites were 63% of the total population, projections are that past 2043 that number will fall below fifty percent.[xiii] In that location is a feeling among Tea Party members and those who share their ideology that control is slipping away; that this in no longer the adept quondam The states of the days of yore.

For many, Obama is just as well hard to identify with. He is non suitable to be the primary executive of this great nation. Information technology may be all right for African-Americans to have equal rights or fifty-fifty equal opportunities but for an African American to be in the highest position in the nation, a superior figure, an arcadian and exalted leader, the commander in chief of the world's most powerful armed forces, goes as well far. For the white people who are accustomed to existence the rulers it violates something very basic: slaves shouldn't get to rule over their masters.

Thomas Jefferson's first draft of the Declaration of Independence listed every bit one of the several named grievances confronting Rex George the Third that: "He has waged cruel war against man nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of the afar people who never offended him, captivating and conveying them into slavery."[fourteen] This sentence, at the insistence of the delegates from the southern colonies was not included in the final typhoon.

During the Revolutionary War at that place were large numbers of slaves, probably in the tens of thousands, who escaped from slavery taking promise in the promise past the British that if they were victorious, slaves would be freed. When the British evacuated, thousands of sometime slaves went with them, giving partisans of slavery another reason to hate and fright blacks.[15] Another little known but very important piece of American history is the close connection between the perpetuation of slavery and the second amendment to the Constitution. Proslavery delegates at the Ramble convention were strong advocates for the 2nd Amendment which was important for them in that information technology guaranteed that the federal government would not interfere with the states maintaining their slave patrols, whose main purpose was to put downwards slave rebellions and capture runaway slaves. Thus the "well organized militia" clause.

In Virginia and the Carolinas, most men between the ages of 18 and 45, with the exception of those in "disquisitional" professions" which included judges, legislators, and students, but not doctors, lawyers or clergy, were required to serve in the slave patrol militias for at least some period of time.[sixteen]

By the 1780's there had been hundreds of slave rebellions in the southern colonies. In large areas in the south, blacks outnumbered whites.[xvii]

At the Constitutional Convention, southern delegates had several concerns about threats to the beingness of slavery. One of their concerns was that Article i, Section viii of the proposed constitution, which gave the federal authorities the ability to raise and supervise a militia, could allow the federal militia to take control of country militias. At that place were multiple concerns. Equally expressed by Patrick Henry at the Virginia ratifying convention: "In this state in that location are two hundred and thirty half dozen thousand blacks, and there are many in several other states. But there are few or none in the northern states. . . May Congress not say, that every black human being must fight? Did we not see a picayune of this concluding war? . . .acts of Assembly passed that every slave who would get to the army should exist free" [the reference is to blackness soldiers serving nether Washington in the Revolutionary War]

Henry was too worried that: "They will search that paper [the constitution], and see if they have the power of manumission . . .And have they not sir? Have they not ability to provide for the general defense force and welfare? May they not think these call for the abolition of slavery? May they not pronounce all slaves gratuitous, and will they non be warranted by that ability?" He was quite correct to be afraid for this is what did happen in 1863 when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Annunciation.

Another fiddling known function of the 2d subpoena story was that the original typhoon equanimous by James Madison said:

"The correct of the people to go on and carry arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a gratis country: merely no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person"

Because of the concerns of Henry, George Stonemason, and other southern delegates, the wording was changed to what is presently in the Constitution:

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a complimentary country, the right of the people to go on and conduct arms, shall not exist infringed." [xviii]
Note that the word country was changed to land, thus shifting the locus of control from the federal government to state governments, along with dropping the religious conscientious exception clause.

So there is a connexion betwixt the history of racism/slavery in this country and the baroque and uniquely American firearms fetish, one of the consequences of which is the current epidemic of gun violence. Another legacy of the attachment to and defense of the institution of African American slavery.

As Americans pushed west killing or expelling Native Americans, Spaniards, Mexicans, and anyone else in their path through the first role of the 19th century ane of the major domestic political conflicts was between partisans of "States' Rights" and those who favored a strong federal regime. States' Rights became 1 of the cornerstones of the American conservative and libertarian tradition; morphing into the more diffuse "the less regime the ameliorate" credo. Local and state government could be criticized for limiting the "freedom" of the individual citizens, but the existent danger was from a centralized federal government which might wish to exert control over local affairs. The outcome that this conflict coalesced around was, of course, slavery. Equally the newly settled areas of the frontier sought statehood, Congress became a battleground for the fight over whether the new land would exist "slave" or "free"; John Calhoun versus Daniel Webster. This fight escalated through the middle of the century culminating in the Civil War. The statement is still made past many in the S that the Civil War, or as some Southerners prefer to call it The War of Northern Aggression, was about "States' Rights" and not slavery. My contention is that at its centre, States' Rights was primarily about protecting slavery which was essential for much of the economic action in the South which was based on growing cotton wool, which could not have been done profitably without the utilize of slave labor.[nineteen]

But in many ways the Civil War settled niggling regarding racism. In that location was a brief catamenia from the N's victory in 1865 until the late 1870s, the reconstruction era, where there was an effort made to make a significant deviation in the Southern way of life. African Americans exercised their voting rights and there were even some African Americans who won elections and had some power in local and state authorities. However, with the demise of the Reconstruction Era, when federal troops were withdrawn, virtually all African American political gains were undone; the era of Jim Crow descended.

Douglas Blackmon in his book, Slavery by Another Name, documents some of the means in which de facto slavery was reconstituted, chiefly by means of convicting black men of mostly fictitious crimes and sentencing them to "penal servitude", which was functionally indistinguishable from slavery. These practices didn't end until the advent of the New Bargain in the 1930s.

Michelle Alexander has recently written a widely acclaimed book titled: The New Jim Crow, in which she describes the workings of the latest iteration of political and institutional racism - the huge number of African-Americans who are incarcerated, on probation or parole, or whose economic opportunities have been severely curtailed because of having a criminal record.

David King, was the plaintiff in the Male monarch vs. Burwell case, which, had the plaintiff prevailed, would take nullified parts of the Affordable Intendance Human activity and resulted in thousands losing their wellness insurance. The case was recently heard past the Supreme Courtroom, which institute confronting the plaintiff. When asked why he agreed to become involved in the lawsuit King said the only benefit he anticipated was: "the satisfaction of smashing the signature achievement of the President he loathes".[xx]

Barbara Lee, U.S. Congresswoman

Source: wikimedia/permission granted

Barbara Lee, the African-American Congresswoman (and the alone legislator to vote confronting the resolution giving President Bush the say-so to go to state of war afterwards 9/11) pointed out, when the Republicans were threatening to not raise the debt ceiling and shut the government down, that there has been a long history of Congress routinely voting debt ceiling increases no matter which party was in control of the legislative or executive branch. It was simply when in that location was a black president that this well-established precedent was cleaved.

The journal Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society recently published an entire event on Psychoanalysis, African-Americans, and Inequality. Jones and Obourn'south article: Object Fear, the National Dissociation of Race and Racism in the Era of Obama suggests that: "President Obama's presence has tapped into a national psychic location for internal violence and despair, resulting in a cultural atmosphere in which racial oppressions increase and in which ceremonious rights protections can be stripped away. . ."[xxi] They besides write: "The danger of white American losing "our land" . . . is threatened past the effigy of a black president".[xxii]

I believe that the unmarried-minded opposition of the Republicans, as epitomized past the congressional Republican leaders' cabal on the evening of Obama's 2009 inauguration, vowing to do anything and everything they could to oppose any legislation that Obama supported, has a significant racist component.

Southern congressional representatives have too wielded a bang-up deal of political power in our federal government throughout the history of this country: from the days of the Ramble convention, with the debate most counting slaves for purposes of representation which led to the infamous 3/5th compromise and the second amendment, through the present.

Ira Katznelson, in his book Fear Itself: The New Bargain and the Origins of Our Time, points out that Democratic Southern representatives, in render for supporting New Deal legislation were able to ensure that New Bargain mandated protections did not apply to agricultural and domestic workers, the bulk of whom, in the South, were African Americans, and that Jim Crow could go along undisturbed.[xxiii]

Melvin Dubofsky in his article: The Roots of the Tea Party concludes: "The Tea Political party's agenda may be partly funded by the stick-in-the-mud Koch Brothers, . . . but its mass participants danced to tunes beginning played by the Southern Autonomous lawmakers."[xxiv]

Ian Haney Lopez recently in his book Dog Whistle Politics writes about the increasing apply of code words or phrases, particularly those with racist meanings, in political soapbox. Phrases such as "taking personal responsibleness", "nutrient stamp recipients", "or "illegal aliens" amid others, have latent or unconscious associations that trigger whites to resent nonwhites. Although this is not a new development, having been used extensively by the Reagan's presidential campaign northward in 1980, Right-Wing and Tea Political party politicians use this technique to feed racial animus, while maintaining plausible deniability.

At that place has besides been a recent surge in interest in the concept of implicit or unconscious racism. There is a procedure called the Implicit Association Test, which can exist accessed online, and has been by more than two million people, which claims to measure racial prejudice that is independent of the individual's level of overt or witting racism. The average score for white people is .iv on a zero to 1 scale, where naught indicates no racism. .iv is in the "moderate bias" range. The determination drawn is that many of those who deny that they are racist are more probable to exist deceiving themselves than to exist lying to others.

I think that Obama'due south denial of racism is a crucial cistron in his presidency and the current domestic political situation. Barack Obama'south life, upwardly to his election every bit president in 2008, has been a remarkable American success story. A bi-racial child growing up in a considerably less than ideal environment gets to graduate from an Ivy League Higher and become to Harvard Police School and become accepted as a member of the nation's power elite. He receives the prestigious honor of being named editor of the Harvard Law Review, goes on to become a ascension star in Chicago politics, a United States Senator, and finally president.

His story is dramatic proof that, for him, racism has not been a barrier to success. His wish that this be truthful for everyone is powerful and dearly held. It is a crucial aspect of his identity. There is a strong resistance to seeing the prevalence and power of racism in this country, that his personal success story is very much the exception to the rule.

Obama still doesn't run into the full force of the racist rage that is directed against him. His 2022 State of the Union voice communication reiterated his belief, first articulated in his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic convention, when he proclaimed that there'southward non a black America and a white America and in that location's non a liberal America and a conservative America - there is but a Us of America.

To summarize and conclude: the central argument here is that the current resurgence of correct wing paranoid political groups, particularly the Tea Party, is driven by an upsurge of racism. It can be seen every bit an enactment on the part of southerners and their descendents and sympathizers, of the trauma of the civil war. The trauma involving the losses of life, limb and property likewise equally the humiliation of existence defeated in the war. I also argue that racism has a long history of influencing the political beliefs of the United States in that it is closely associated with one of the cardinal tropes of the right wing in this country - that the enemy is a federal authorities which tyrannically intrudes on the rights of local government (chiefly states) and the individual; and its corollary - that less federal government is expert and more is bad.

Until the Civil State of war this fight against the federal regime had primarily been in the service of preserving slavery. Although the justification for an antigovernment stance these days is nigh oft presented as a valorization of freedom and liberty, I believe that there are powerful disavowed currents of racism that fuel the antigovernment stance of the Tea Party and related right wing groups.

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Dr. Lotto is Editor of The Periodical of Psychohistory and in private practice in Massachusetts. A earlier version of this paper was presented at the International Psychohistorical Clan Conference 2015, and at The Psychohistory Forum 2016.

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Notes

[i] New York Times – 3/7/2012
[two] Salim Muwakkil, In These Times, August 2022 "Our Neo-Confederacy", p. fourteen.
[3] LePore, J. The Whites of Their Optics, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010, p. 136.
[iv] Ibid. p. 95.
[5] Rick Perlstein, Nation, "The Grand Old Tea Party", p. fourteen-19.
[vi] Heather Cox Richardson, Jacobin, summer 2015, p. 74.
[vii] Ibid. p. 78.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Christopher Parker et. al. 2010 Multi-Land Survey of Race and Politics, Academy of Washington Plant for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Sexuality.
[x] Volkan, V. Chosen Trauma, The Political Ideology of Entitlement and Violence Berlin meeting 6/x/2004
[xi] Lifton, R.J. The Future of Immortality, New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1987, p. 241.
[xii] Wikipedia, Non-Hispanic Whites.
[thirteen] usnews.nbcnews.com/in/18934111
[xiv] LePore, p. 132.
[fifteen] Ibid. p. 139.
[xvi] Hadden, S. Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Harvard Academy Press, 2003.
[xvii] Tom Hartmann, Truth Out, 1/15/2003.
[xviii] http://jgiganti.myweb.uga.edu/henry_smith_onslavery.htm)
[xix] See Christopher Hayes' article in the Nation, five/12/2014, The New Abolition. p. xi-15, for an business relationship of the economic importance of slavery to the Due south.
[xx] Female parent Jones, May & June 2015, p. 5
[xxi] Jones, A. L. & Obourn, M. Object Fearfulness, the National Dissociation of Race and Racism in the Era of Obama. Psychoanalysis, Culture, & Society, Vol. xix, #iv Dec. 2014, p. 393.
[xxii] Ibid. p. 398.
[xxiii] Katznelson, I. Fright Itself: The New Bargain and the Origins of Our Time. Liveright Publishing, 2013.
[xxiv] In these Times, Jan. 2014, p. 45.

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Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-me-in-we/201602/the-south-rises-again

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