Twenty-First Century Reconstruction

It is hard to say what future historians will say of this moment in time, days before doughface donny is sworn in to usurp the office of president. Will it be the start of a great American awakening? When we finally realize that the republican party is not "conservative" as they and their enablers have asserted time and again but actually just traitors who want a white supremacist authoritarian dictatorship in place of the republic that they claim to be protecting from all those dirty hippies and brown people? Or is this the start of a reign of terror that will make the holocaust look quaint by comparison? It could be the beginning of a new phase in our everlasting civil war, a reopening of the actual military or guerrilla warfare campaign. It is impossible to predict what comes next, I hope that it is not violent but that ship has likely sailed, there will probably be blood spilled in the near future so perhaps I should restate that. I hope that O'Brien's vision does not come true, that the future is that of a boot stomping on a helpless face... forever.

After weeks of revelations about Russian interference in the election to boost the doughface and his ridiculous press conference, Donny's approval rating stands at 37%. So nothing is inevitable and it may be dawning on doughface donny and the republican elites, hence the extreme haste in firing those in government not personally loyal to the aristocrats and confirming loyalists. Reinhold Niebuhr often wrote that war is never inevitable, who knows? Maybe a real round of organizing and demonstrations could make doughface donny resign and the republicans think twice before hurting American more, after all congress' approval is still at 12% and only 13% among republicans. It's almost as if just making liberals cry wasn't enough, the "people" expect republicans to actually govern.

I first realized how applicable the doughface label was for donny when I had a revelation that the last eight years are a Twenty-first Century experiment in what would have happened if the Confederates had not seceded from the Union and simply waged political war on Abraham Lincoln instead. If you read any good books about the Civil War, what often stands out is not Lincoln's courage but his caution. At so many points the first Republican president approached southern treason and aggression with trepidation and conciliation, he had to be pushed quite far in order to finally realize that there was nothing he could do to persuade the planter elite. The slave power conspiracy, as it was called, had no intention of working in good faith with the first president, arguably in American history to that point, that they didn't control on the issue of the "peculiar institution."

The Civil War was a counterrevolution by slave owners in the South against Lincoln and the Republicans. Lincoln was actually pretty moderate, only calling for a halt to the spread of slavery into territory conquered from Mexico. This was basically traditional policy, numerous compromises and concessions were made to keep the South happy and slavery contained. James K. Polk oversaw the fulfillment of manifest destiny through war with brown people and compromise diplomacy with white people, Mexico in the former and Britain in the latter with the Oregon territory. Lots of political wrangling later and the Supreme Court plopped a steamer into the mix with their Dred Scott decision. This basically legalized slavery throughout the country, the slavers were ecstatic. This minority of a minority basically had democratic America by the throat. Slave owners had been waging a rhetorical campaign for decades to turn the peculiar institution from a necessary evil to a positive good and now it finally had paid off. Democratic American finally said "enough" and elected Lincoln.

Slavery may have been the central issue, but the driving force behind secession was the question of labor. Who labors and under what conditions? The North decided early on that labor would be contractual, an agreement between free (if not equal) actors about what the conditions, terms and compensation would be. Coercion, however, was at the heart of the Southern labor system, human beings as property would be forced to labor under whatever conditions the master saw fit.

The war ended the property aspect of the system, but not the coercion. First there were contracts, freedmen had to be under contract with a planter by a certain date or risk being imprisoned for vagrancy. Then there was what came to be known as the convict lease system, after you locked up a bunch of former slaves you couldn't just let them sit in idleness now could you? So prisoners, often locked up for "insolence" or some other made up crime, were leased out to work in mines, on infrastructure, or picking cotton. If you have no conscience this is a great deal, black people off the street and the rest living in fear, dehumanized laborers in dangerous work conditions, and the only money changing hands was from property owners to the state. It was slavery 2.0 and in many cases much more brutal, again if you have no humanity left in you convict leasing was basically free-range farming.

And that is where I fear the United States under doughface donny is headed. He has already made plain his intention to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants. Those immigrants were doing something here, not just standing outside of Home Depot or as donny put it "bringing drugs, bringing crime" or being rapists. Who will work the fields, process meat and poultry, build things? I have a shiny spot on the Supreme Court I will bet you on the answer. The trial balloons are already going up on using convict labor to "build the wall". (link here, it's to the Daily Caller and a million offensive ads, click if you have a strong stomach)

Aristocrat America hasn't been throwing African-Americans and Hispanics in prison for non-violent drug offenses for all these years just to have them waste away. That's a valuable resource, if you're a fucking Nazi. And now that public opinion has finally started to turn on the whole mass incarceration thing, it's time to slam the trap shut before all the set up is ruined. Kill two birds with one stone, round up and deport a bunch of brown people, replace them with black people. Win-win evil. And if a few million die in the process, fuck it, there are plenty more and we really don't need that many people to labor.

I hope I'm wrong, in fact please let me be wrong. But we have instances in our history of both rounding up immigrants and mass prison labor. If there would be an "American" fascism though, that would be it.