Ah, Indiana! Long understood by sentient Hoosiers as the middle finger of the south, a state trying valiantly to replace Mississippi at the bottom of the civic barrel.
I thought about Indiana’s retrograde governance when I came across an article from The Bulwark, arguing that while Trumpism is clearly incompatible with liberal democracy, it is quite compatible with the governance of states that have never quite emerged from the Confederacy.
Liberal democracy has never put down deep roots in the South in the way it did across the rest of the country. The region never really abandoned its warped electoral politics and inclination to single-party cronyism, a Southern political instinct that helps explain how Democratic dominance transformed so completely into Republican one-party rule following the civil rights era. Inequality continues to define economic life in the region. Southern states have remained hostile to many minority groups, particularly LGBTQ Americans, and they are wildly out of step with most other states on reproductive rights. And incarceration in the South remains both less humane and more common than in other regions.
Trumpism is intent upon “southernizing” America. (Okay, I know that isn’t really a word…) The article quoted our creepy vice-president, JD Vance, who during the campaign opined that “American history is a constant war between Northern Yankees and Southern Bourbons” and went on to conclude that “whichever side the hillbillies are on, wins.” He added that he applies that image to America’s current politics , because–in his (Yale-educated) hillbilly view– ” the Northern Yankees are now the hyperwoke, coastal elites.”
The Bourbons, in this understanding, were the Southern planters and professionals who opposed Reconstruction. They fomented discord among poor whites to ensure that they would focus their political energies on their peers rather than those who were their de facto rulers. That elite applauded when, In 1896, the Supreme Court approved segregation with the principle of “separate but equal.”
In 1898, America’s first coup d’etat took place as the Democrats of Wilmington, North Carolina issued a “White Declaration of Independence.” They were attacking the coalition of black Republicans and white Populists that had control of the local government in the 1890s, which the old Confederates of the city found intolerable. With their resentment and rage being fueled by white Democratic powerbrokers, two thousand armed men forced out the duly elected government. None were more pleased by this result than their Bourbon backers.
The article reports that this “banker-planter-lawyer” class is largely responsible for the South’s political and economic underdevelopment–that it was “ostensibly pro-business but viciously self-interested” and that as a consequence, the South as a region still lags economically—pinned down by poverty and hobbled by the absence of public investments. The states have few worker protections, and its working classes have difficulty earning a living wage, making It “virtually impossible” to exist on the income of a single, low-wage, 40-hour-a-week job, especially in the absence of social welfare/healthcare.
That paragraph could have been written about Indiana.
From “Right to Work” (for less) legislation, to one of the nation’s most regressive tax systems, to the legislature’s constant knee-bending to landlords who prey on the poor, to vicious cuts in Medicaid, to restrictions on abortion that are sending medical practitioners out of the state, to the theft of tax dollars from public schools in order to subsidize wealthy Hoosiers and religious schools…the list goes on.
Some years ago, I wrote about ALICE, an acronym for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed; it applies to households with income above the federal poverty level, but below the actual, basic cost of living. United Way of Indiana found that more than one in three Hoosier households was unable to afford the basics of housing, food, health care and transportation, despite working hard, that 37% of households lived below the Alice threshold, (14% below the poverty level and another 23% above poverty but below the cost of living), that these were families and individuals with jobs, so most didn’t qualify for social services in Indiana, and that the jobs they fill are critically important–these are child care workers, laborers, movers, home health aides, heavy truck drivers, store clerks, repair workers and office assistants—and they are unsure if they’ll be able to put dinner on the table each night.
And just like those southern Bourbons, our elected overlords couldn’t care less. They focus instead upon deflecting responsibility by turning struggling Hoosiers against each other–hence the legislative attacks on trans children and DEI and moronic pronouncements that Black folks benefitted from the 3/5ths compromise.
The theory is, if we’re provided with scapegoats, perhaps we won’t notice the Bourbon corruption, or the lack of public investment in social and physical infrastructure…
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