It’s a fair question, and I don’t think I have a pat answer.
To the extent that the state’s voters are making changes that actually take effect statewide, I would be more sympathetic than if the entire rest of the state wanted to make specific zoning changes in three or four cities, when the population of those cities was solidly opposed.
NB - I would like to get a look at the residence(s) owned by this state senator. Just want to make sure he is walking the walk.
Glad I don’t live there. I could get along fine in Ike’s or JFK’s USA.
I had no idea you were a union man.
Speaking of times you could get by in, and four towns affected by the decisions of the state…
Damn good water though
Hey, views are on a spectrum. Compared to some hardcore members of the LP, I’m Bernie Sanders. Compared to some ancient Roman rabble rousers, I’m Howard Roark.
I’m fine with unions anywhere in the economy where the consumer has the choice to use or not to use their services.
I’ll bet the best dinner you can buy that no (L or l) libertarians were involved in the confiscations of those towns.
Between the unions and the high taxes for the wealthy and all the expensive government-funded programmes (the interstate highways, NASA, the military) you’d think that period would have been a dystopia for Libertarians looking back at those days.
And yet at the time Hayek and Mises and Rand didn’t have the traction with American conservatives they did later. Meanwhile, their modern disciples seem to wax rhapsodic about that “Father Knows Best” period of suburbs and small towns in the Heartland when America was still Great (at least if you presented as a white cisgender male and didn’t pay too much attention to Cheever, Yates, Updike, Sirk, Kazan, etc.).
It was a simpler time, those good old days. I wonder what happened during LBJ’s administration that changed all that and finally turned a critical mass of American conservatives against the federal government and started their final push toward the embrace of “free” market extremism. It’s a puzzle.
JFK had chosen LBJ as his running mate as a sop to the Solid South - and even with his help, had squeaked into office on the narrowest of margins (and accusations of electoral skulduggery). After the JFK assassination, LBJ surprised racists by continuing to support, indeed lobby passionately for, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which passed 71-29 against a Democrat-led filibuster.
The Dixiecrats left the party in droves after the disaster of 1968 (where they mounted third-party George Wallace and split the vote), so the Old Plantation unexpectedly found itself allied with Big Business.
What puzzles me is how stable that alliance has been. Big Business doesn’t seem to have all that many interests in common with institutional racism or with Bible-thumping, and can do just as well in a socialist climate until and unless the government gets on to trust-busting. Speculation: Bernays-inspired consultants have worked out that the current alliance is the easiest way to ensure regulatory capture, but I really don’t know.
I was being facetious about the puzzle part. Upon signing the Civil Rights Act in 1964, LBJ famously said that the Dems “have lost the South for a generation” – by which he meant the southern racists who had traditionally voted Dem since the Civil War. He didn’t anticipate the trend would continue and grow after 1986, which brings us to your question:
Bernays-style propaganda definitely played a part in cementing that stability. The starting point is to understand that the Civil Rights Act pulled the rock-bottom skin privilege enjoyed by poor and working-poor whites (southern and otherwise) out from under them. LBJ is supposed to have told Bill Moyers in 1968:
“I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
So the corporate pickpockets to which he was referring found the perpetuation of racism (including via Bible-thumping evangelical preachers) a powerful means of continuing to ply their trade. You don’t give up a tool like that.
Of course the nature of the distraction had to be refined as overt racism became unacceptable, and in stepped one of the most talented heirs of Bernays, Lee Atwater:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “N-gger, n-gger, n-gger.” By 1968 you can’t say “n-gger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N-gger, n-gger.”
Quoted in full because this statement is absolutely critical to understanding what happened in the 1980s. The abstract language happened to dovetail very nicely with rising Reaganite and Libertarian rhetoric about small government, states’ rights, deregulation, removing or weakening welfare, etc. Thus did racism become deeply intertwined with American movement conservatism’s “free” market advocacy, and remains so to this day.
[ETA: to be clear, this does not mean that all Libertarians or Republicans or conservatives are racist.]
To me, the tipping point was the increased trend away from laws that were clearly drawn and explicit, and toward laws that stated “the Secretary shall determine” leaving us to be ruled by “laws” made up on the fly by people who were answerable to exactly zero voters.
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