{"id":33965,"date":"2024-05-26T11:35:16","date_gmt":"2024-05-26T18:35:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=33965"},"modified":"2024-05-26T11:35:17","modified_gmt":"2024-05-26T18:35:17","slug":"why-republicans-want-and-need-a-permanent-economic-underclass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2024\/05\/26\/why-republicans-want-and-need-a-permanent-economic-underclass\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Republicans Want and Need a Permanent Economic Underclass"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Thom Hartmann\/The New Republic<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Why“Social mobility in America today is lower than in any other developed country.” (photo: Spencer Platt\/Getty Images)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

25 may 24<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Ever heard of the \u201cmudsill theory\u201d? Well, it goes back to the slaveholding South. And it explains a lot.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Odds are you\u2019ve never heard of the \u201cmudsill theory of labor,\u201d but everybody in this country really should learn about it. It explains a whole spectrum of Republican behavior that otherwise seems baffling and self-defeating. For example:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The past seven years have seen a near-fivefold increase<\/a> in documented child labor violations by employers. States have responded to this alarming trend in two ways<\/a>: Democratic-controlled states are putting more teeth into their laws and upping enforcement; Republican-controlled states are loosening their laws and cutting back on enforcement so children can drop out of school and go to work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So far, three blue states (and two red ones) have made it harder<\/a> for employers to exploit child labor, while eight red states have made it easier for children to get trapped in a cycle of work that often ends their educational progress and consigns them to a lifetime of manual labor. Eight other Republican-controlled states are currently<\/a> considering legislation to weaken child labor laws, while 13 mostly Democratic-controlled states are in the process of tightening their restrictions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, Republican-controlled states are waging war against universal quality public education for their children. The first shots were fired in efforts to strip schools of books and curricula referencing America\u2019s history of slavery, Jim Crow, Native American genocide, and brutality against the queer community. Those were followed by often violent, threat-filled appearances at school board meetings by militia members<\/a> and other white supremacists<\/a>, \u201ccalling out\u201d teachers and school administrators for \u201cwoke indoctrination.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most recently, multiple red states moved to kneecap public schools by removing their funding and reallocating it to families who can afford private academies, religious schools, and home schooling. Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah, and West Virginia have all instituted universal<\/a> or near-universal school voucher programs in the past few years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These programs, advocated<\/a> by right-wing billionaires, are designed to ghettoize red state public schools by subsidizing middle- and upper-class children\u2019s tuition while leaving poorer students\u2014who can\u2019t afford the costs beyond the vouchers\u2014stuck in defunded and thus failing public schools. Tennessee, Missouri, Louisiana, Nebraska, and Alabama have put into place<\/a> or are about to institute voucher programs that go nearly as far.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, Republican-controlled states go out of their way to make it difficult for workers to unionize or for existing unions to succeed and expand. The immediate result of this \u201cright to work for less\u201d mentality and activity is that social mobility\u2014the ability of a person to move from being the working poor into the middle class, or from the middle class into the upper middle class\u2014is largely frozen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My family is probably typical of American social mobility. My grandfather was a poor immigrant from Norway who made furniture. My father worked at a tool and die shop, a good union job. I\u2019ve done much better than my father, just like he did much better than his father. And my son, with a master\u2019s degree and his own business, will do better than I have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Social mobility in America today, however, is lower<\/a> than in any other developed country, a huge change since the 1950\u20131980 decades before the Reagan revolution, when we led the world<\/a> in social mobility. Most American children today are locked into the social and economic class of their parents; the opportunity for advancement that union jobs used to provide is half of what it was when Reagan became president.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maryland, Minnesota, Delaware, Vermont, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Montana, and Utah have the highest social and economic mobility in the United States; only Utah is a \u201cright to work for less\u201d state, and all the rest welcome unions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oklahoma, South Carolina, Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Texas\u2014all \u201cright to work for less\u201d states\u2014are the states where workers stuck in poverty are most likely to be frozen in the social and economic class into which they were born.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you notice a pattern, you\u2019re right: Young people are far more likely to exceed their parents\u2019 economic accomplishments in blue states than in red states, and have been since Reagan killed the union movement and defunded public education in the 1980s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what does all this have to do with mudsills, the first layer of wood put down on top of a home\u2019s concrete or stone foundation to support the rest of the house? And how and why did today\u2019s GOP adopt the mudsill theory?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For that, we must step into the Wayback Machine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On March 4, 1858, slave plantation owner and South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond rose to speak before his peers in the U.S. Senate. At the time, his speech wasn\u2019t noted as exceptional, but over the following year it was published in the newspapers and caught the imagination of the plantation owners and \u201cscientific racists\u201d of the South; it was soon the talk of the nation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hammond asserted that for a society to function smoothly, it must have a \u201cfoundational\u201d class of people who, like the way a mudsill stabilizes the house that rests atop it, bear the difficult manual labor from which almost all wealth is derived. \u201cIn all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties,\u201d Hammond proclaimed<\/a>, \u201cto perform the drudgery of life.\u201d Hammond claimed that every society throughout history rested on a mudsill class; that even Jesus advocated this when he said, \u201cThe poor you will always have with you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To stabilize society, he additionally argued, such a group of people must be locked rigidly into their mudsill class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hammond\u2019s mudsill theory was quickly embraced by the Southern plantation owners as well as many Northern industrialists and newspaper owners, although progressive politicians and spokesmen for labor were outraged, particularly at the idea that social mobility must be denied to the laboring class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

President Abraham Lincoln jumped into the debate with a speech on September 30, 1859, in Milwaukee. At the time he was a lawyer in private practice and a fierce advocate for the right of social mobility for working-class white people. Speaking of the industrialists who employed child labor, opposed education, and used brutal methods to keep workers in line, he said<\/a>: \u201cThey further assume that whoever is once a hired laborer is fatally fixed in that condition for life; and thence again that his condition is as bad as or worse than that of a slave. This is the \u2018mud-sill\u2019 theory.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lincoln didn\u2019t find the argument persuasive; in fact, he was offended by it<\/a>. As president, Lincoln followed up with his goal of promoting social mobility; he signed legislation creating over 70 land-grant colleges, including my mother\u2019s Michigan State University, where tuition was free or very affordable until the Reagan revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These days, Republicans generally take Hammond\u2019s point of view, while today\u2019s Democrats embrace Lincoln\u2019s perspective. This didn\u2019t happen by accident or in a vacuum. Russell Kirk was the twentieth century\u2019s philosopher king of the mudsill theory, although he never used the phrase. As I laid out in detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> Kirk\u2019s 1951 book, The Conservative Mind<\/em><\/a>, argues forcefully, like Hammond did, that society must have \u201cclasses and orders\u201d to ensure stability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kirk argued in the 1950s that if the American middle class\u2014then under half of Americans\u2014ever grew too large and well paid, then such access to \u201cwealth\u201d would produce a social disaster. His followers warned that under such circumstances, minorities would forget their \u201cplace\u201d in society, women would demand equality with men, and young people would no longer respect their elders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The dire result, Kirk warned, would be social chaos, moral degeneracy, revolution, and the eventual collapse of American society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While at first Kirk was mostly only quoted by cranks like Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley Jr., when the 1960s hit and the civil rights movement was roiling America\u2019s cities, women were demanding access to the workplace and equal pay, and young men were burning draft cards, Republican elders and influencers concluded Kirk was a prophet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Something had to be done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ronald Reagan came into office with the mandate to save American society from collapse. To that end, he set out to reestablish a mudsill class in America by ending free college and gutting public schools, destroying the union movement, and weakening enforcement of child labor laws.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus today\u2019s Republicans\u2014from Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas to Mike Johnson, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Donald Trump\u2014are finally close to fulfilling Hammond\u2019s and Reagan\u2019s vision of an America built on mudsill labor (while ironically repudiating America\u2019s first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And now, as the late Paul Harvey would say, you know the rest of the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Source: https:\/\/www.rsn.org\/001\/why-republicans-want-and-need-a-permanent-economic-underclass.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thom Hartmann\/The New Republic “Social mobility in America today is lower than in any other developed country.” (photo: Spencer Platt\/Getty Images) 25 may 24 Ever heard of the \u201cmudsill theory\u201d? Well, it goes back to the slaveholding South. And it explains a lot. Odds are you\u2019ve never heard of the… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33965"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33965"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33965\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33966,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33965\/revisions\/33966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}