Today's Christian Science Monitor has a really insightful piece that frames Scott Walker's work in Wisconsin as part of an attempt to model the state's economy along Southern lines. In the South, states tend to work with a combination of "weak unions, a business-friendly climate, a thin social safety net, and lower taxes." To wit, Walker's union-busting has been coupled with large tax cuts for wealthy interests and deep cuts in education and local aid. If the modern Republican Party is mostly a Southern creature, then Walker is something of a poster boy for its ongoing effort to export the South's "methods" to the rest of the country.
One quick criticism, though: CSM is totally wrong on the origins of the South's preferred economic system:
That core idea – that tax-cut opportunity trumps tax-paid benefits – is built into the South's Jeffersonian society, which backs limits on federal power and promotes the state's role in safeguarding individual property and rights. It comes at a price. "By design, life is tougher in the South," concedes Clemson's Woodard.
You could call it Jeffersonian, or -- as I prefer -- you could call it the product of slavery, racism, and the structures devised to maintain cheap black labor through Reconstruction and into the 20th century. Despite its large population of impoverished workers, unions never took hold in the South because of racism and the widespread subjugation of black labor. Indiscriminate violence was more than enough to dissuade most African Americans from unionization -- lynchings were not uncommon for black organizers -- and white workers were held at bay by the threat of unemployment, resentment toward black workers (who were paid at subsistence wages), and their own white supremacist views (racism works wonders for shattering class solidarity). Likewise, low taxes and a thin social safety net were devised as a way to empower the planter/land-owning class, and keep funds from flowing to African American communities. Even now, there is something of an inverse relationship between a state's black population and the generosity of its social services.
And finally, to add my usual disclaimer, this isn't to accuse the Republican Party of anti-black racism -- there are legitimate ideological reasons for favoring a low-tax, weak-union status quo -- but to note the irrevocably racial origins of the South's economic model. That said, it's hard to escape the fact that movement conservatism was initially attractive to white Southerners because of its utility in maintaining the traditional, radicalized economic order of the South.
