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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to see how canned phrases to represent certain concepts can become nonsensical when put together :

> The Deep South was established by English slave lords from Barbados and was styled as a West Indies-style slave society, Woodard notes. It has a very rigid social structure and fights against government regulation that threatens individual liberty. Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Texas, Georgia, and South Carolina are all part of the Deep South.

The pro- slavery rigid society that somehow values individual liberty? Would anyone be able to explain how that works?

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Thinking about who has the vote back when the USA became independent, I think of those lords as being close in character and power to dark age European kings, and I mentally map their slaves to feudal serfs.[0]

My cynical reading is that describes an attitude of “if you let someone else tell you what to do that makes you a peasant, so when we do it it’s fine because we do it to peasants, but when other people do something much milder to us that’s evil because it means treating us as peasants.”

Aristocrats have often given me that impression, no matter the era or region.

[0] feudalism had actual slaves, in addition to serfs, but I’m not claiming deep wisdom here — only personal impressions and the metaphors I use to make sense of the world.

A better analogy would be to the lower, mostly independent rungs of a feudal society like the English yeoman. Antebellum, the general attitude in the South was that even the poorest person was entitled to live his life as he saw fit on his land, and should be regarded as equal to a rich plantation owner with employees and slaves. There was generally no bureaucracy that could force a poor person to lose his land, make his children leave home for school, incur expenses, etc. Social customs somewhat enforced neighborly behavior in place of regulation. This is how slaveholding could persist; rights depended on having just a bit of land.

That is why the Reconstruction of the South was so painful; it was essentially a social and political revolution by top-down administration to add bureaucracy and consolidate the economy into larger farms and industrial owners/laborers.

> even the poorest person was entitled to live his life as he saw fit on his land

.. but by implication non-landowners were second class citizens, and nonwhite people were unpersons?

> Social customs somewhat enforced neighborly behavior in place of regulation

Including lynching.

> .. but by implication non-landowners were second class citizens, and nonwhite people were unpersons?

Yes, but remember that half of the adult population everywhere was a second-class citizen simply because of their gender. The idea that some people don't deserve as many rights as others isn't an aberration we can lay at the feet of the plantation owners.

Lynchings were post-war, mostly post reconstruction. I think second-class citizen is close enough to work.

Although IIRC they can be thought of as the end of a long tradition of mob justice being the system, or at least a large part of the system for keeping order. And directed against (supposed) criminals of all colors.

> the poorest person was entitled to live his life as he saw fit on his land, and should be regarded as equal to a rich plantation owner with employees and slaves

I think this describes neither medieval Europe nor the antebellum US South. Certainly in Europe, a king needed no 'bureaucracy' to take anything he wanted from anyone at any time. Lords could largely do the same with impunity, since they had the power to do so and were largely immune from prosecution due to the heavily politicized courts prior to the rise of heavy industry in 1700, after which non-lord authorities like commercial barons arose, and demanded better legal representation.

IMHO, the US south never really lost that same feudal sensibility, that titled folk deserve greater power / immunity than commoners and the demi-people below that. Before modern telecommunications which enabled enforcement of federal law, that mindset allowed ad hoc laws like Jim Crow to displace formal legal codes in the courts and enabled the segregationist inequality that persisted until the 1960's. I believe that even today that value system lives on in hearts and minds, even if the courts are shaped by it much less.

Thank you, and I somewhat agree with those qualifications. The main point is that the Southern culture tried to embody and enshrine something akin to yeoman’s mindset and rights (if glorified given the limitations in reality) and the Northeast, while descended from founders who admired some of those principles, differed culturally enough to mostly abandon it.

> who has the vote

Years ago I saw a book on the history of extending the franchise in the US. One story stuck with me. In some early close vote to extend franchise to those (white males) with wealth but not land, one proponent described his decision as something vaguely like "If I thought for a moment, that the US would every be anything but an agrarian nation, I would of course share my colleagues concerns, and oppose this measure. But thankfully...". Franchise extension by misjudgement. I wonder if that's a pattern?

> The pro- slavery rigid society that somehow values individual liberty? Would anyone be able to explain how that works?

It only valued individual liberties for free individuals, like slave owners. Slaves are by definition not free individuals, so the right to individual liberty by definition didn't apply to them.

It's practically tautological if you substitute the word "liberty" with "freedom".

No, it's far from a tautology. A strong belief in individual liberty was a distinguishing characteristic of that society. And especially of that political society, which meant landowners. Having lots of slaves was another characteristic.

The useful comparison is just up the coast, Massachusetts was almost the opposite, a theocracy of busybodies. Where a town council could re-arrange people's living arrangements if they thought X was a bit of a loner wanting to be out in the woods. And of course enthusiasm for every detail of the approved religion was not optional.

The tautology is that non-free people (slaves) do not have freedom (AKA individual liberty).

I agree with you, but it's not a tautology. It's saying that free individuals (slave-owners) should have freedom to do stuff they want, e.g. own slaves, without having a government stop them from doing it.

That's the basis of the model - "I do what I want, and you also do what I want."

Obviously, it fails as a universal. Freedom that operates on the basis of economic, political, or physical coercion of others isn't freedom at all.

Which would be fine in a more mature system, because the basic question in any political organisation is where to place the trade-off between individual freedom and personal responsibility to others.

The US model is all for individual freedom, but has real issues with the concept of personal responsibility to others - which it fails to solve by pretending the problem has never existed, and is irrelevant.

One way out of this is by narrowing your definition of morally relevant others - which historically has excluded women, or slaves, or people of other races (and currently excludes non-human animals, but that's a broader debate...)

The definition of freedom depends on what you value, and what you value varies with time and place. Were sweatshop workers in New York City free? Ranch hand employees out west? Chinese railroad workers in the USA? Are starving workers freer than well fed slaves? Theres a big push underway now to get rid of all American civil rights in favor of security theater, will we be free once we eliminate the Bill of Rights? Kinda unclear what this "free" thing is and who has it.

> Were sweatshop workers in New York City free? Ranch hand employees out west? Chinese railroad workers in the USA?

Slaves were definitionally not free under the law - their bodies were property of masters, just like farm animals were. If those slaves escaped their owners, they were legally allowed to be hunted down and returned.

That is a fundamental difference than the sweatshop, railway, or other workers, even though those workers were also abused by their employers. They still had the option to walk away, even if it meant accepting the destitution as a result. Lots of them did walk away and starve. Some toiled away as workers generation upon generation. A few went on to build great wealth and influence, as is evidenced by the rise of the early industrialist families of the United States.

> Are starving workers freer than well fed slaves?

Absolutely, and that doesn't excuse a system that lets free workers starve, just as a full stomach does not excuse the enslavement of humans.

> Theres a big push underway now to get rid of all American civil rights in favor of security theater

Huh?

4th amendment, 2nd amendment. You really don’t see this?

No, I really don’t. Could you elaborate?

2nd amendment rights are stronger than ever. 4th amendment rights issues kinda peaked about 10 years ago, and although Snowden certainly shined a bright light on some shady things, I would hardly call it a “big push”, given the backlash and the fact that the public doesn’t seem to be going along with it.

I’m much more concerned about the entire public’s outright willingness to broadcast every facet of our lives right out in public for anyone to see (what the IC would call “open source” intelligence) than any spying the government is doing on our private information.

2nd amendment is doing ok I’ll walk that one back. 4th amendment is dead and buried. Totally agree that the public not giving a fuck is a severe problem. Cheers

If you want a great explanation then I recommend reading this book review: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-se...

The short story is that they valued the unlimited freedom for a single individual more than the general freedom of all individuals. In a sense, it's the finding and feeding utility monsters on the theory that that will maximize utility for society.

The pro- slavery rigid society that somehow values individual liberty? Would anyone be able to explain how that works?

"Don't tell me what I can and can't do with my property!"

These people would have to have considered slaves people in order to extend individual liberty to them.

I think these people didn't care about individual liberties in general, but on their OWN individual liberties.

> The pro- slavery rigid society that somehow values individual liberty? Would anyone be able to explain how that works?

Same way as in classical Greece (both Sparta and Athens, etc.) and Rome - slave-holding aristocrats value their own freedom highly, will fight and die for it.

Actually, that led to hatred of monarchy and use of republican forms with class equals. But 'sic semper tyrannis' wasn't a servant's battle cry.

The author is obviously only taking about white people there. You’d have a different culture representing black folks. (I’d love to see if white culture is even dominate there or only concentrated in those with power).

The whole article completely erases black people. The people descended from black slaves comprise a nation in themselves.

IIRC the argument in Albion's Seed (which is an earlier and more academic book which overlaps this one) is that many things we think of as particular to african americans are aspects of the surrounding culture that were dropped later by the upper class. It's been a while but the examples I remember are included many foods (and styles of preparation -- deep frying was only for the rich, fat to spare) and accents. But a few centuries later the rich kids started getting sent to university, and stopped speaking like that.

>The pro- slavery rigid society that somehow values individual liberty? Would anyone be able to explain how that works?

This was apparently a really important question amoung European liberal democrats (which is a broad group ranging from constitutional monarchists all the way to social democrats) in the 19th century. Many of the more conservative liberals were really worried about balancing equality and order in a way where the state still made sensible decisions. I guess, pre-civil war America makes an interesting case study comparing North and South.

I listened to a BBC history podcast discussing this question with some depth, maybe you can find it useful as well [0].

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b09vyw0x

This was a contradiction noticed by the contemporary commentators themselves. From David Frum's article: http://davidfrum.com/article/were-the-founding-fathers-liber...

Yet it’s a very striking fact that the language that to our ears sounds most “libertarian” in the Founding generation tended most often to issue from those most committed to slavery. By contrast, the Founding Fathers who sound most “statist” — Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams — tended also to be most hostile to slavery.

This disjunction is more than some odd little paradox of history. It is a resounding klaxon warning of the enormous gap between the 18th century mindset and our own. Samuel Johnson jeered at the American colonists: “How is that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Johnson’s accusation of hypocrisy is obviously well-founded, but there is something more going on here than hypocrisy. It was precisely the intimate awareness of the horror of unfreedom — and possibly guilt for the denial of freedom to others — that inspired the passionate concern for liberty among so many slaveholders. When Patrick Henry said that he would rather be dead than share the fate of the 75 slaves he owned, he was not engaging in metaphor. But he was also not expressing 21st century libertarianism.

> It has a very rigid social structure and fights against government regulation that threatens individual liberty

Frankly I dont really see the contradiction. You can have a 'rigid' social structure and still frown upon the interventions of external forces such as government on that social structure. Not liberty in general but specifically liberty from government.

I think that it is freedom from government rules but lots of strict social rules. You can do what you want but don't get "uppity" and know you place. We will tell you what is ok not the Washington DC.

Presumably it valued individual liberty for a very select group of individuals.

slaves were seen as we see sheep and cattle now: property. would you apply "individual liberty" to farm animals in today's age?

> The pro- slavery rigid society that somehow values individual liberty?

One thing described it's history, another - current state of affairs.

When people with wealth and power talk about "liberty," they pretty much always mean their liberty to control others without the oversight of a central government. When the senate assassinated Caesar, they weren't trying to preserve freedom for the plebs—they were trying to preserve the republic that gave them, the privileged few, power over everyone else. Most of the Magna Carta was about protecting the barons from a king who might try to take away too much power. Present-day conservatives and right-libertarians will use the word "liberty" to mean "private property."

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