We naturally assume the Confederacy was defined by slavery. Of course, the secessionist nation of eleven Southern states was born of, fought for, and died mostly over that peculiarly heinous institution.
So it seems heretical even to suggest that the Confederate model could possibly help explain the increasingly deranged pathologies of contemporary blue-state America, given its ostensibly progressive agenda. Yet, mutatis mutandis, the methodologies, values, and guiding ideology of the Old South can help us fathom the strange paradoxes of our twenty-first-century progressive blue-state model, most notably in California—and especially Northern California’s Silicon Valley. The latter has become a modern version of the single-crop antebellum King Cotton economy and culture, whether we look to the staggering accumulation of wealth in the Bay Area or the plethora of homeless people and service workers living in trailers and campers parked near the tech hubs of the world.
Under both systems a tiny elite assumed that its wealth and power were a result of superior wisdom and morality, and so naturally felt entitled to establish social mores and public policy in general. Their resulting orthodoxy protected the wealthy and privileged at the expense of an underclass while driving out the middle and working classes.
To give an example, the conditions of the roads and freeways of some of the current wealthiest states such as California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York nonetheless rank in many surveys among the poorest ten in the nation. That disconnect is eerily reminiscent of the antebellum South, whose shipments abroad accounted for over 60 percent of the value of all U.S. exports, while the region lagged far behind the North in railroad, turnpike, and canal mileage.
The antebellum Southern economy prompted general economic and social stagnation for the non-elite and vast economic, social, and cultural inequalities, as the tech economy does today. The plantation owners of old and today’s woke California oligarchs apparently found the resulting pyramidal feudal system preferable and politically useful. Of course, the neo-feudal systems of the Old South provoked much criticism among contemporaries. Currently, urban geographers and journalists such as Joel Kotkin and Edward Ring have argued that California’s utopian and globalist agendas neglect freeways and water storage, the modern version of antebellum “internal improvements” so often resisted by the South. Contemporary California’s policies instead reflect the power and globalist concerns of Silicon Valley and the coastal tech and investment wealth that is less focused on the dire housing, transportation, and workplace needs of a shrinking middle class living near them.