AP discovers that black tea party members exist

See…as a black male who leans left, that offends me. How dare you compare a political party to a plantation, or black people to slaves because of the way they vote? I know Hot Air members think it’s cute to use that particular metaphor when speaking about liberal minorities, but it is truly offensive and inappropriate. -StoneKrab

A political party is a collection of people who seek to control the apparatus of government for particular ends. If one of those ends is to organize society along the economic model of a plantation, then don’t be surprised that the comparison is made between the party and what the party is in essence advocating. The Democratic party no longer agitates for race based plantations, to be sure, but a plantation mentality lurks beneath the surface.

A plantation is in essence a mini-state, run by a managerial elite. The economic strategy of this mini-state is to confiscate by force the “fruits of labor” of the denizens of the plantation, and then have the managerial elite redistribute them back to the community according to needs as determined by that same managerial elite, with the elite keeping the lion’s share for themselves. You focus on the violence of the plantation to differentiate it from the state that would emerge from leftist policies, but again, think about it — that type of violence, too, is a feature of any state. Indeed, it is arguably the central feature of a state. What is a state, after all? A monopoly of force, i.e. the threat of violence. If you don’t do what the state wants, e.g. you decide not to pay your taxes like Wesley Snipes, then men with guns show up. If you resist the will of these men, they beat the crap out of you with batons — just like on a plantation. Ah, you say. The state is about more than just violence. It administers social programs to “help” people. Yes, but so did the plantation. The plantation provided medical care, food, lodging, etc. (Not education, interestingly, because that would endanger the whole enterprise.) The plantation owners justified their power over others by arguing that their charges were incapable of fending on their own, that they needed to be managed by an elite, that this really was the best of all possible systems for such people. The rationalizations of plantation owners are quite the same as those of people who advocate an overweening central state authority with themselves in charge. By judicious usage of largesse, the plantation owner wouldn’t even have to resort to violence. Even those exploited by the arrangement didn’t necessarily hate it. (After the civil war, many freed slaves voluntarily went back to live with their owners. They had internalized the mentality of the plantation.)

As another example, we tend to think of Sicilian La Cosa Nostra families as “the mob”, a very bad thing totally unrelated to the state, which we think of as a good thing. But in Sicily, these families functioned as a state. You paid tribute to the capo of your family (taxes), and in return he would protect you from outside interference (law enforcement). You did favors for the capo (campaign, vote), and in turn he would look after you (entitlements), but if you challenged his authority, he would punish you. John Gotti operated this way. The Chicago machine operates this way, too. Rod Blagojevich operated this way.

La Cosa Nostra, plantations, political parties, and states are not unrelated phenomena.

When Democratic bigwigs imagine the ideal society, what do they see? A benevolent elite taking care of people too stupid to take care of themselves and meting out punishment and reward to people according to their deserts and forcing everyone under them to participate in this arrangement whether they want to or not. This is not too far off from the vision of the capo or the plantation owner.
Exit questions: What is the practical difference between chattel slavery and a compulsory system of 100% taxation? And what was the Soviet Union but a plantation spanning half the globe?

shazbat on April 7, 2010 at 2:50 AM