Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id739068357
the “liberal consensus”—the New Deal idea that the federal government had a role to play in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, and promoting infrastructure—was a true consensus. It was so widely popular that in 1950, the critic Lionel Trilling wrote of the United States that “liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.”
✏️ So the setup is that new deal stuff of quasi-socialism was basically the popular lay of the land… for a while 🔗 View Highlight
id739068389
But the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional tied the federal government to ensuring not just economic equality, but also civil rights. Opponents of the liberal consensus argued that the newly active federal government was misusing tax dollars taken from hardworking white men to promote civil rights for “undeserving” Black people. The troops President Dwight Eisenhower sent to Little Rock Central High School in 1957, for example, didn’t come cheap. The government’s defense of civil rights redistributed wealth, they said, and so was virtually socialism.
✏️ Somehow, the decision to promote and spend taxes on civil rights was one step too far? Now this was socialism (the bad kind in their mind) 🔗 View Highlight
id808473175
in 1867, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act, extending the vote to Black men in the South. White southerners who hated the idea of Black people using the vote to protect themselves started to terrorize their Black neighbors. Pretending to be the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers, they dressed in white robes with hoods to cover their faces and warned formerly enslaved people not to show up at the polls.
id808473261
in 1870, Congress created the Department of Justice to enable the federal government to protect the right of Black men to vote.
id739068526
The accusation of “socialism” had sharp teeth in the 1950s, as Americans recoiled from the growing influence of the Soviet Union and the rise of Communist China. But Republicans’ use of the word typically had little to do with actual, Bolshevik-style socialism
✏️ So now i’m trying to parse this out.. was the fear of socialism a reaction to soviet union/china, or was it about black rights? Or a mix of both? 🔗 View Highlight
id808473266
Suddenly, it was harder for white southerners to object to Black rights on racial grounds. So they turned to a new argument, one based in economics.
id808473287
formerly enslaved people were poor, and they would vote for leaders who promised to build things such as roads and hospitals. Those public investments could be paid for only with tax levies, and most of the people in the South with property after the war were white. Thus, although the infrastructure in which the southern legislatures were investing would help everyone, reactionaries claimed that Black voting amounted to a redistribution of wealth from white men to Black people, who wanted something for nothing. Black voting was, one magazine insisted, “socialism in South Carolina.”
✏️ Tying socialism to racism 🔗 View Highlight
id739068523
in the United States, the political charge of socialism tended to carry a peculiar meaning, one forged in the white-supremacist backlash to Black civil rights in the 1870s.
id808473329
After World War II, most Republicans joined Democrats in believing that the federal government had to oversee business regulation, welfare programs, and infrastructure. They knew what businessmen would do to the economy unless they were checked; they had seen people homeless and hungry during the Depression.
id808473397
The stagflation of the ’70s pushed middle-class Americans into higher tax brackets just when they needed their income most, and helped spread the sense that white tax dollars were being siphoned off to help racial minorities. As towns and governments tried to make up their declining funds with higher property taxes, angry property owners turned against the government.
✏️ So wait… stagflation led to increased taxes, and the perception was that the middle class were having to pay much more taxes that were then benefiting the people not paying as much (the poor and the marginalized… the black and brown) 🔗 View Highlight
id808473519
Ronald Reagan ran for president with the story of a “welfare queen” from the South Side of Chicago—code words for “Black”—who lived large on government benefits she stole. “She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands,” Reagan claimed. “And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names.” There was such a woman, but she was a dangerous criminal rather than a representative welfare recipient. Nonetheless, the story illustrated perfectly the idea that government involvement in the economy handed tax dollars to allegedly undeserving Black Americans.
✏️ Using one specific case of a criminal, to paint an entire race of people as lazy and criminal. 🔗 View Highlight
id808473598
Voters put Reagan in the White House, where his administration cut taxes and slashed spending on public welfare programs (while pouring money into defense spending, and tripling the national debt). In the name of preventing socialism, those programs began the process of hollowing out the middle class.
✏️ Reagan was on the republican platform of “small government” and “states’ rights”. In practice, this meant cutting taxes, gutting welfare programs, but then in contrast spending way too much on defense. It wasn’t small government.. it’s just always about small government to help people; it still remains that they need government to help corps and the rich. When they argue for small government, they just mean for the masses. followup 🔗 View Highlight
id739068933
Since Reconstruction, white supremacists have argued that minority voting means socialism, and that true Americans stand against both