Republicans aren’t turning back the clock to the Robber Baron days of McKinley’s 1890s, they’re turning back the clock to the days of Andrew Jackson’s Southern gentlemen days.
Republicans are turning back the clock to the wealthy property owners control of government, the proliferation of guns, honor killings and the misogyny of the 18th and 19th Centuries.
A “benevolent Christian mask hides the barbaric violent behavior of the “Southern Gentleman”.
The best and most brutal example of the dual morality of "Southern Gentlemen" is the first series of HBO's True Detective.
The Republican Party's Regression to backcountry values.
“for hog stealing, death by hanging... for the rape of an eleven-year-old girl, one shilling fine.”
Republicans are turning back the clock to the wealthy property owners control of government, the proliferation of guns, honor killings and the misogyny of the 18th and 19th Centuries.
“Backcountry courts tended to punish property crimes with the utmost severity, but to be very lenient with crimes of personal violence. In Cumberland County, Virginia, during the eighteenth century, a court administered the following punishments: for hog stealing, death by hanging; for scolding, five shilling fine; for the rape of an eleven-year-old girl, one shilling fine. This structure of values continued for many generations in the backcountry. Historian Edward Ayers finds that in the southern upcountry during the nineteenth century, county courts “treated property offenders much more harshly than those accused of violence.”
Life was cheap; property was expensive....
Crime was also not tolerated in the rural south of the 19th century; violence as a response to crime, or to pre-empt crime, was. This belief continued well into the 20th century, as the fear of vigilante justice, due to the overwhelmingly large black population, created both vigilante justice in the form of the Klan, which evolved into de facto vigilante justice from law enforcement itself, further undermining faith in just laws and a stable government: “After the Civil War, [slave patrols] seamlessly morphed into the Ku Klux Klan, the Red Shirts and other extra-legal organizations with the same purpose: to keep the black population cowed and under control. Fear of the black population is also why Southern society long accepted brutality in law enforcement to a greater degree than other parts of the country did.”
Is it crazy to think that British folkways were the seed of American violence? Perhaps not. America’s legal system is intimately tied to British common law, where we get habeas corpus and jury trials. U.S. v. Miller, the first significant Second Amendment decision of the 20th century, is based in Blackstone, The Wealth of Nations, and the colonial history of militias, divining the limits of gun control in the gangster era from 17th-century militia laws. It’s not unthinkable that the codes outlining the use of power and violence, particularly in places where there was less recourse to the law, have also followed the same principle of stare decisis.
The shootings in Aurora, and to a certain extent the rise in homicides in Chicago this year, have brought gun control to the forefront for the first time in awhile. Both Obama and Romney addressed it this week, as one might expect. Romney’s response was brusque: “And so we can sometimes hope that just changing the law will make all bad things go away. It won’t. Changing the heart of the American people may well be what’s essential, to improve the lots of the American people.”
But in some small way it does contain a point. America is a very violent country. Duke sociologist Kieran Healy (via Ezra Klein) produced a chart comparing the U.S. to OECD countries (besides Mexico and Estonia) in terms of deaths from all forms of assault:
The U.S. is simply much more violent than other developed countries. And the region that brings up the national average is the South:
MORE AT:
American Violence and Southern Culture
Why is America so much more violent—in particular, so much more homicidal—than other developed countries? One vein of history and social science suggests that its roots are in the South, and the British borderland culture that it originated in.
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