<snip>
There are different types of "capitalist." Some of these are more progressive than others.
To begin with, "type" is an expression of internal relations. Though capitalist relations of production limit the kind of type dominant in them, this leaves room for significant variation depending on the more specific character of the relations.
This is true within US capital itself.
Michael Lind provides a description of US capital consistent with this. He associates Bush with a "premodern" capitalist mentality that remains dominant in the US deep south (a region he claims includes that part of Texas whose population derives from the westward migration of southern plantation agriculture).
“By the time they reached Texas, the Anglo-Celtic ancestors of most of today’s white Texans has been conquering and expropriating other ethnic nations for centuries. Originally they were Protestant Scots whom the English planted in conquered Ulster on land stolen from the native Catholic Irish. <snip>
“Centuries spent conquering frontier lands – first from the Irish, then from the American Indians and Mexicans – and exploiting the labor of others (the Catholic Irish in northern Ireland, blacks, Mexican-Americans, and not least other Southern whites) turned the Anglo-Celtic Southerners who have dominated Texas into a people as militaristic as the ancient Spartans.<snip>" (Michael Lind, Made in Texas, pp. 29-30)
He claims the mentality is much less "progressive" than the industrial capitalist mentality characteristic of other regions of the US.
“Although they may look like members of the old-stock Protestant business class of the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast, the oligarchs of Texas do not think like them. The mentality of the raditional Texan businessman is that of the premodern ‘seigneurial’ elite which, according to Luraghi, included not only the Southern slaveowners but also the British ‘Nabobs’ of the West Indies, the Mexican hacendados, and the Brazilian plantation owners. It is not an industrial capitalist mind-set at all, but the mentality of the Spanish conquistador, who dreamed of quickly acquiring fabulous wealth by plundering precious metals rather than by patient effort. <snip> (p. 47)
Ted
-------------------------- Michael Lind paints with a broad brush and in slapdash fashion, making rather a mess of things. Indeed, it's hard to know where to begin to sort this out. Still, he is right to call attention to the persistence of regionalism in American life and politics. Lind himself grew up in Texas but was educated at Yale, so perhaps his own background makes him expecially attuned to this factor.
Years ago, Kirkpatrick Sale, in his book _Power Shift_, noted the relative eclipse of the old northern, especially northeastern business class, by southern and southwestern economic elites, a struggle for primacy which he summarized as "Yankees vs. Cowboys." (Another writer, Karl Oglesby, used the same phrase). Although Sale's analysis was inevitably a bit schematic and lacking in subtlety, he was probably onto something. The change in the relative preponderance of regional elites came about just as the US population as a whole was shifting to the south and west. It might be recalled that the "rise of the sunbelt" was a staple of political discussion in the early 1980s. The shift of economic power and population altered the balance between long-established, distinctive regional cultures, which remain remarkably persistent despite the vast increase in social and geographical mobility in American society.
The "Anglo-Celtic warrior culture" of the Scotch-Irish that Lind alludes to is somewhat overblown, IMO. (For one thing, they were not "Celtic" in any meaningful sense). This notion is a staple of Civil War discussion, and finds its way into scholarly literature, where its foremost exponent is Grady McWhiney. It's sometimes advanced by writers with southern sympathies as an explanation for why the south had greater battlefield success and held out for so long against a materially superior north. Although it is not altogether wrong to interpret the American Civil War as a clash of cultures, this hardly suffices as a chief explanation of its course and outcome. Moreover, in the passages Ted quoted, Lind seems to conflate two different sources of southern culture. The plantation south derived its social structure and folkways from the original tobacco-producing "tidewater" south of the Chesapeake region, where chattel slavery was introduced, and from rice-growing South Carolina. This is the culture that imposed its "way of life" on the deep south. The back country or "upland" south was settled by the Scotch-Irish Lind mentions, who arrived in North America for the most part during the two decades before the American Revolution. The tidewater and the backcountry cultures were very different in their origins, in the south of England and the English-Scottish borderlands respectively, though they became yoked together in Dixie. The back country "Scotch-Irish" were not in the main big slaveholders, and to characterize the attitude toward commerce of these hardscrabble yeoman as "seigneurial" is a bit bizarre. Still, this was a culture shaped in important ways by centuries of endemic violence and warfare in the far north of England.
Interestingly, George W. Bush himself manages to unite in his person two important American regions, and is not a purely southern or Texas politician in the way that, say, Phil Gramm was. He is recently descended from the New England/New York aristocracy--his grandfather was a US senator from Connecticut--but grew up and made his career in Texas. He is thus the perfect "omnibus" presidential candidate, able to appeal beyond his own cultural region, something that his financial backers and the Mayberry Machiavellis probably saw intuitively. The foremost student of American regionalism, the Brandeis University historian David Hackett Fisher, provocatively remarks somewhere that regional elites in the US have tended to ally themselves politically with the working class of the other section; thus, southern elites joined northern urban immigrants in the Democratic party for nearly a century, from the end of reconstruction until the old Democratic coalition finally broke up in the 1960s. Northern elites smashed the antebellum slave society, but acquiesced in the apartheid system that replaced it for the sake of national unity. However, African-Americans, where and when they were permitted to vote, often continued to vote in their majority for the party of Lincoln, again until the 1960s. The effect of the "southern strategy" first elaborated by Richard Nixon--a southern California politician with midwestern antecedents--has been to form a new version of the old alliance, this time within the GOP. It's the white south, united as it most often is behind the southern elite, together with a large section of the suburbanized descendants of the old northern white working class, against a diminished Democratic Party made up of a section of the northern elite, middle class white progressives, blacks, and immigrants.
Some capitalists are indeed "more progressive" than others (though I confess that I'm too dim to see what is gained by interpreting this in terms derived from a school of psychoanalysis). Better John Corzine or Robert Rubin than Ken Lay. In the US, the more progressive capitalists have tended to be northern and associated with banking and finance, and many of them will today find their political home in the DP.
Jacob Conrad