The south and the elections
By John Slaughter
from The People's Tribune

The benchmark of American democracy since its inception has been the vote. While the masses of the people who participated in the revolution of 1776 -- the workers fresh from the debtor's prisons of Europe, indentured servants, farmers, slaves, native Americans -- fought for a vision of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," their cause also included the fight for "representation," a government of the people. Today, in 2004, elections are showcased as the preeminent expression of our democracy.

Revolutions, however, are ultimately about which class will assume power, and who determines how society is reorganized. The propertied classes moved quickly to take control of the new government, and formed it to safeguard their interests. The aims of the masses were thwarted, and the battle continues to this day. When the form of rule is a democracy, an essential aspect of the exercise of that rule is the skillful control and manipulation of elections. Central to that process in the history of this country is the role of the South.

A Slaveholders' 'Democracy'

At the founding Constitutional Convention of 1787, James Rutledge, delegate from South Carolina, declared "[Economic] interest alone" should be "the governing principle of nations." By interest he meant property, specifically slave property. The Southern delegates insisted, as a condition of their states' participation in the new Union, that certain clauses be included to protect and further the interests of the slave power. These included especially the three-fifths clause (Article 1, Section 2).

The three-fifths clause provided that slave owners could count 60 percent of their slaves in determining the number of citizens in the state and therefore the number of congressmen apportioned, as well as the number of electoral votes. By the end of the 1700s there were more than 755,000 African slaves, none of whom could vote, but 60 percent of whom were counted on behalf of the Southern aristocracy to tip the balance of power in their favor.

Thomas Jefferson has been called the "Negro President" because without the three-fifths clause he would not have been elected President in the election of 1800. In the number of actual ballots cast, John Adams was reelected, but in the Electoral College, Jefferson, a Southerner (and slave owner), received more votes as a result of the apportionment of votes based on the three-fifths clause.

In the 62 years between the election of George Washington and 1850, slave holders controlled the presidency for 50 of those years. Eighteen of 31 Supreme Court justices were slave holders. A majority on the Supreme Court at the time of the Dred Scott decision were slave holders. Almost from the inception of the new republic until the eve of the Civil War, America was virtually a Southern nation.

Without the three-fifths ratio, critical questions that decided the course of the young nation might have been decided otherwise. Missouri might not have become a slave state, Andrew Jackson's removal of the Indians from the South might not have happened, slavery might not have been allowed in Kansas nor in the territories acquired from Mexico, a country that had already abolished slavery.

Reconstruction Betrayed

A "democracy" dominated by the slave power became a fetter on the advance of a rising industrial capitalism. The emancipation of the slaves in the course of the Civil War marked its turning point. Codified in the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, for a time democracy took a step forward in the South. Millions of freedmen and poor whites were enfranchised.

For a time the new Reconstruction governments set up in the defeated Southern states were able to implement progressive legislation, including the establishment of public schools for the first time in the South. But while the defeat of the slave power was in the interests of industrial capital, the alteration of property relations was not. The redistribution of the wealth and property of the slave owning class was halted in its tracks, laying the basis for the ultimate defeat of Reconstruction.

State's Rights won the day, and with the plantation owners (many of whom were now investors from the North) back in the driver's seat, Reconstruction was rapidly dismantled. Freedmen and poor whites were effectively disfranchised, and the "Redeemer" governments, together with the extra-legal terror of the Ku Klux Klan, forced the masses of Southerners back into the near-slavery of share-cropping and Jim Crow segregation.

Welcome to the Solid South

The veneer of democracy grew very thin. African Americans virtually disappeared from the voter rolls. With poll taxes, literacy tests and other property qualifications, many poor whites were eliminated as well. From a 57 percent participation in the elections in the South in 1896, only 19 percent of the Southern electorate voted in the elections of 1924.

The have-nots were locked out of the electoral process, leaving a greatly restricted and class-skewed remainder. The Democratic Party was organized as a private, white-only club, and the Democratic primary became the only election that mattered. With virtually no competition, elections were almost devoid of issues. Personalities dominated, demagogues prevailed. A one-party Solid South meant that the South would become the balance of power in national politics. Those who controlled the South controlled the nation.

In the South, a political process dominated by a planter and industrial elite was free to inculcate a reac-tionary program designed to reinforce the interests of private capital. Consequently taxes were kept low and programs for health care, education and welfare for the poor and working class were kept at a bare minimum. Regulations on business such as environmental standards were virtually nonexistent.

On the national level, as Solid South politicians were able to be reelected time and again and rise to acquire key positions in the national government, the Southern wing of the Democratic Party was able to exact a heavy toll on the direction of national policy. But for the existence of the Solid South as a contradictory pillar in Roosevelt's progressive "New Deal," national health insurance would have been passed along with Social Security in the 1930s. The passage of Taft-Hartley "Right-to-Work" legislation stunted the growth of the labor movement. While the form of rule in the South was almost openly despotic, its role in the country as a whole in restricting democracy served to consolidate the rule and interests of capital.

The More Things Change, The More They Stay the Same

Maintained as an agricultural backwater for decades, with the advent of the mechanical cotton picker and the consequent mechanization of agriculture, segregation was an impediment to the economic development of the South and the expansion of capital it represented.

The Civil Rights movement would change the face of the South. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, millions of African Americans as well as white workers in the South were enfranchised once again in a period that some have called a second Reconstruction.

While the composition of the Southern electorate changed, the formula for rule remained the same. Control the South and control the nation. With the gravitation of African-Americans into the Democratic Party, the Republicans employed a strategy beginning with the Goldwater campaign of 1964 to draw white Southerners into their ranks. But only the party labels changed. What has become identified as the Republican neoliberal formula for economic development is little more than the same old Southern low-wage, low benefit, low tax program.

The so-called two-party politics that has developed in the South exhibits more the appearance of democracy than the reality, however. In 1985 the Democratic Leadership Council was formed, with a neoliberal program at its heart. By 1992 these neoliberal policies were united with politicians drawn from the South, and by the 1990s Southerners of both parties, long excluded from national leadership, have come to dominate both the executive and legislative branches of government. DLC candidate Bill Clinton was elected on a program of a balanced budget, smaller government, devolution to the states (states' rights), and welfare reform.

With the blurring of party lines and little distinction in program between the two parties, the political system today, in spite of the appearance of things, has come to exhibit the core characteristics that shaped the Solid South before 1950. Without any real choice between them, and without the interests of most working and poor people being represented at all, the result has been a shrinking, class-skewed electorate. Less than one-half of the electorate turned out to vote in the 1996 election, the smallest turnout since 1924. In 2000, 100 million did not vote. Both parties and virtually every candidate for higher office are tied to the ruling class and are consequently bound to represent the interests of capital. Money dominates. Every

Congressional candidate must raise millions of dollars, and for Presidential candidates it is now hundreds of millions, most of which comes from corporate interests and the wealthy. Huge outlays are spent in the marketing of personalities in the mass media. Instead of democracy the people get a show.

Times Call for Our Own Political Party

Today, in 2004, in spite of the way the game is being played out (and the ruling class makes the rules), there are two contradictory, even antagonistic processes at work. The context is globalization. The new electronic technology is creating a new class of poor and working people as jobs are destroyed that will never be replaced. It is precisely this new class that finds itself locked out of the electoral arena. Their struggle is to break free from the heavy yoke that binds them.

On the other hand, the problem for the ruling class is how best to dominate the process of globalization. This has meant the drive toward empire, as the U. S. moves not only to dominate the globe economically, but also to provide the military might necessary to control the inevitable uprisings of the impoverished masses around the world.

Labor-replacing technology has also meant for the capitalist a falling rate of profit, which has not only accelerated the effort to replace even more workers with a more "efficient" technology, but has spurred the search for cheap labor across the globe. Greatly increased military expenditures to finance U.S. empire have required the slashing of social programs, the privatizing of public services, and the removing of controls over the economy and the environment. In other words, the old Solid South political program has been adopted as the national program of the ruling class. The two parties disagree only on how best to implement it.

It is not only the program of the ruling class but the very form of rule that presents a danger to our democracy. We have seen how old Solid South politics barely disguised an open despotism. Today the elections provide a facade for a motion toward a more direct exercise of power and control. The faÁade of democracy is maintained while democratic processes and institutions are being systematically chipped away. By virtue of the Patriot Act and Homeland Security, we have seen the gutting of CIA and FBI oversight regulations, the curtailing of the Freedom and Information Act, the ignoring of the War Powers Act, and the chiseling away of individual rights by the Supreme Court in the name of states' rights among others.

In the context of globalization, the politicians may pay lip service to the issues of jobs and health care and education as they campaign for election. But for the workers, these are life and death questions. The exercise of democracy for the mass of poor and working people, for independence, for self-determination, is the fight for freedom from exploitation, for emancipation from want, for the liberation that allows the fullest expression of our human potential.

Voting today is showcased as the highest expression of our democracy. While it may be a facade for class rule, and as V.O. Key said about voting in the Old South, "elections do not a democracy make," the context of the elections in 2004 reveals what is really at stake. The voiceless must have a voice. The dispossessed and locked-out must have their own political party that expresses their own political program and interests.

JOHN SLAUGHTER, author of New Battles Over Dixie: The Campaign For a New South, is available to speak through Speakers for a New America. Call 800-691-6888 or email speakers@lrna.org for more information. John Slaughter can be reached at lrnaatlanta@comcast.net.