'
Leans,' LOL?
I really
don't think she's a decent historian. Claiming Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan embodied the Confederacy's ideology is…silly, more than anything else. From the first review:
Quote:
The West ultimately joined forces with the South, as Richardson details, and the idea of rule by a wealthy majority morphed into the cornerstone of the modern Republican Party, which keeps the old oligarchic ideas alive and well via a repulsive combination of unfettered capitalism, social conservatism, and fundamentalist Christianity, propped up and perpetuated via conservative media outlets.
The real brilliance of Richardson's book is that it shows how the oligarchy in this country has used the same tactics of persuasion to retain power since the very beginning. The rhetoric of twenty-first-century oligarchs is virtually indistinguishable from the rhetoric of the southern plantation owners of the 1850s.
The strategy is the same: win the poor and working-class white vote by telling them that evil minorities and women are stealing their jobs and wealth so that they never come to see that it is in fact the oligarchy that is rigging the economic system in their favor to siphon worker productivity into ever-higher profits for the wealthy (neatly demonstrated in our continuously rising levels of inequality and middle-class wage stagnation). In summary, people cannot unite economically if they are divided racially.
The strategy never seems to fail, because if poor white people can at least feel superior to minorities, they won't revolt against the wealthy elite that are in reality the root of the problem. This is the divide-and-conquer strategy the right is well-known for using throughout history. Blame immigrants, the media, the left, the intellectual elite, anyone except the economic elite that push for steeper tax cuts and lower regulation (trickle-up economics).
The game plan simply hasn't changed in over 150 years because, despite its shameful and exploitive history, the targets of this manipulation are not reading scholarly works in American history. If you ever wondered why leaders like Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump said things like "I love the uneducated," it's because they know the uneducated are more likely to fall for the rhetoric that will actually get them to vote against their own interests.
If one wants the perspective of a Boston College/NE elitist who is sad we haven't become more Scandinavian/Canadian in our politics over time and generally dislikes America, she's probably a decent read.
