Divine Wind
Platinum Member
There are a lot of places this thread could have been placed, but the quote below places it squarely in political current events :
"how close the real Confederacy also came to the fantasies of the alt-left"
As Professor Guelzo's article points out, the social structure of the Confederacy was highly stratified and more closely resembles the elitism and socialism of the Left Wing. Maybe it's a good thing Lincoln
did invade the South in the War of Northern Aggression!
What if the South had won the Civil War? 4 sci-fi scenarios for HBO's 'Confederate'
A successful Confederacy would be a zero-sum economy. In the world of Confederate, the economy would be a hierarchy, with no social mobility, since mobility among economic classes would open the door to economic mobility across racial lines. At the top would be the elite slave-owning families, which owned not only assets but labor, and at the bottom, legally-enslaved African Americans, holding down most of the working-class jobs. There would be no middle class, apart from a thin stratum of professionals: doctors, clergy and lawyers. Beyond that would be only a vast reservoir of restless and unemployable whites, free but bribed into cooperation by Confederate government subsidies and racist propaganda.
Social media progressives are probably right to draw back in horror from the prospect offered by Confederate, although not always for the reasons they presume. The Confederate economy, like the modern Chinese economy, was in the capitalist world but not of it. The Confederate elite of 1861 did not mind making money, but it was aggressively hostile to entrepreneurship and contemptuous of middle-class culture. The most famous advocate of the slave system, George Fitzhugh, frankly described slavery as “traditional socialism” and bitterly contrasted the cruelty of free-market “cannibalism” with the cradle-to-grave welfare provided by the slave owner.
The Confederate government centralized political authority in ways that made a hash of states’ rights, nationalized industries in ways historians have compared to “state socialism,” and imposed the first compulsory national draft in American history. If Benioff and Weiss are successful in creating an alternative world in Confederate, it will shock us fully as much as Game of Thrones has — not for how much of the Confederate future we avoided, but how little.
"how close the real Confederacy also came to the fantasies of the alt-left"
As Professor Guelzo's article points out, the social structure of the Confederacy was highly stratified and more closely resembles the elitism and socialism of the Left Wing. Maybe it's a good thing Lincoln
did invade the South in the War of Northern Aggression!
What if the South had won the Civil War? 4 sci-fi scenarios for HBO's 'Confederate'
A successful Confederacy would be a zero-sum economy. In the world of Confederate, the economy would be a hierarchy, with no social mobility, since mobility among economic classes would open the door to economic mobility across racial lines. At the top would be the elite slave-owning families, which owned not only assets but labor, and at the bottom, legally-enslaved African Americans, holding down most of the working-class jobs. There would be no middle class, apart from a thin stratum of professionals: doctors, clergy and lawyers. Beyond that would be only a vast reservoir of restless and unemployable whites, free but bribed into cooperation by Confederate government subsidies and racist propaganda.
Social media progressives are probably right to draw back in horror from the prospect offered by Confederate, although not always for the reasons they presume. The Confederate economy, like the modern Chinese economy, was in the capitalist world but not of it. The Confederate elite of 1861 did not mind making money, but it was aggressively hostile to entrepreneurship and contemptuous of middle-class culture. The most famous advocate of the slave system, George Fitzhugh, frankly described slavery as “traditional socialism” and bitterly contrasted the cruelty of free-market “cannibalism” with the cradle-to-grave welfare provided by the slave owner.
The Confederate government centralized political authority in ways that made a hash of states’ rights, nationalized industries in ways historians have compared to “state socialism,” and imposed the first compulsory national draft in American history. If Benioff and Weiss are successful in creating an alternative world in Confederate, it will shock us fully as much as Game of Thrones has — not for how much of the Confederate future we avoided, but how little.
