Men Will Fight To The Death To Gain And Maintain Social Status

This has been the tumultuous history of the United States of America as it attempts to proceed with its experiment in popular government.

Lincoln said that a country half slave and half free cannot stand. The sainted president personally hated slavery (the peculiar institution as some called it). On the other hand when he was elected the nation’s top excutive in 1860 and eleven Southern States seceded from the Federal Union, he saw no practical way that millions of freed Negros could economically and socially be integrated into a predominantly White society.

He therefore tried to bring the estranged Southern states back into the fold by stating that he had no intention of interfering with Southern culture built on slavery. But the Rebel States fearing that powerful, radical Republican liberals in Congress (yes, in those days the liberals were Republicans) and their abolitionist allies in the North would soon force Lincoln to a harder stance against the Southern social and economic structure. And so formal factional war broke out when Southern arms attacked Federally held Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor South Carolinian on April 12, 1861.

Within a few months the Radicals convinced Lincoln that the Southern rebellion could not be broken short of defeating the dastardly slave system. Thus following the Union victory at Antietam in Maryland in September1862, Lincoln issued his emancipation proclamation freeing all slaves in those states currently at war with the Union. It was a rather feeble paper only directive, but a start nevertheless.

Now to the heart of this write, the status of men. At the top of Southern society were the rich and powerful planter class and its army of slaves that worked the fields. Beneath them were the government bureaucrats that enforced the system as it suited the planter class, and beneath them were millions of poor Whites that were hardy treated better than slaves.

Yet when war broke out hundreds of thousands of poor Whites rushed to fill the ranks of the Rebel, Confederate, armies. The reason was very simple. If the South lost the war and the slaves were set free poor Whites would have no one below them. They would in effect lose what little status they had had. They were therefore willing to engage in countless battles involving suicidal charges and mangled bodies rather that lose their meager status over Negroes.

American Whites, particularly lower class Whites, have been fighting this status battle ever since the 1860s.

Following the Union’s winning of the war in April 1865, an era of Reconstruction commenced with Federal troops garrisoned in the South enforcing Negro civil rights — for a time Negros could vote and hold office. By the 1870s, however, with the majority of Whites in the North no more interest in Negro rights than Southern Whites, the will for Reconstruction ended. Federal troops left the South and an era of White terror lead by the infamous Kiu Klux Klan and Jim Crow laws commenced putting Negros into a virtual state of slavery until their civil right rebellion of the 1960s.

When Democratic presidents Kennedy and Johnson backed the Black civil rights movement of the early 1960s, this flipped the political equation on the White status front. It was now Democratic liberals pushing for minority rights that became the enemy of White status.

Finally the business rich and powerful class became allied with status angry working class Whites throughout the country under the Republican banner, particularly in the South and middle far west, as a defense against a growing minority demographic advantage. The two-term presidency of a Black Barack Obama was the last straw. Something radical had to be done.

For the rich good old boy network and resentful Whites the ways of democracy were no longer seen as serving their wealth and status ambitions. Thus a strange alliance of haves and have not Whites has commenced ripping apart the foundation of American democracy in order to hold on to power and status against a wave of minorities moving through prestigious universities and into positions of high social and business importance.

At the heart of their attack against minority influence is the destruction of the American voting structure. Maintaining their status through corruption of the ballet has become so desperate that they have even turned to supporting that dangerous nut ball, Donald Trump, creating a mass movement of fanatical true believers of no good account.

Of course the fight for White status, not only in America but world wide as well, is all balled up in the tribal impulse — the birds of a feather flock together thing. How this mess of an attack on democracy will unwind itself is both fascinating and chilling. In any event one thing is for sure, nature’s tribal impulse and the battle for social status among those feeling deprived of their freedom and standing in life will never end — masks and vaccinations be damned. I would rather die some say, and once again they do as the endless war for status rumbles on.