Odds are you’ve never heard of the “mudsill theory of labor,”
but everybody in this country really should learn about it. It explains a whole
spectrum of Republican behavior that otherwise seems baffling and
self-defeating. For example:
The past seven years have seen a near-fivefold
increase in documented child labor violations by employers. States
have responded to this alarming trend in two
ways: Democratic-controlled states are putting more teeth into their
laws and upping enforcement; Republican-controlled states are loosening their
laws and cutting back on enforcement so children can drop out of school and go
to work.
So far, three blue states (and two red ones) have made it
harder for
employers to exploit child labor, while eight red states have made it easier
for children to get trapped in a cycle of work that often ends their
educational progress and consigns them to a lifetime of manual labor. Eight
other Republican-controlled states are currently considering
legislation to weaken child labor laws, while 13 mostly Democratic-controlled
states are in the process of tightening their restrictions.
Meanwhile, Republican-controlled states are waging war against
universal quality public education for their children. The first shots were
fired in efforts to strip schools of books and curricula referencing America’s
history of slavery, Jim Crow, Native American genocide, and brutality against
the queer community. Those were followed by often violent, threat-filled
appearances at school board meetings by militia
members and other white
supremacists, “calling out” teachers and school administrators for “woke
indoctrination.”
Most recently, multiple red states moved to kneecap public
schools by removing their funding and reallocating it to families who can
afford private academies, religious schools, and home schooling. Arizona,
Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah, and
West Virginia have all
instituted universal or near-universal school voucher programs in the past few
years.
These programs, advocated by right-wing
billionaires, are designed to ghettoize red state public schools by subsidizing
middle- and upper-class children’s tuition while leaving poorer students—who
can’t afford the costs beyond the vouchers—stuck in defunded and thus failing
public schools. Tennessee, Missouri, Louisiana, Nebraska, and Alabama have put
into place or are about to institute voucher programs that go nearly
as far.
Finally, Republican-controlled states go out of their way to
make it difficult for workers to unionize or for existing unions to succeed and
expand. The immediate result of this “right to work for less” mentality and
activity is that social mobility—the ability of a person to
move from being the working poor into the middle class, or from the middle
class into the upper middle class—is largely frozen.
My family is probably typical of American social mobility. My
grandfather was a poor immigrant from Norway who made furniture. My father
worked at a tool and die shop, a good union job. I’ve done much better than my
father, just like he did much better than his father. And my son, with a master’s
degree and his own business, will do better than I have.
Social mobility in America today,
however, is lower than in any other developed country, a huge change since
the 1950–1980 decades before the Reagan revolution, when we led the
world in
social mobility. Most American children today are locked into the social and
economic class of their parents; the opportunity for advancement that union
jobs used to provide is half of what it was when Reagan became president.
Maryland, Minnesota, Delaware, Vermont, New Jersey, New York,
Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Montana, and Utah have the
highest social and economic mobility in the United States; only Utah is a
“right to work for less” state, and all the rest welcome unions.
Oklahoma, South Carolina, Alabama, Florida, Kentucky,
Mississippi, North Carolina, and Texas—all “right to work for less” states—are
the states where workers stuck in poverty are most likely to be frozen in the
social and economic class into which they were born.
If you notice a pattern, you’re right: Young people are far more
likely to exceed their parents’ economic accomplishments in blue states than in
red states, and have been since Reagan killed the union movement and defunded
public education in the 1980s.
So what does all this have to do with mudsills, the first layer
of wood put down on top of a home’s concrete or stone foundation to support the
rest of the house? And how and why did today’s GOP adopt the mudsill theory?
For that, we must step into the Wayback Machine.
On March 4, 1858, slave plantation owner and South Carolina
Senator James Henry Hammond rose to speak before his peers in the U.S. Senate.
At the time, his speech wasn’t noted as exceptional, but over the following
year it was published in the newspapers and caught the imagination of the
plantation owners and “scientific racists” of the South; it was soon the talk
of the nation.
Hammond asserted that for a society to function smoothly, it
must have a “foundational” class of people who, like the way a mudsill
stabilizes the house that rests atop it, bear the difficult manual labor from
which almost all wealth is derived. “In all social systems there must be a
class to do the menial duties,” Hammond
proclaimed, “to perform the drudgery of life.” Hammond claimed that every society throughout
history rested on a mudsill class; that even Jesus advocated this when he said,
“The poor you will always have with you.”
To stabilize society, he additionally argued, such a group of
people must be locked rigidly into their mudsill class.
Hammond’s mudsill theory was quickly embraced by the Southern
plantation owners as well as many Northern industrialists and newspaper owners,
although progressive politicians and spokesmen for labor were outraged,
particularly at the idea that social mobility must be denied to the laboring
class.
President Abraham Lincoln jumped into the debate with a speech
on September 30, 1859, in Milwaukee. At the time he was a lawyer in private
practice and a fierce advocate for the right of social mobility for working-class
white people. Speaking of the industrialists who employed child labor, opposed
education, and used brutal methods to keep workers in line, he said: “They further assume
that whoever is once a hired laborer is fatally fixed in that condition for
life; and thence again that his condition is as bad as or worse than that of a
slave. This is the ‘mud-sill’ theory.”
Lincoln didn’t find the argument persuasive; in fact, he was
offended by it. As president, Lincoln followed up with his goal of promoting
social mobility; he signed legislation creating over 70 land-grant colleges,
including my mother’s Michigan State University, where tuition was free or very
affordable until the Reagan revolution.
These days, Republicans generally take Hammond’s point of view,
while today’s Democrats embrace Lincoln’s perspective. This didn’t happen by
accident or in a vacuum. Russell Kirk was the twentieth century’s philosopher
king of the mudsill theory, although he never used the phrase. As I laid out in
detail in The
Hidden History of American Oligarchy, Kirk’s 1951 book, The
Conservative Mind, argues forcefully, like Hammond did, that society must
have “classes and orders” to ensure stability.
Kirk argued in the 1950s that if the American middle class—then
under half of Americans—ever grew too large and well paid, then such access to
“wealth” would produce a social disaster. His followers warned that under such
circumstances, minorities would forget their “place” in society, women would
demand equality with men, and young people would no longer respect their
elders.
The dire result, Kirk warned, would be social chaos, moral
degeneracy, revolution, and the eventual collapse of American society.
While at first Kirk was mostly only quoted by cranks like Barry
Goldwater and William F. Buckley Jr., when the 1960s hit and the civil rights
movement was roiling America’s cities, women were demanding access to the
workplace and equal pay, and young men were burning draft cards, Republican
elders and influencers concluded Kirk was a prophet.
Something had to be done.
Ronald Reagan came into office with the mandate to save American
society from collapse. To that end, he set out to reestablish a mudsill class
in America by ending free college and gutting public schools, destroying the
union movement, and weakening enforcement of child labor laws.
Thus today’s Republicans—from Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas to
Mike Johnson, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Donald Trump—are finally close to
fulfilling Hammond’s and Reagan’s vision of an America built on mudsill labor
(while ironically repudiating America’s first Republican president, Abraham
Lincoln).
And now, as the late Paul Harvey would say, you know the rest of
the story.
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