Salon: The “original sin” of the Southern political class is cheap, powerless labor

[LongTomH]

23. There was an interesting AlterNet article on a similar subject back in June 2012

Progressive futurist and AlterNet editor Sara Robinson argued that the GOP is being run by the descendants of Southern slaveowners.

It's been said that the rich are different than you and me. What most Americans don't know is that they're also quite different from each other, and that which faction is currently running the show ultimately makes a vast difference in the kind of country we are.

Right now, a lot of our problems stem directly from the fact that the wrong sort has finally gotten the upper hand; a particularly brutal and anti-democratic strain of American aristocrat that the other elites have mostly managed to keep away from the levers of power since the Revolution. Worse: this bunch has set a very ugly tone that's corrupted how people with power and money behave in every corner of our culture. Here's what happened, and how it happened, and what it means for America now.

HiPointDem is correct that slavery tarnished the history of both North and South and that conditions for workers in both North and South were horrible. However, the reforms that improved conditions for workers largely came from Northern union organizers and Yankee political reformers, the Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson, JFK, etc.

Northerners are far from pure; most of the old Yankee industrialists were guilty of exploiting their workers; but, there was that reformist strain that eventually produced better working conditions, and the shared prosperity of post-war America until the Reagan revolution.

I posted some excerpts from the article, beginning with my own comments:

Human beings make models ('hypotheses' in scientific terms) to explain how things work. In science, a hypothesis is judged by its utility in explaining known phenomenon and it's predictive capabilities; that is, how well does it explain new phenomena? Progressive futurist Sara Robinson has offered an interesting hypothesis to explain the behavior and ideology of the Republican party over the last few decades.

The North vs South model can be regarded as a hypothesis; the question is: How useful is it in explaining the increasing ruthlessness of GOP politicians and the capitalists who exploit the South's cheap labor?