Suicidal Bootlicking as a Method of Governance
Education and extraction in the cannibal South.
There are two basic ways to attract rich people to your state. The first is to make your state an attractive place to live: have good schools, have a well-run government, and take good care of your residents in order to create a large pool of happy, healthy, and prosperous people, who will be a pleasure to live around, and who will attract more people in a virtuous cycle. California and New York are examples of this approach. They are not perfect, but they are full of rich people because rich people find them to be attractive places to live and raise a family and do business.
The other way is to get on your knees, crying and dripping nervous sweat, and yell out: “Please, come to our shitty state! We’ll let you do whatever you want! We won’t tax you! We’ll let you exploit our impoverished work force! We’ll make sure our yokel legislators prioritize you personally above everyone else! Please! We’re desperate!” This is the approach of, for example, most of the states in the South. Rather than investing in their own population, they work to keep their own population poor and needy so that out-of-state capitalists might want to come and build a factory where they can employ them cheaply and without a union. The rich people who run the factories will then have to, at least, buy a house in the state, though they will fly back to New York and California as often as possible.
This has more or less been the South’s strategy since the end of Reconstruction. And look at the results—the South is still poor as shit. It hasn’t worked after more than a century. What to do? Double down, of course. That’s the strategic thinking that helped the South win the Civil War.
A necessary part of this cycle is that states take from their own most needy citizens in order to try to attract out-of-state people who are not needy at all. It is a reverse Robin Hood with an anti-hometown twist: “I’m born and raised in South Carolina and I love it deep in my bones, and that’s why I’m going to make sure our public schools are awful and our wages are low and all of you have no legal recourse to fight for yourselves at work, in order to funnel money into the pockets of investors in Japanese auto companies, a few of whom might find it necessary to move into a gated community within our state’s boundaries. Please vote for me for governor.” The politicians never quite word it that way. Instead they say, “I love Jesus.” But that’s what they mean.
As a native of the South, it is a perverse pastime of mine to watch this process constantly unfold in new and ever more destructive ways. The explosive growth of wealth at the very top of the income spectrum has added an interesting new wrinkle to this dynamic. The cannibal South’s appetite for its own children is only increasing.
Focus today on Texas and Florida—South-ish states who are forging new frontiers in the Southern pattern of wealth attraction. In the Trump era, both have had great success in attracting entrepreneurs and tax-avoiders by branding themselves as ultra-MAGA Free States. Many of the world’s richest people have washed up in South Florida in recent years, fleeing the taxes of California and other fiscally sane states. The richest man of all, Elon Musk, has moved the bulk of his operations to Texas, crying all the way about other state courts that dared to try to enforce the law upon him. Texas politicians have an ambitious plan (which is having some success) to turn the state into a financial capital—Y’all Street, to rival Wall Street. Their pitch to companies is a corporate version of the pitch that Southern states make to wealthy individuals: “Come here and you will be free to exploit your customers and investors! Screw everyone, with our blessing!” (Or, as the FT puts it, “an effort by Texas to form its own economic nation-state with an unabashedly pro-CEO bent, a departure from norms about neutrality between investors and management.”) Just as some of America’s biggest hedge funds and money management firms have relocated to Miami in search of sun and no state income tax, Texas hopes that its own pathologically pro-CEO system, designed to make it harder for investors to ensure that company owners aren’t ripping them off, will attract a broad swath of companies to their own scorched land. The vision is that eventually, both Silicon Valley and Wall Street, along with all of their associated billionaires, will reconstitute themselves in the lands of skin cancer and guns.
Already free of state income taxes, Republicans in both Texas and Florida are also trying to slash their property taxes, a move that would most benefit rich homeowners, and would necessitate the shifting of both state’s tax burdens more drastically onto middle and lower class residents. Very much in line with the overall philosophy.
Achieving this sort of reverse class war governance comes with some contingencies. As the Republican Party has long known, getting non-rich people to vote against their own economic interests requires some other bones to be tossed. Those bones are usually religion and bigotry, topped with whatever culture war crusades happen to be in vogue. In Texas and Florida today, this is producing—along with screaming Islamophobia, anti-trans cruelty, and everyday Bible-thumping—a sustained campaign to make education at all levels in the states dumber, by leavening it with crude religious zealotry and subjecting it to Trumpian standards of censorship. It is this attack on education that I want to comment on, because it is going to interact with the broader project of licking the boots of the rich in some fascinating ways.
The first and most obvious thing to say is that once you start draining the tax base that supports your public schools and hanging the Ten Commandments in classrooms and making students sit through anti-communist indoctrination classes and banning thousands of the world’s greatest books and so on, one side effect will be that rich people are not going to send their kids to your public schools. Duh! Everyone with means will opt out of your public schools because for the most part they did not get rich by getting shitty educations. This is why, for example, Ken Griffin and other finance zillionaires are paying to build their own bespoke private schools down to Miami. Griffin is a large financial backer of Ron Desantis. He has invested in Florida Republicans to ensure that he gets the tax and regulatory policies that are most favorable to his own $49 billion fortune. The price of this is that Florida’s public schools are decimated by right wingers. Ken Griffin does not care about the fact that hundreds of thousands of Florida kids will receive worse educations in exchange for his lower tax rate, because he can simply build a good private school for himself and his peers. This is an example of the fundamental moral depravity of the very rich.
It is not just K-12 public schools that are under attack in Texas and Florida and other red states. They have also been busily destroying the quality of education at their own state university systems. Ron Desantis has annihilated Florida’s respected New College, wholly in the name of weird right wing culture war. University professors are being subjected to both implicit and explicit censorship in Texas and Florida. The quality of higher education that citizens of these states receive, in other words, is being eroded because the limits of academia are being dictated by people who are not academics. And who are, in many ways, anti-academics!
Zoom all the way out, and what you will see is this remarkable process unfolding: State politicians giving away the well-being of their existing residents in order to attract out-of-state rich people who, due to the very erosion of living standards that occurred because of the policies used to attract them, will then conduct as much of their lives as possible outside of the states that they are taking advantage of.
Ken Griffin goes to Harvard, makes a fortune, builds his business in New York and Chicago, and then finally deigns to move his hedge fund down to Florida in order to not pay taxes, builds a private school, and then watches the kids of all his associates go back to Harvard. Do you think these masters of the universe are going to send their kids to the University of Florida or the University of Texas to learn some halfhearted religious bullshit? Hell no! They want the best educations for their kids. They will not be utilizing the educational systems that have been degraded in order to redirect more wealth into their own bank accounts. Harvard and Yale will educate a crop of imperial capitalists, grow their fortunes, deploy them down to desperate Southern states that they can plunder, and then accept their children back again in order to repeat the process. Notice what the Southern states themselves get out of this process: Less than nothing. They are making the ambient education levels of their own residents lower in order to be better exploited by out-of-state wealth. They are ensuring that their own residents will be less competitive with the Harvard cutthroats of the future. They are locking themselves into a perpetual cycle of having to offer ever more extravagant enticements for out-of-state rich people to come on down, because they robbed themselves of the ability to build their own ladder upwards by giving it all away to attract the last generation of out-of-state wealth. This deranged and suicidal cycle, at least, explains how this stupid system has gone on for so long. The way it is able to extract from the normal residents of a state in exchange for absolutely no positive return is a marvel to perceive.
Come South! Please! We’ll build a wall around your private compound, to protect you from the desperate hordes that we have produced on your behalf.
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Related reading: The Cannibal South; America Is Becoming Dallas, Part One and Part Two; The Confederacy Won’t Die Until Florida Does; The Republican Party Is a Trick.
I wrote a book about the labor movement, called “The Hammer,” that includes a chapter about South Carolina—the most anti-union state of them all, and a leading proponent of the Southern economic strategy. Yet there are still unions there, and some hope. Check it out, if you’re interested. If you live in the South, please organize your workplace as fast as possible.
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As a Texan who couldn't imagine leaving, it is a nightmare to watch those in power sell our state for parts. Watching how Elon is blowing up public beaches for his shitty rockets, professors getting fired for the most mildly inclusive syllabi, and especially to see the public schools that raised me to be enshittified. It just makes me want to remind everyone from the outside that there are many, many of us who can't stand this and are trying to save our communities in the face of these powerful, rich vampires. We have beautiful canyons and rivers and forests and beaches, diverse communities and rich cultures, and despite the political challenges, it is a wonderful place to live.
Since I once worked at an elite college in the Northeast, I can attest that they have profited from this Southern strategy for a very long time. The 1,000 or so affluent families who ruled the South before the Civil War routinely sent their children to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, and other elite colleges to be educated. That's how so many of their buildings got named after Southern politicians and leaders. After being educated, the offspring would return to run their parents' plantation or business. Local poor whites and, of course, slaves suffered. This history has been coming to light in recent years, much to the chagrin and shame of these institutions.
The game is indeed long. What's going on in Texas, Florida, and other Southern states is only the 21st-century version.