The Power and the Money

Department of Things That Will Obviously End Well

Many years ago, in what seems like another life, I wrote a case about Blackwater. When I began researching the case in 2008, not long after my time in Afghanistan, the company was at the peak of its ambitions. It’s training ground in Moyock, North Carolina, was very impressive — and it still is — but the amazing part of Erik Prince’s vision was that he wanted the company to manufacture, deploy and operate a panoply of advanced hardware. These included the Grizzly APC (interior pictured), an armed frigate (see page 53), armed reconnaissance blimps, and a small private air force.

There is a rationale behind the idea of privatizing some military functions. Much of what is called “combat service support” has a civilian equivalent. In theory,  a private company could maintain a large reserve support capacity and rent it out to various clients, including the military, for less than it would cost any of those clients to maintain such capacity internally. In practice, it’s less clear that outsourcing logistical and support functions generates savings or improves readiness, but that’s an issue for another day.

The issue for today is that Russian Federation appears to be deploying private organizations to take and hold Syrian territory in return for oil and mining concessions. (The link is to the New York Times.) This is bad on about a hundred different levels. The small problems have to do with the problems of outsourcing core military functions to private organizations. The big ones have to do with the incentives.  

Not only do these contracts encourage Russian companies to go buccaneering, they encourage Moscow to broaden the war as much as possible. They also encourage Moscow to pressure Damascus into fighting to the bitter end and give corrupt Russian officials incentives dump public resources into subsidizing ostensibly private military operations. The officials don’t even have to be corrupt in a Venezuelan bribe-taking sense; all you need is an open-door between public service and lucrative private posts in the companies that stand to benefit.

Private military forces are, sadly, a thing. Erik Prince is running a small private air force for the UAE in Libya. But I’m not sure that I’ve heard of mercenaries paid with contingency fees financed out of the spoils of war. That seems new. I am sure that there must be a giant hole in my logic and this experiment with profit-driven pacification will end well.

North Carolina in historic and geographic perspective

Political events over the past few years in North Carolina have been quite depressing. Extreme gerrymandering diluted representation. In 2012, the Democrats won the popular vote for the federal House but lost most of the seats. In 2016, a 53% GOP margin for House votes won them 77% of seats; a 55% margin for state senate turned into 68% of the seats; in the state lower chamber, 53% of the vote got them 62% of the seats. (See here. For maps showing the power of gerrymandering in the state, see here.) 

Then, when the Republican governor lost re-election in 2016, the legislature moved to strip the Governorship of most of its power. 

But this is not unprecedented.

First, let us compare across space: Maryland is as gerrymandered as North Carolina, only in favor of Democrats. Is is true that Republicans benefit more nationally from gerrymandering (only Illinois and Maryland have a strong Democratic bias) but N.C. is not at all unique.

Second, the legislative power grab after the election is unique in the 21st century — the Maryland legislature did not try to strip Governor Hogan of his power in 2014 — but it is not unique across American history. First, consider Louisiana under Huey Long. For all the shenanigans, Governor McCrory did not move to destroy the opposition when he was in power the way Long did back in 1928-35. 

More ominously, consider Redemption in North Carolina. In the 1868 election, Republicans solidly trounced the Conservative Party. In 1870, however, the Conservatives managed to come back by effectively casting themselves as the white people’s party ... and using terror tactics by the Ku Klux Klan. Governor William Holden called out the militia to fight the KKK, but the Conservative nonetheless won the legislative elections. They first moved to prevent legislators from being seated from districts where the state militia arrested KKK terrorists. They then impeached Governor Holden. In 1876, the Conservative Party renamed itself the Democratic Party, becoming part of the national Democratic coalition. It took them until 1898 to fully disenfranchise the black population. (See also here.)

By those standards, North Carolina has so far been quite civilized. No riots, no extrajudicial killings or warrantless arrests, no declarations of martial law, and the courts have reined in the lame duck power grab and may reverse the gerrymander. Vigilance is warranted. Protest is warranted. And political mobilization is needed. But worse things have happened and worse has been overcome. 

What can we learn from Huey Long?

Back during the Obama administration, critics always used to say that there was too much “uncertainty.” Business executives being fragile flowers and all, they could not be expected to make tough decisions without absolute 100% certainty about everything.

That argument made no sense back then. After all, the Obama administration was well inside American norms during 2009-10 … and hamstrung afterwards. You can make a case that the DAPA order pushed executive action too far, but that’s really not what people were complaining about. Anyway, investment steadily rose during the Obama administration while the cost-of-capital remained low, meaning that the whole premise of the argument that “uncertainty” mattered was based on nothing.

The Trump administration, however, has brought the whole argument over “uncertainty” roaring back! Here we are, a month in, and you’ve got political uncertainty galore. Will Obamacare survive? Will the administration survive? Will it lash out? What norms will be broken? How can you trust a government that lies with such ease about everything? How bad will corruption get? Will we have a trade war? A real war? Civil unrest? Impeachment? WHO KNOWS! RUN FOR THE HILLS! CASH UNDER THE MATRESSES!!!

Or maybe let’s take a deep breath and ask if there is anything that history can tell us. Turns out that there is! In the 1930s, Huey Long ran a very Trumpian administration in Louisiana. Governor Long was, in fact, the model for an American dictator in It Can’t Happen Here. (A novel I recommend, by the way. Free at the link.)

The picture, yes, is of Texas, not Louisiana. I was just in Austin and will be returning fairly often. I’ve only been to Louisiana once, in 2004, when I stopped outside Baton Rouge on my way to Boston from Mexico City. (I also drove through New Orleans in 1996, on my way from Florida to California.) The place seemed crazy, but then again I was idiotic enough to decide to stop into a biker bar outside the city. I’m fairly certain that my Army Reserve ID was the only thing that kept me from severe physical harm.

But I digress. Let’s return to Huey Long. His regime really was that wild, wilder than any 2004 biker bar. In 1928, he won election. He then trampled over what little civil service there was in Louisiana, firing opponents and forcing state employees to donate to his campaigns. He passed out jobs to active legislators. (Really. He did that.) He imposed taxes on political opponents. In fact, he threatened to impose taxes that business people considered tantamount to expropriation. In return, they had to negotiate with him. When one opponent complained by saying, “Maybe you’ve heard of this book. It’s the Constitution of the State of Louisiana,” Long replied, “I’m the Constitution around here now.”

It got wilder. In 1930, he won a Senate seat but postponed taking it while remaining as governor. He then installed a puppet, Oscar Allen, who won in a massively fraudulent election. Allen was such a puppet that Long’s brother said, “A leaf once blew in to Allen’s office and fell on his desk. Allen signed it.” The legislature, meanwhile, turned into a Soviet rubber-stamp: the governor’s bills passed in minutes. He passed a newspaper tax he called the “tax on lying.” On 1934, he strengthened the Bureau of Criminal Identification, an agency empowered to make warrantless arrests throughout Louisiana. In 1935, the opposition was reduced to organizing a paramilitary to seize the Baton Rouge courthouse, prompting Senator Long to declare martial law. To cap it off, he established a state printing board that could effectively shut down any newspaper in the state.

Finally, Carl Weiss shot him on September 10, 1935.

So talk about uncertainty! That was American uncertainty. If uncertainty matters, we should see it in Louisiana under Long.

So Gabriel Mathy (American University) and Nicolas Ziebarth (Auburn) went looking to see what uncertainty did to the Louisiana economy under Long! In a forthcoming paper for the Journal of Economic History, they constructed uncertainty measures for Louisiana and found … nothing. All the uncertainty had remarkably little economic impact.

That should not make you complacent about the future of the Trump administration. Quite the opposite, in fact. First, the result may be specific to the southern United States. One of the best parts of a great paper is where they look for border effects with Mississippi. Mississippi didn’t get a Huey Long, but maybe markets thought that it might: the craziness was already priced in. If that’s the explanation, then the U.S. may be in a for sudden crash.

But that seems unlikely. (The paper uses multiple methods, all pointing the same direction.) What’s more likely is that you can’t trust the markets to discipline the a truly-erratic administration until it is too late. If you want to make sure that the Trump administration doesn’t wreck American governance  then you’ve got to act yourself and act politically.

Go see and join the debate at this post.

Alabama is not Mississippi

OK, that is clearly true. I just spent a big chunk of time in Alabama, I know this to be true. 

But John Marshall at Talking Points Memo is understandably surprised that a recent poll shows the Fat Crybaby only 2 points ahead in Mississippi while 21 points ahead in “the fairly politically and demographically similar state of Alabama next door.”

That cannot be right, can it?

Well, yes, it can! 

According to the Census Bureau, eligible voters in Mississippi are 60% white and 35% black. In next door, Alabama they are 68% white and 25% black. Also according to the census bureau, black people in both states turn out to vote at rates around six points higher than whites. (2012 turnout in both states was around 60%; 2008 turnout was 63% in Mississippi and 64% in Alabama.) That shakes out to an electorate that is 59% white and 38% black in Mississippi but 68% white and 28% black in Alabama.

Now assume that Hillary Clinton will get 95% of the black vote, 80% of the Latino vote, and 75% of the other vote in both states. (These assumptions do not really matter, but they make exposition easier.) What then needs to be true about the white vote for Clinton to receive 46% of the total vote in Mississippi but only 36% in Alabama?

Well, she would have to get 13% of white vote in Mississippi and 10% in Alabama. That is only a three-point difference. It is totally believable and certainly within the margin of error in the crosstabs. I can certainly believe it. If you give her 13% of the white vote in Alabama, her share there rises only two points; give her 10% of whites in Mississippi and her share there falls by only one point. 

Let’s check this with the 2012 results. Romney won 55% in Mississippi, but 61% in Alabama Obama got only 38% of the vote in Alabama, versus 44% in Mississippi. The six point difference in the 2012 election is less than the ten point difference in the 2016 polls, but ten points is not so great as to be unbelievable. 

Now, Mississippi is far from a swing state. To win there, Clinton needs to get 20% of the white vote, which ain’t gonna be easy. But that is a lower bar than in Alabama, where getting 20% of the white vote would get her only 43% of the total. In Alabama, she needs to pull in 31% of the white vote to win. 

Having been in Alabama, getting to 20% (let alone 31%) feels impossible. There is some deep-seated identity voting going on, more like political parties in Trinidad and Tobago than what most would consider normal American politics. (See here for more on ethnic politics in Trinidad.)

Many white people in Alabama were super nice. Think the amused gentleman in the pink shirt. But in picking the photos for this post, I noticed a lot of photos like the second one above, where people in the background are staring at us, especially if my wife was taking the picture. (Look at the father and son directly behind us. My wife takes pictures like a fashion photographer, so we have 15 full seconds of frames: they were staring the whole time.) That does not happen in family photo albums from the northeast or Florida. 

Yes, it is anecdotal, but I just do not think that it will be easy for any Democratic candidate to break the 20% barrier among white voters in Alabama (or culturally, albeit not demographically) state of Mississippi for some time to come. The WaPo-SurveyMonkey poll results are plausible. They may even hold until November. But they are not a sign that Mississippi is turning purple any time soon. 

But to repeat the punchline: given the very different demographics in the two states, it is quite reasonable to believe that Clinton is only two points behind in Mississippi while being 21 points down in Alabama. 

Alabama peaches

I know, peaches are normally associated with Georgia. But they grow fine peaches in Alabama.

We were driving out near Rosa Park’s home town. On our way back to Montgomery, the kids passed out in the back seat. Those of you who have small children (and most who don’t!) will understand the issue: you don’t want them to wake up before they’re ready! They’ll be about as happy as a hung-over adult roused out of bed after three hours. Not a good thing!

Now, for context, I must say, against expectations, even the most isolated state roads in Alabama are excellent even by Massachusetts standards, and Massachusetts standards are high.

So when we saw a peach stand on a country road — we had a dilemma. My lovely wife wanted peaches. Mi mano, Gabe, who was in the car, thought she should try them. But the kids were asleep, and would surely awake if we stopped ... but we were still more than 45 minutes away from Montgomery and the BBQ place here we planned to eat lunch.

Solution: Gabe and my lovely bride would get out to buy peaches. I would drive around for ten to fifteen minutes, then return and pick them up. Problem solved!

After ten minutes, I come back from my perambulation past prosperous rural houses, in a white part of Alabama that more resembles a lower-middle-class exurb that the kind of rural poverty some might have in mind. 

My wife and mi compa are wandering around the grounds of the peach stand, smiling but looking slightly forelorn; not talking to the three white woman who run the place. They get in. She looks at my mano, who looks back, and they bust out laughing. The story:

The stand was run by three white woman of various ages: likely a mother, a daughter, and a grandmother. My wife approaches them, smiling I am sure, as she does. The grandmother was in the watermelon patch to the left; the mother stayed away. So she asks the daughter, “Which one is sweeter, your peaches or the nectarines?”

“A nectarine is a hairless peach, is all.” Southern hospitality, this is not. 

“Are these peaches grown in the grove back there?” my wife tries again, in the best Noo Yawk friendliness, the friendliest friendly part of this continent, as you know.

“Some of ‘em.”

At this point, I am told, ma had begun conferring with grandma in the back of the patch. My people decide to buy some peaches, and then wound up wandering pointlessly around the grass until I returned.

In the car, after my wife tells the story, mi mano chimes up. “It wasn’t Amma! It was me. It was the Mexican rapist they were afraid of.”  

(Photo from Montgomery proper, or at least a part of the outskirts worthy of its own post. Mano looks like primo.) 

This led to an argument over whether Mexican was the new black, conducted in a jocular tone that I have trouble conveying to white people. Seriously, it was funny! When racist white people are bothered, but either don’t try or aren’t able to exercise power, it can be amusing. (There is a deeper takeaway there that you should convey to the next person who tries to tell you that reverse racism is a thing.)

The argument went on until we passed a big white barn-like structure selling pig parts and pig meat under a big Confederate flag. There, as we drove by, we saw a white woman and a black woman engaged in an animated arm-waving discussion that certainly seemed, to our LatAm-and-Caribbean conditioned eyes, to be a customer arguing with a client.

If that could go on under the traitorious slaveowning anti-American battle flag of the evil Confederate rebels, well, then, I have to say a point for Gabe. Would my wife have gotten that sort of treatment by herself? We may never know. We did not try to re-run the experiment.

Maybe Mexican is the new black! After all, Alabama has officially made it illegal to drive while Mexican, even if you work for the Air Force. 

America, love it or leave it

My wife and kids came to Alabama on an overnight train to Birmingham, something she really wanted to do. We met them downtown, near the train station.

The freeway drive up from Montgomery is worth doing, if only for a large sign reading “America, Love It or Leave It” right across I-65 from a giant Confederate flag. It’s only ironic if you assume that the author of the America sign had no problem with the secessionist flag and didn’t want to secede.

Maybe that assumption is wrong! He could be making a profoundly anti-racist statement! 

Well, we can find out! Turns out the gentleman who put the sign up was named Billy Newell, a former construction magnate. He also put up a nearby sign reading “Go to church or the devil will get you.” In most of the country that would pin him as a major-league Republican. But this is Alabama! Going to church from fear of the devil puts you right in the median.

Billy Newell, many will be surprised to find, was a big backer of Lucy Baxley in her 2006 gubernatorial race. Baxley, a Democrat, campaigned in a losing race for a one-dollar raise in the minimum wage and went on to become the last Democratic elected statewide official in Alabama during her stint on the Public Service Commission. In other words, he had some serious liberal leanings that seem incongruous to those of us from the parts of the country that have never tried to secede.

So you know, I can’t discount that the sign really was intended as a giant eff you to the backers of the traitorious slaveholders’ banner. Which would include the governor who defeated Ms. Baxley. Take that, America-haters!

Identity politics

We are all guilty of it. In fact, “identity politics” should be called just politics, period. We all belong to prescriptive or ascriptive groups. Our membership in those groups (whether voluntary, involuntary, or quasi-voluntary) gives us material interests. Sometimes we reject those material interests in favor of the interests of other groups whom we consider more worthy; sometimes we don’t. We always, however, recognize that there are situations where the interests of our favored groups will be sacrificed, or at least attenuated. Maybe we’ll lose a political battle, maybe we’ll accept a banked favor by sacrificing now to get more later. 

Since sometimes we know our favored groups will lose, symbolic actions matter, at least when those action incur political costs to the person who makes them. It is a way of signalling that you will not be forgotten.  “I can’t give you what you want immediately, but I am willing to incur costs to show my support. I am making a down payment on future support for your agenda, if you support me now.”

Which I why that I hope Hillary Clinton does not pick Tim Kaine ... oh, dammit!

Even fiction writers have trouble showing how the British Empire could have abolished American slavery

In 1973, a business historian named Robert Sobel published a highly entertaining book entitled For Want of a Nail. It is an incredibly detailed faux history book from a world where the British defeated the American revolution, all the way down to a plethora of fake footnotes. It is a fun read, enough to inspire me and some friends to make a long foray into fanfic back in the early 2000s. 

One of us, Johnny Pez, has received the rights from the Sobel estate to rewrite the book. Johnny intends to fill in a lot of gaps in the original as well as bring it up to 2016. He is off to a great start, which you can read here. 

The problem is that major parts of Sobel’s alternate history are simply broken. 

Take, for example, the way his imaginary British North America. At first, in his world, things are different because the slave trade is not stopped: rather, it continues until the 1830s. Then, in 1835, he has a financial crisis hit London. Cotton prices drop and slave prices go down with them. As a result, with an unspecified amount of financial support from the British government, the Southern Confederation (coterminous with our slave states of the same period) bails out the planters with a payment of £35 per slave in 1840, twice their market value. 

Well. There are a few problems with this scenario. First, take Sobel’s slave population compared with the real actual United States: 

How does a world where the slave trade remains open — itself a most improbable development — wind up with fewer slaves than in real history? Sure, the victorious British manumitted a bunch, but not that many. 

Then there is the price of those slaves. When Sobel’s financial crisis hits, the slave price he lists is roughly the same as the price of a young male slave in New Orleans in the real world. They then crash by an incredibly implausible amount by authorial fiat. He just waves his hands. The below chart shows the extent of the hand-waving; I have deliberately included data from the real 1840s to show what a punishing price decline actually looked like:

Sobel does not say how the manumission bonds are paid for. There are two possibilities. First, that the U.K. government bore all the cost. That seems weird, as he has the bill being passed by the Southern Confederation. But it could be. Only if it was, then you have a situation in which the U.K. just agreed to transfer roughly 11% of its GDP to the Southern planters with no political concessions in turn. I suppose that is possible, but it seems unlikely. 

More likely is that the Southern Confederation agreed to finance the bonds itself and then managed to transfer the cost of paying those debts to the Northern Confederation after the British agreed to unite the two small dominions into one big one in 1842. In return, the Northern Confederation gets a big protective tariff around all of North America. I can imagine that ... although one imagines a slightly more interesting convention than the one Sobel describes. After all, the new united North America is going to be born with a manumission debt worth 17% of its GDP.

But that is fixable. What seems unfixable, at least at first glance, are the following:

1. Keeping the slave trade open until 1840 is very implausible;
2. If it remained open, there would be a lot more slaves in North America, with unknowable effects on the price and even larger fights over the spread of the institution into Indiana (our Northwest Territories);
3. If it was closed, then the slave population should still have been much larger;
4. It is hard to imagine why the slave price would have declined so much and be seen by the planters as a permanent decline. A temporary depression is not going to convince slaveowners (or any asset holder, for that matter) to sell at the bottom. You need to create some sort of contrived situation involving bankers and bankruptcies and even then Sobel has painted a situation in which all the Southern banks are going under, so who cares whether you can repay your debts?

How you can square all of those circles, I do not know! If you can find cases of reputable books from the 1960s with equally bullshit numbers, then you can say the numbers are wrong and give a story for why they are wrong. (Although ... man, the number of slaves is not a state secret, even if slave prices were hard to find. Ditto the statements about the slave trade being open seem pretty damn clear.) But that puts you in a situation where the new country has to finance a manumission cost that is more on the order of 48% of GDP and convince the planters to take the deal. 

In short, Mr. Sobel pulled a magic price decline out the air to tell his optimistic story about the British Empire. Take that away and it gets much dicier.

No, a British victory in the Revolutionary War would not have ended slavery early

July 4th is upon us, and here we go again with a bunch of “The American Revolution was a mistake” posts. Now it’s Dylan Matthews at Vox, giving us three reasons why 1776 and all that was a “monumental mistake.”

Reason number one? “Abolition would have come faster without independence.” His evidence for this? Well, only that Parliament in fact abolished slavery in 1833. 

So lets look at that abolition for a moment. The British parliament voted to raise £20 million in bonds to compensate slaveowners in the West Indies and South Africa. The Abolition Act valued slaves at their average price in 1822-30, using a database of 74,000 transactions. They then divvied up the £20 million among all the colonies according to their proportion of total slave value. Across all the islands of the West Indies, that came to 780,993 enslaved people valued at £58 each, for whose freedom slaveowners received £26 per person. (Actual valuations varied from £115 in British Guiana to £27 in Bermuda.)

This brings us to the first problem facing a hypothetical British Empire contemplating abolition: using the same methodology, North America possessed 2.1 million slaves in 1833. Using the same methodology as the Abolition Act, that would have cost British taxpayers an additional £53 million pounds, on top of the £20 million for the West Indies. 

How much was £73 million? Well, the entire nominal GDP of the United Kingdom came to only £440 million in 1833. More relevantly, perhaps, total public spending came to only £51 million. Financing an additional £50 million in bonds at 3.4% would have cost £1.8 million per year ... almost 4% of all public spending. In the abstract, that was easily affordable ... in the concrete, the additional expense could have sunk the bill.

But there is a second problem. Slave prices in the West Indies were sinking in the 1820s along with the price of sugar, which dropped (net of shipping costs) from 2.3p per pound in 1818 to 0.8p per pound in 1829. (Prices are contemporary, but expressed in modern decimal values. Data from Robert Martin, Statistics of the Colonies of the British Empire, 1839, Appendix p. 3.) There were exceptions, of course: slavery was booming in Trinidad and British Guiana. But in general slave prices were declining across the West Indies and British policy prevented slaves in declining areas (like Jamaica) from being sold on to booming places. Barbadian slave prices, for example, fell by half between 1823 and 1831. (Table 5.)

That is not to say that the British planters supported abolition: slavery was obviously more profitable to them than free labor would be. (J. R. Ward looked into that back in 1978.) It is to say that they were willing to accept compensation at 44% of the average market price because market prices were falling fast.

Contrast that with the southern United States, where the cotton boom was just getting started. By 1833, the South was starting a prolonged cotton boom driven by exploding British demand for cotton textiles. In addition, American slave populations were growing fast. Combine the two and you have rapidly growing wealth tied up in slaves:, expressed below as a percentage of the U.K. GDP:

It doesn’t take a political scientist to realize that the politics of abolition are going to look very different in the above world. West Indian interests reluctantly capitulated to compensated abolition; North American slaveowners are going to fight a lot harder. Any compromise is going to result in a much higher compensation per slave than the West Indian slaveowners received. 

We then add the third problem: in the 1830s, cotton is a strategic crop. Sugar is nice; cotton drives the U.K. economy. It is the oil of the day. Politicians could contemplate a disruption of sugar production in the West Indies with equanimity. After all, the product is available from elsewhere and who cares if it comes from within the Empire or outside? Those same politicians could not easily contemplate a reform that might disrupt the flow of cotton to British textile mills. 

Fourth, we have to think about how American independence was avoided. There are basically two scenarios: (1) British diplomacy avoids conflict, and (2) Britain wins on the battlefield. Scenario (1) implies that the British government accepted that it could not tax the American colonies. Scenario (2) implies that the U.K. repeals most or all of its exactions on the American colonies. Both make it unlikely that the U.K. would impose taxes on North America to pay for the freeing of North American slaves.

An abolitionist U.K. government will face a Hobson’s choice. They can abolish with insufficient compensation, even if it could get such a bill through Parliament — which is unlikely — they would risk triggering a revolt by Southern planters. The British Empire could probably win such a revolt (strangling Southern commerce and trying to mobilize Northern armies), but no government would take such a threat lightly. They can abolish with sufficient compensation — which would be extremely expensive and risk triggering a planters’ revolt regardless. Or they can ignore public opinion (10% of the British population signed an anti-slavery petition) and hope the problem goes away.

The problem is that the longer Parliament waits, the less tractable the problem becomes. 

 

It is certainly possible that the British Empire would have abolished slavery earlier than the United States. Johnny Pez has a post showing the roots of how that might happen in a world where Britain defeats the Continental Army. (He is currently engaged in a magisterial project of re-writing For Want of A Nail, by Robert Sobel. It promises to be awesome.) 

But the British Empire was ruled by human beings. And those human beings would have faced a situation where their medium-term political and economic self-interest conflicted with their morals and long-term interests. The result, I suspect, would be delay and half-measures, with a high likelihood of ending in a war. 

The American Revolution might have been a mistake. But it is probably not because the horror of slavery would have ended much sooner. 

Another post that is not about Brexit

There are other commentators with far more to say. Of course, most of them are filibustering. I would recommend Brad Delong. He points out that the academics who have purported to lay out what the E.U. should do to reinvigorate the project are making a sad mistake by limiting their recommendations to what they consider politically feasible. Sadly, what is feasible is also insufficient. Europe (or at least Germany) needs to move the Overton Window.

I am now reunited with my family in Montgomery, Alabama, enjoying the expedition and working on things like Argentine innovation history and black migration to Canada. The U.K. is far away.

So I will talk about our exit from the mysteriously deserted South Boston! Southexit? Svexit? 

Note: most Southern (and many Midwestern) towns and cities would seem equally deserted at any time, but that didn’t square with the town’s downtown. Too many shops that looked too dependent on foot traffic! Or at least people parking their cars and getting out. But we saw nobody, not a soul.

Well, we learned was what happening as we approached the North Carolina border. My phone buzzed, and ugly buzz that usually accompanies some sort of weather warning. I was driving, so I handed it over to my compa. He looked at it, said nothing, but a few minutes later he added, “You should speed up. That way.” He pointed towards the strikingly blue sky ahead of us. “No, really. I don’t want to scare you, but you should speed up.”

The phone alert was a tornado warning, telling us to shelter in place. And the sky behind us was ... well, Jesus, I never knew that clouds could actually be green. The blue skies were so blue because a twister was sucking everything up into it.

Nothing happened to us ... but we later read about some tragic property damage and one death caused by the same weather system in North Carolina. Nobody was out because everyone had been told to stay in. It just did not occur to us to check, despite all the obvious warnings from the sky.

We were relieved to make it out of the stormfront and into North Carolina. Our first stop was the Roxboro Cotton Mill. The mill was one of the last holdouts in the slow collapse of North Carolina’s light industry. The mill was one of the last holdouts, shutting down in ‘99. Right now, a public charter school is trying to raise the funds to turn the building into an auditorium and gymnasium. 

 

I could make the abandoned mill into a metaphor for globalization and the subsequent counterreaction. Or I could throw some cold water on that by pointing out that 1999 was before China received normal trading relations (NTR) with the United States and began to hammer manufacturing communities here. But both of those possibilities would take this post close to Brexit.

What has nothing to do with Brexit? Barbecue! We made it from Roxboro to Durham without complication. There, in an excellent way to celebrate our survival, we got some barbecue. It was awesome, very good, worth every bit of plaque on our arteries. Durham, I need not add, is not a particularly southern town. But this was good BBQ!

The only thing of particular interest in Durham said bad things about America, not the South; like I said, it is not particularly southern. We started to head to the interstate around 9pm (to press on to Charlotte that night) only to get stuck in a short downpour that was so bad we had to pull off into a convenience store and wait it out. The store was only minutes from where we had the BBQ, maybe a mile away. It was modern and well-kept. It had a gas station attached. (We filled up.) It had a constant stream of patrons, even despite the near zero-visibility downpour. And all of them were black. 

Obviously, there is nothing surprising about America’s extreme segregation. But it is not something, I think, that we should allow ourselves to forget or begin to think normal. 

Still not about Brexit

The closed road meant we had to turn off Route 360. The detour took us through Scottsburg, which seemed less a town and more a random collection of rather dispersed but also rather nice houses. No people were out and about, unsurprisingly. We turned down another road, navigating our way around felled branches and trees, when we saw the only sign of the election thus far this trip:

The employees were nowhere to be seen, for reasons we soon discovered.

We got back on Route 360, which took us to our destination: South Boston, Virginia. How could we not stop in Southie? Well, South Boston turns out to be a surprisingly pleasant town. In fact, it seemed almost near perfect for a small town. 

I say surprisingly, because most of the small towns that I have visited in further south, in Alabama and Georgia, have been dumps. They might have been cute once, but the automobile sucked the life out of their centers, quite literally demolishing many of the buildings to make way for parking. In some the outskirts are relatively prosperous, if generic sprawl; but in many the outskirts are also suffering. The strip malls are often filled with a collection of check-cashing places and consignment stores, interspersed with churches and (in South Carolina) adult stores. They are, in general, sobering places to visit. 

Conversely, many small towns in New England (and in some parts of the Midwest) have been gentrified. Their centers are cutesy, often dependent on tourism, students, or upscale exurbanites, with shops catering to that trade. They can be like the worst stereotypes of hipster Brooklyn, only with easier parking. 

But not South Boston! South Boston had hit that sweet spot. The downtown was surrounded by pleasant, well-kept houses and a collection of rather nice church buildings. The downtown itself was vibrant, filled with shops, but real shops catering to ordinary people: insurance agencies, furniture stores, the occasional antique shops, restaurants that were in no way upscale. It wasn’t rich, it wasn’t poor, the car hadn’t sucked the life out of it but it didn’t survive as a preserved bit of fakery for the gentry, either.

For example, here is my compa looking puzzled a store selling what seemed to be an entirely random collection of useful stuff. Very useful stuff, yes, and quite nice, but it still isn’t clear why you would need to have it all in one place.

There were also a lot of storefront churches, including one that was a pleasant surprise. And might explain downtown’s vibrancy, only this was the only sign in Spanish that we saw. 

The streets, however, were spookily deserted. A few parked cars, but very little vehicular and no foot traffic. That was a puzzle, since most of the storefronts were filled. What was going on? 

Well, we were soon to discover why nobody was outside save us ...

Not about Brexit at all

I must write something, so I’ll write about the weather! 

I’m on the road to Alabama. We left D.C. sometime after noon, heading south on I-95. The express lanes out of the city were clear, but they disappear in the far exurbs, and we decided to leave the interstate for Route 1 to Richmond. That plan proved a little harder than expected when a shortcut dead-ended at the gates to a massive prison complex, but in general it worked.

Route 1 travels through a combination of sprawl, old towns, and new exurbia. The exurbs can get strange: pods of massive $200,000 attached rowhouses designed — by law — without any stores or bars or meeting places within walking distance. I’m currently reading Zoned in the USA, by Sonia Hirt (Virginia Tech). When I finish it, I may have more to say on the topic. 

We stopped at a Dunkin Donuts, best damn coffee in America, and pushed on to Route 360, aka the Patrick Henry Highway. Why get on a soul-destroyed interstate in a canyon of trees when you don’t have to? The road took us through a quaint area of farms and a landscape that was far less weird than points north in the state. For example, no Confederate symbols. Not one.

Well, maybe one. There were three flags outside the Black Forest Haus in Amelia, Virginia. One was Old Glory. The second was the German bundesflagge. The third ... well, the third looked like the Stars and Bars as we zipped past, but that couldn’t be right, could it?

We didn’t turn around to check, but we did make a U-turn a little past the Tastee Freez because the storm clouds gathering in the distance made for an unbelievable tableau. 

Now, we had a destination in mind, a town we hadn’t known existed:

So we got back on the road ... and right as we did, the rain started, the clouds closed in, the wind kicked up, the visibility dropped. We slowed, and the squall passed ... but downed trees closed Route 360. So we had to get on the off-off-interstate. 

Where we ... 

Another turn in the South

 In 2004, a good friend and I drove around Georgia, Alabama and the Florida panhandle. I had just gotten back from Fort Huachuca, he was getting leave from Fort Benning, and we both had family in Broward County, Florida. (And in my case, Miami-Dade as well.) We had been to the region quite a bit ... but rarely outside the confines of an Army post. So why not take my old Ford Focus and tool around the deep southeast for a few weeks before heading down to Fort Lauderdale? 

It was a great trip. The South is definitely different. The first thing you notice is how the countryside is intensively farmed. In fact, there is this ah hah moment when you realize that most of the woods you have seen are actually tree farms. My buddy said, “We’re not in New England,” after which we started yelling “Niner niner!” every time we spotted anything really alien. For example, take Quitman, Georgia, with the decaying mansions set back from the streets and its obvious poverty and extreme segregation. Neither poverty nor segregation are alien to New York or New England, of course, but once-rich and now-poor all black small towns are not particularly common. The only thing not “niner” in that town was the small market catering to Mexican immigrants.

Or consider Dothan, Alabama. The town depends on Fort Rucker for its existence, but that was not what made it not like New England. Nor did the suburban sprawl around the town; most American towns look like they’ve exploded across the countryside. What made Dothan southern was the way the sprawl had sucked all the life out of the center of the town, leaving it mostly a vasty expanse of parking lots. There was none of the quaint cuteness that would have filled a similar town in New England; but even California towns have more life in their centers. (In that sense, Quitman was actually more like a northeastern town than most Southern ones.)

The deadness of the centers applied to the larger cities, as well. (Birmingham was a partial exception.) We arrived into Montgomery at night, so it was less than surprising that the central city seemed deserted. We did find a nice little brewpub next to a retro-style minor league ballpark. It closed early, but the patrons suggested two other nearby bars. We went to one on the first floor of a motel on a hill at the edge of downtown, where the buzz-cut bartender sold me a $15 contraband Cuban cigar (putatively) that I then got to smoke right at the bar. (Some differences, they are awesome.) But the difference really showed up during the  day, where the downtown seemed to never open. It was an expanse of parking lots, vacant storefronts and drive-through banks, punctuated by the piles of government buildings and frighteningly devoid of traffic. And I don’t mean just pedestrian traffic. Kids could have played hockey in the middle of Dexter Avenue at 10am, if there had been any kids. And lunch didn’t change anything. Did all those government workers stay holed up in their offices?

Now, it is not like the northeast did not have abandoned urban centers when I was growing up. Central New Haven circa 1990? Ugh. The once-great “Hub” of the South Bronx? Awful. Baltimore? You have seen the Wire. And my first visit to Buffalo in 1990 can only be called depressing, along with my second, third and fourth. 

No, what was weird to a northeastern sensibility was that downtown Montgomery felt abandoned but not decayed. The streets and plazas were spotless. The empty storefronts were well-sealed and well-maintained. It all looked as if it had been suddenly abandoned in the face of an invading army. It was strange.

But that was just weird. What made Montgomery downright eerie was all the Confederate memorials. Sure, Rosa Parks had her plaque. And there were no slaveowning banners. But you couldn’t escape the oddly-respectful memorials to the Lost Cause. Statues of “The Statesman,” e.g., Jefferson Davis. Murals in the state capitol (which the legislature no longer uses) celebrating horseback-riding antebellum aristocrats. A memorial to the Confederate dead who served in the “War of Southern Independence.” 

The monuments to the Civil War were even more common outside the big cities: the below picture is from Havana, Florida, and it captures just how strange the monuments are:

Consider exactly what those soldiers were defending their families, communities, state and nation from. And then consider that the term “nation” is in that sentence. Wait ... what?

In southeastern Georgia we saw many more slaveowning Battle Flags than in Alabama, including a bumper sticker on a truck bearing the ominous slogan: “It’s Not Over.” A Shell station off of I-75 right over the Florida state line flew a gigantic Third Flag of the Confederacy. The design of the Third Flag is sufficiently obscure that it leaves little doubt that whomever put it up knew exactly what it stood for; no pretending to hide behind “southern heritage” here.

It completely weirded me out. As I wrote at the time, “It’s not the Cavaliers and the Roundheads, it’s slavery, dude. I can see memorializing the poor bloody soldiers who suffered and died for the CSA, but the CSA’s leaders should be treated the way the Germans treat the Nazis.”

Now, this was late 2004, so some of the strange atmosphere was supercharged from the recent election. In Georgia, an angry pickup driver threateningly tailgated us on a rural road, probably incensed by my Kerry-Edwards bumper stickers. He pulled up next to us and looked like he was about to start something when he noticed my friend was wearing BDUs. He got solemn and suddenly sped off. In Gainesville, we overheard loud laments about the war in Iraq from hospital workers eating at a Japanese steakhouse made up to look like a pagoda. And in Birmingham, Alabama, a diner did in fact serve us “American fries.”

And while not directly election-related, we kept running into angry demonstrations against the use of “Happy Holidays.” This was not a new thing by 2004, but I had lived in Mexico from 1996 to 2002 and spent most of 2002-04 in New Haven, various Army posts, and overseas. So the angry demonstrations against a completely anodyne phrase that had been used in the more Jewish parts of America since before I was born took me completely off guard.

But for all that, the real strangeness had to do with the war. The war that had ended 139 years ago by that point and will reach its 150th anniversary this year. 

Which brings us to a recent comment by Dave Evans of Georgia, who took issue with my characterization of the Confederate flag as the “slaveowning banner.” In the next post, I will lift my response to him from the comments. I think it is worth highlighting. But for right now, I just want to leave it with the statement that driving through the English-speaking South is a far stranger experience for a New Yorker than anywhere in English-speaking Canada west of Quebec.