Pride

Paul Krugman makes the essential but widely ignored point that slaveowners defended slavery so fiercely because they were making money from transforming other people into literal property. In this context, I’ll note that by far the most commonly used casebook for the required first-year law school Property course in American law schools does not contain the word “slavery” anywhere in its 1249 pages. (And before anybody mentions it, the notion that you can actually study contemporary property law in an edifying manner without also delving deeply into the historical roots of the contemporary property rights regime is exactly the kind of reactionary nonsense that the purveyors of such nonsense promote by labeling any inquiry into such matters as woke ideology, corrupting the youth of Athens, Ohio).

Here I want to focus on the psychology of systems of oppression:

Slaves became a hugely important financial asset to their owners. Estimates of the market value of slaves before the Civil War vary widely, but they were clearly worth much more than the land they cultivated, and may well have accounted for the majority of Southern wealth. Inevitably, slaveholders became staunch defenders of the system underlying their wealth — ferocious and often violent defenders (remember bleeding Kansas), because nothing makes a man angrier than his own, probably unacknowledged suspicion that he’s actually in the wrong.

Indeed, slaveholders and their defenders lashed out at anyone who even suggested that slavery was a bad thing. As Abraham Lincoln said in his Cooper Union address, the slave interest in effect demanded that Northerners “cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right.”

One question that fascinates me is this: What percentage of the many tens of millions of Americans who are going to vote for Trump and Trumpism 300 days from now will do so with some knowledge, whether conscious or semi-conscious or unconscious, that they are actually in the wrong? I don’t for a moment deny that there are huge numbers of sincerely committed hardcore reactionary authoritarians and revenant fascists of all stripes in the American polity. I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about the vaguely in the middle of the political spectrum lifelong Republicans by habit, who know that Trump and everything he represents is deeply corrupt, and a kind of fundamental rot in our political system and broader culture, but who can’t bear to acknowledge this publicly, or perhaps even to themselves, and who are so angry precisely for this reason. (“Nothing makes a man angrier than his own, probably unacknowledged suspicion that he’s actually in the wrong.”). I don’t doubt this was also true for a significant number of slaveowners, who couldn’t make that acknowledgement because, among other reasons, the money was too good.

I see this same dynamic in so many facets of life. Someone makes a mistake, or series of mistakes, and instead of acknowledging that and changing course, they dig in even further, because the acknowledgement is too psychologically painful — too dangerous to their sense of self, their identity as a good German American, or Christian, or boss, or colleague, or spouse, or . . .