If you look at the Red State / Blue State divide and you tie it out with a map of States With Large Fossil Fuel Businesses, they line up disturbingly tightly. O&G is a patronage system in much the same way the MIC and the financial sector are patronages for large political constituencies.
Often hard for people to get the macro perspective and realize we're choosing to perpetuate these trends, we're not just riding some natural economic wave beyond any institution's control.
That doesn't hold up when you get to states like Wyoming, the Dakotas, Utah, or West Virginia. It also doesn't hold up when you interrogate some of the biggest benefactors of slavery - Manhattan and Chicago brokers who leveraged the Dredd Scott decision and the Fugitive Slave Acts to functionally extend the franchise above the Mason-Dixon Line. Why are Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin swing states? Why is Virginia considered safe in 2024 and North Carolina on the tipping point? Hell, you can visualize the red wave that passed through the Midwest in the wake of the frakking boom under Obama. Even setting aside his shit politics, the geyser of O&G money was what ultimately flipped a bunch of those seats.
Accumulated wealth from the Plantation Era definitely trickled down to subsequent generations and formed the foundation of southern bourgeois wealth. But the agg sector wasn't what formed the foundation of industrial-era wealth in the US. It was the mineral and fossil fuel industries that became the primary accumulators of profitable capital. A big part of the Southern Strategy was Nixon, Goldwater, Reagan, and Bush tapping that wellspring of financial clout.
If you look at the Red State / Blue State divide and you tie it out with a map of States With Large Fossil Fuel Businesses, they line up disturbingly tightly. O&G is a patronage system in much the same way the MIC and the financial sector are patronages for large political constituencies.
Often hard for people to get the macro perspective and realize we're choosing to perpetuate these trends, we're not just riding some natural economic wave beyond any institution's control.
Red vs. Blue county maps also line up with areas that owned the most slaves. Looks like they replaced cotton with oil.
That doesn't hold up when you get to states like Wyoming, the Dakotas, Utah, or West Virginia. It also doesn't hold up when you interrogate some of the biggest benefactors of slavery - Manhattan and Chicago brokers who leveraged the Dredd Scott decision and the Fugitive Slave Acts to functionally extend the franchise above the Mason-Dixon Line. Why are Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin swing states? Why is Virginia considered safe in 2024 and North Carolina on the tipping point? Hell, you can visualize the red wave that passed through the Midwest in the wake of the frakking boom under Obama. Even setting aside his shit politics, the geyser of O&G money was what ultimately flipped a bunch of those seats.
Accumulated wealth from the Plantation Era definitely trickled down to subsequent generations and formed the foundation of southern bourgeois wealth. But the agg sector wasn't what formed the foundation of industrial-era wealth in the US. It was the mineral and fossil fuel industries that became the primary accumulators of profitable capital. A big part of the Southern Strategy was Nixon, Goldwater, Reagan, and Bush tapping that wellspring of financial clout.