Elsewhere on the Gulf of Mexico, BP has pulled off the neat trick of hiring cleanup workers at depressed pay, thanks to its own malfeasance: The spill ruined Gulf maritime industries,  further glutting the already flooded labor market, and driving down wages. That’s the freely-employed, of course. But BP, like the Florida tomato growers, is also availing itself of another variety of unfree labor — prison workers, happily offered up by local officials to do a job that The Nation has called “arguably the most toxic in America.”

This is America, on Labor Day week in 2010. But in more ways than we like to notice, it feels like 1910. Somehow, the labor laws and basic protections that we once thought were part of the fabric of American democracy have been quietly excised. Of course, in the South, the postwar dream of free, prosperous, safe labor was never really there at all. The region has always been poorer. It’s always had more rapacious bosses. And Southern workers (especially white ones) have always seemed mysteriously willing to take it, as far as often-condescending Northern liberals can tell.

It’s the glaring question that sharp students always notice and want to ask about Southern politics: Why have poor white people, seemingly such obvious beneficiaries of progressive politics, never joined with their oppressed black neighbors to overthrow their outnumbered overlords?

Conservative habits tell much of the story. Racism has long kept white Southerners from forming the biracial alliance that progressives see as so obviously beneficial; but if racism is costly in this sense, in another it is a lucrative investment, and not casually abandoned. Gender norms keep the peace too. Southern white men have long understood that they are, as one historian has put it, “masters of small worlds,” and a threat to one master is a threat to all.

But, despite the temptation to liberal arrogance, it’d be a mistake to imagine that poor white Southerners are befuddled fools, with no understanding of their class identity and class interest. That’s the view of someone who won’t grant the courtesy of knowing some of the history of workers in the region. And there’s no better week than this one to remember.

On September 6, 1934 — 76 years ago Monday — gunmen guarding Chiquola Mill in Honea Path, South Carolina opened fire on a crowd of picketing textile workers. They killed seven, and wounded about 30. If the history of industrial labor in the South has been a stage tragedy, this was the climactic moment; the rest, for white workers at least, is denouement.

The story of how white Southern workers ended up looking down the barrel of a gun starts, however, much earlier.

After the destruction of slavery in the Civil War, the last remaining pocket unconquered by industrial capitalism was opened up. Investors realized that the undeveloped South was easy pickings. Starting around 1880, textile mills abandoned the New England towns we associate them with — Lowell, Lawrence, and so forth — and moved to the Southern Piedmont, the region running from Virginia to Alabama that sits above the coastal plain but below the Appalachians. Think Greensboro, Charlotte and Birmingham.

At first running on water-power from Appalachian streams and labor power from uprooted farmers, the Southern mills quickly became the largest industrial enterprises around, the symbols of the New South. But this profit rested on intensive exploitation and domination: whole families worked in the mills, including children. The “mill-hands” received appallingly low pay, worked in nightmare conditions, and were utterly dependent on the companies: the general rule was that they lived in mill-owned villages, inhabited company-owned houses, shopped at company stores and went to company doctors. For a few years before going to work, the children might go to company schools, and the men played on company baseball teams. They even worshiped, typically, in churches that were paid for by the mill. (Of course, while the executives might pay the salary of the mill-hands’ Holiness preacher, they wouldn’t dream of going to the same church themselves. The mill towns were strictly segregated along class lines, as well as racially. To the “uptown” folk, the mill workers were the “lintheads,” their stunted, pale and diseased neighbors, to be pitied and loathed.)

The institution of the mill town was an endless paradox. It was a kind of half-prison, half-fortress. Mill-hands couldn’t control their collective destiny, but they could, and did, control some of their own lives and take care of each other. Said one, Hoyle McCorkle, “It was a two-hundred-headed family. Everybody on this hill, we looked after one another.” (Another paradox: McCorkle’s sentiment is both a statement of fact, and a glossing over of the widespread realities of alcoholism, early-and-often pregnancies and domestic violence.)

Mill-hands were plagued by pellagra, a malnourishment disease caused by their limited diets of pinto beans, mustard and turnip greens, fatback meat, and often little else. They lived in low-grade shotgun shacks. Yet for all that their conditions were brutal and the experience of industrial work was generally degrading and humiliating to these uprooted rural folk, they were still fed and housed. This was more than they could count on while back on the farm. And it was more than black Southerners could ever take for granted — a grim privilege that the almost universally white and racist mill-hands were well aware of.

This system, stretched taut by irony though it was, remained stable until World War I. If the mill-hands kept quiet enough — which they knew to do — they could usually scrape by. But the mills overexpanded to meet wartime demand, and the tightly-drawn fabric of mill life started to unravel. Recession followed recession for textiles, and the whole industry was in depression well before the great crash in 1929.

To keep profits from sinking too far, the companies deployed then-voguish “scientific management” techniques. College-educated consultants — often Northerners to boot — working in the tradition of management guru Frederick Taylor patrolled the factory floors with stopwatches and clipboards, telling mill-hands how to do their jobs faster. Workers were decimated by layoffs, yet still found production quotas doubling, tripling, or more, while their pay stagnated or sank. For the masses of Southern textile workers, the depression was almost two decades long, and was associated with one word, describing the new factory regime: “stretchout.”

The stretchout brought workers into the streets. “During the last few years men have been carried away from their work dead or unconscious. I ask you to read of the cruelty of Pharoah to the Israelites to get a comparison,” wrote one. At one protest, a group of eight mill-hands carried a coffin down the street; a ninth was lying in it, dressed up as their superintendent. Periodically, the “superintendent” would sit up and ask, “How many men are carrying this thing?” “Eight,” the marchers would reply. Then the faux-superintendent would command, “Lay off two; six can do the work.”

A strike wave broke out in 1929, but it was spontaneous and ill-organized. A series of bloody crackdowns extinguished the flashes of protest easily enough — most famously at Gastonia, N.C., where a fairly fraudulent trial followed a massacre, and ended with communist organizers fleeing to Russia.

Hope was renewed, after the failure of this first series of uprisings, by the election of Franklin Roosevelt. Mill-hands viewed the new president as a near-spiritual personal savior. In huge numbers, they wrote letters to him, to Eleanor Roosevelt and to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. Wrote one, “I want you to know that I am for you in this most wonderful undertaking. I am a long ways from you in distance yet my faith is in you my heart with you and I am for you sink or swim.” And they didn’t hesitate to tell him what they really thought. The mill bosses, wrote another, were “old slimy serpants crowling spiting their Poison fighting your program.” In one now-famous letter, a mill-hand wrote to FDR, “You are the first man in the White House to understand that my boss is a son of a bitch.”

Yet the New Deal turned out not to be Kingdom Come for textile workers. Under the National Recovery Administration, various boards were set up to arbitrate between labor and capital, and new codes were written to regulate the industry. But Roosevelt let the companies write them. Ed Bruere, the head of the new Cotton Textile Labor Relations Board, scoffed, “Every introduction of improved machinery or technical methods is likely to be interpreted as stretchout.” Bruere’s CTLRB received thousands of complaints from August 1933 to 1934. It ruled only one time in a worker’s favor in a wage-and-hour dispute.

Although they still felt the president himself was on their side, mill-hands understood that negotiations were over. After a summer of watching the textile companies flout their demands, Alabama workers decided they’d had it. The union, the United Textile Workers, was reluctant, but they walked off the job anyway in midsummer of 1934. Word spread up the Piedmont virtually overnight. Strikers piled into trucks and cars and raced from mill town to mill town to call mill-hands out to join them before the bosses could catch on. Since the strike was obviously happening one way or the other, the UTW — a generally feeble and conservative union — called a meeting, and endorsed the thing. On September 1, 1934, the general textile strike began. With participation between 200,000 and 400,000, from Maine to Alabama, it was the largest labor rebellion in American history to that point. The only prior uprising that exceeded it was the collapse of slavery during the Civil War.

But, while a general strike is an inspiring thing, it’s not easy to pull off. Strikers quickly started finding themselves evicted from company houses, and homeless. As people who lived to hand-to-mouth, how could they last without paychecks? The UTW, broke and disorganized as it was already, was in no position to feed a few hundred thousand hungry people. The churches — another common fallback — were largely unfriendly. Worst of all, the federal government was nowhere to be seen, and state and local officials were getting their response ready.

In South Carolina, Gov. Ibra Blackwood rounded up a posse, promising to deputize “mayors, sheriffs, peace officers and every good citizen.” In Georgia, Gov. Eugene Talmadge declared martial law, and rounded up strikers in internment camps. (Newspapers in Nazi Germany crowed that this was a sign of fascism’s coming global triumph.) Mill companies did what they had always done: buy up a quick-assembly industrial army — some police, some goons-for-hire — to menace picketers. And at Honea Path, on the sixth day of the general strike, the inevitable massacre happened.

It wasn’t immediately obvious that it was all over then. 10,000 mourners showed up to the funeral for the Honea Path dead, seemingly defiant. (Nor was Honea Path the only case of violence, although it was the most famous. Machine gun nests became a normal sight on the roofs of textile mills during the strike.) Bessie Shankle remembered that her family “nearly starved to death” during the strike. Now they were being shot at too, and it had become clear that no help was on the way. After a few weeks, with the dead likely numbering in the dozens, the uprising began to disintegrate.

Roosevelt appointed a board to arbitrate a deal. But, revealing his lack of interest in the workers’ cause, he put a Republican in charge, New Hampshire Gov. John G. Winant (no relation of mine). The Winant board sided with the workers on virtually nothing; Roosevelt politely asked the mills not to blacklist strikers — a request that they denied. But the union, desperate to seem successful, wanly declared victory anyway. The workers, betrayed, walked away and never came back. “You seem to think we won something,” wrote Mollie Dowd. “I just cannot see it and things here are in a much worse condition than they were three months ago.”

The crushing of the strike imparted a clear enough lesson: keep your head down. For a whole generation of mill workers, the disaster became a taboo, bad luck even to mention. “I took a man’s hat off his head and fanned him ’til he died, ’til the breath left him. But I ain’t got no more to say into it. I’ve been trying to forget about all of that, and this is just bringing it all back up,” remembered a veteran of Honea Path. When interviewed later, a daughter of a striker marveled that she didn’t know the story herself. “I can’t understand why my Dad didn’t tell me. He could talk about the war and about people being blown to bits, but he couldn’t talk about his neighbors being killed. It’s like somebody trying to hide a dirty secret about their family, like they’re ashamed.”

After 1934, the labor movement would try every few years to organize Southern textiles. The rise of the CIO unions starting in 1935, left the cotton mills as the biggest industry without a major union presence. An attempt in 1937 failed when organizers tried to convince bosses that the union and the manager could be friends. The mill-hands were disgusted. A more serious campaign in 1946, dubbed “Operation Dixie,” showed little ability to uproot or challenge the now-institutionalized and intensifying stretchout. Seeing no reason to go out on a limb again, the workers held onto their skepticism; little else had ever worked for them. The union, explained mill-hand Ila Dodson, is “nothing but trouble.”

The basic tenets of 20th-century progressive politics in America — unionism, the welfare state, public-safety regulations — all failed the mill-hands, the largest class of industrial workers in the South. And the failure was spectacular, a once-in-a-generation trauma. The inability of New Deal liberalism to bring on board the Southern white working class was, it seems in retrospect, its ultimate undoing. Who was it that voted for Wallace, then Nixon, then Reagan? The depressing question points to the politically weak people for whom racism was the only bullet left in the chamber. We can’t excuse their racism this way. But we can start to understand it.

The historian Robert Zieger has said that, although we are fond of thinking of the South as stuck in the past, when it comes to labor relations, Dixie is not where we have been. It’s where we are going. It is exaggerating, but not by too much, to say that the unraveling public safety state and the union-free country we know today emerged from the violence at Honea Path. This descent has been possible, in part, because we forgot about 1934. And we forgot about 1934 because the mill-hands did themselves. It was too painful to remember.

Referenced in this article

This article relies on the work of more scholars than I can name here. A good guide to this story, however, begins with “Like a Family,” by Jacquelyn Hall et al., the true bible on the Southern textile mills. Other vital reading on the subject includes Bryant Simon’s “A Fabric of Defeat,” Glenda Gilmore’s “Defying Dixie,” Dolores Janiewski’s “Sisterhood Denied,” Janet Irons’ “Testing the New Deal,” John Salmond’s “The General Strike of 1934,” Douglas Flamming’s “Creating the Modern South,” Michelle Brattain’s “The Politics of Whiteness,” David Carlton’s “Mill and Town in South Carolina,” G.C. Waldrep’s “Southern Workers in Search of Community,” and Timothy Minchin’s “What Do We Need a Union For?”

Anyone interested in more specific recommendations is welcome to ask in the comments, and I’ll do my best to keep up.

So what makes for hallowed ground? The New York financial district is apparently too holy for a mosque, but not for strip clubs and bodegas and the rest of the features of a Manhattan neighborhood. (Nor, for that matter, does it seem to be too sacred for the financiers themselves. Aren’t they the real bad neighbors?) And Palin and Beck and I could all agree that the Lincoln Memorial has transcendent symbolic importance. But the way it’s important to me and the way it’s important to them are different. If they thought their Saturday rally was about using the legacy of Lincoln and King to “restore honor” to America, it seemed to me to be about exploiting that legacy to smuggle in a different meaning about our history and national character. In other words, sacred places aren’t sacred in the same way to everyone. They’re contested terrain; when we see significance in a patch of dirt, we’re saying something about the meaning of past events there. And when we say something about the meaning of past events, we are always, truly, arguing about the present.

L.P. Hartley famously wrote that the past “is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” It’s tempting to say that for the Tea Partiers, this isn’t true; their past is just America. But that’s not quite right, because it’s a kitschified, fictitious version: Americana-land. It’s a place where everyone was in the right, and everyone got along, back when everything was sepia-toned and men were men and the whole town played baseball on Saturday mornings.

This is what Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement mean to the Tea Party folks who got together at the Mall on Saturday. It’s what Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War mean too, and George Washington and the American Revolution. Utah GOP Rep. Jason Chaffetz described the attendees as “good old-fashioned Americans.” For Palin, Washington and Lincoln and King are distinguished by their identical, ironclad faith in God, and their “steel spines.” Beck himself has said, of himself and his followers, “We will reclaim the civil rights movement.” This cuts straight against the grain of history: white conservatives were of course the bedrock of opposition to civil rights. No matter, though, to the Fox showman. “We will take that movement because we were the people that did it in the first place.” This lost heroic past was somehow conveniently free of villains.

Unfortunately, this is a myth of white supremacy. The right wing is busy evacuating the real, troubling meanings from important historical sites, and replacing them with legends of self-flattery.

This is an ignoble tradition that began after the Civil War. David Blight, one of our leading historians of the era, has shown how the process of reconciliation between North and South entailed an agreement that what the war was about was the valor of the soldiers , the romance of blue and gray. Countless memorial events and battlefield reunions featured veterans shaking hands. At newly-sacred places — cemeteries, battlefields and memorials that still dot the South and the border states — white Northerners and Southerners forgave one another and dismissed the meaning of the bloodletting. “I think that we were both right and both wrong,” wrote one soldier, capturing the essence of the moment. “Life and history, and right and wrong and minds of men look out of more windows than we used to think! Did you never hear of the shield that had two sides and both were precious metal?”

The true, central catalyst of the war, which lent it its moral meaning — that is, slavery — was pushed out of mind. Even Northerners came to believe in the myth of the South’s noble, doomed “Lost Cause.” Human bondage, wrote former Confederate President Jefferson Davis, was “in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only an incident.” Northerners proved willing enough to go along, and to transmute their past into an ennobling myth; there’s a reason that people in both regions, even now, try to deny what the war was about, or to say that slavery was going out on its own anyway, or that the Confederacy had black soldiers. “Gone With the Wind” and “Birth of a Nation,” which in one way or another dramatize this argument, were enormous national hits for just this reason as well. Reconciling white people meant writing out black people. White Americans looked at their black countrymen and said, in effect, “This is our story now, not yours.”

This is what’s just happened at the Mall. Nobody was in the wrong during the civil rights years; King was a happy saint in the American tradition, not a dangerous radical.

The story with the hallowed ground of New York City is a little more complicated, but not too different. The real meaning of the disaster on September 11 — the way violence begets violence and fanaticism begets fanaticism, the way geopolitical maneuvering makes victims of ordinary people — is all gone. In its place is the vacuous sanctimony that it the place is “hallowed,” but all that seems to mean is that it is not open to Muslims.

Appropriately enough, just a few feet behind Palin’s podium on the Lincoln Memorial are Lincoln’s own words, on just this topic, carved into the marble. At Gettysburg cemetery, he warned, “We can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground.”

What is the meaning of the tragedy of September 11 supposed to be, that makes the place holy? For what purpose did those people die? And who are Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich to decide? What about the civil rights revolution? If conservatives can appropriate a movement that their ideological ancestors universally opposed, then surely, like the reunionists of the 19th century, they have warped its meaning.

Lincoln’s lesson at Gettsyburg was that, while the willingness of Union soldiers to die sanctified the battlefield, so did the cause itself: the “new birth of freedom,” the end of slavery. His words read now like an admonishment against sanctimony and narcissism. Don’t make this about you, he seems to say. “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”

In classic Tea Party fashion, Palin and Gingrich and Beck have been exaggerating their numbers. But they’re padding the figures with an army of the dead, unwillingly conscripted. That’s not just dishonest. It’s ghoulish, and it’s racist to boot. African-Americans and Muslim-Americans are being treated like supporting characters, not capable of their own citizenship, their own causes, their own struggles, and their own history. In the temples of Americana being built, the parts of our national past that don’t belong to the white, conservative population are being sacrificed.

Referenced in this article

David W. Blight’s book “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory“

It’s hard to imagine a more up-is-down, freedom-is-slavery rendition of American history. Because if the struggle for racial equality under the law was anything, it was radical. For years, the only people willing to talk about redistributing rights were the ones who were also pretty interested in redistributing land and wealth. By and large, the struggle for civil rights was initiated by activists whom Glenn Beck might actually be right to call “radical revolutionaries.”

It’s now an annual custom, every January, for progressive pundits to repeat that Martin Luther King was a left-liberal social democrat. This is utterly beyond any honest dispute, but it still hews to the textbook version of the Civil Rights Movement that starts with Brown vs. Board of Education. In recent years, however, American historians have been rewriting the story. In particular, they’ve been moving back its start date. It may seem pedantic to quibble about when the movement began, but it’s got enormous political implications.

The synthesis of this idea — it’s called the “Long Civil Rights Movement” — comes from a University of North Carolina historian named Jacquelyn Dowd Hall. In her presidential address to the Organization of American Historians, Hall argued that the neat bookends applied to the movement have concealed its true radical roots. There’s a vast wealth of historical scholarship to back this up.

For decades after Reconstruction, the best-organized resistance to white supremacy looked a lot like what we’d now call black nationalism, in various incarnations: the Garveyites, the Exodusters. And when, at the pinnacle of the American left — the 1930s — even the sainted Franklin Roosevelt proved unwilling to carry the torch of racial equality, radicals to his left picked it up. (Roosevelt, dependent on the racist arm of his party, never had much interest in fighting for equality.)

The New Deal didn’t have much to offer for many poor rural Southern folk, whose economy had been in depression since before the crash in 1929. So dirt-poor Southern farmers — especially black ones — didn’t gain much from schemes devised in Washington. Social security and the minimum wage were laws were written to exclude them. Federal dollars headed south tended to get intercepted by “Big Mule” types — the landlords and businessmen who owned the regional Democratic Party. The only major resistance came from groups like the racially integrated, politically radical Southern Tenant Farmers Union — that is, the socialist left.

Likewise, communism, particularly in Alabama, became in many ways the home base for African-American political action. Most famously, the Communist Party’s legal arm took over the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, the group of black teenagers facing trumped-up rape charges in Tennessee. Obviously, the Party was very far from perfect. Its agents were pursuing its own interests, and in this period of reflexive loyalty to the Kremlin — Stalin’s Kremlin — its members were hardly saints. Indeed, some black Southern radicals eventually went to Moscow, where they found out how much was wrong with the Soviet Union.  But pointing all that out does nothing to wash the guilt off of the political mainstream. And even the idea of a Southern African-American communist taking a pilgrimage to Red Square should be enough to give our right-wing heritage-burglars some pause.

Even after the crucible years of the Great Depression, the labor and socialist left continued to push for the full meaning of equality when few others would. In the immediate postwar period, the only major mass agitation for civil rights came out of the union movement, newly powerful since the 1930s. It was the explicitly left-wing, working-class institutions who pushed hardest on the boundaries of Jim Crow. Some workers’ organizations, like the tobacco workers’ union in North Carolina, were just about the only examples around of integrated institutions.

Labor radicals had a vantage point on society alienated enough to see what most people refused to. In fact, the originator of the idea of marching on Washington, A. Philip Randolph, was the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and a socialist. Randolph and Bayard Rustin, another socialist activist largely erased from the public memory, were arguably the two most important mentors to Martin Luther King.

Through these years, many mainstream liberals averted their eyes from the South (and, by the way, from the North too, which was hardly an egalitarian paradise). And conservatives actively fought against the incipient movement for racial equality. Alas, they were pretty successful. The coming of the Cold War and McCarthyism slowed the push for civil rights that had started on the radical left. The right wing succeeded in pushing back by years the onset of legal equality, and used charges of communism to devastate racially integrated organizations like the tobacco workers’ union. They also pushed out of memory the original demand for economic redistribution alongside civil rights.

Admitting that this coalition of communists, socialists and labor activists deserves credit — and the mainstream political class didn’t do itself proud — doesn’t make you a communist. And there are some good academic points to be made against the “Long Civil Rights Movement” argument. But none of them come from the right.

The “safe” civil rights movement we know and celebrate came out of this decidedly dangerous phenomenon. Just out of college, Shirley Sherrod — the former Agriculture Department official recently martyred to Fox News race-baiting — helped start an organization called New Communities. The group worked on getting a black communal farm up and running in rural Georgia, modeled on the Israeli kibbutz — itself, of course a socialist institution. They were hobbled by opposition by white supremacist Governor Lester Maddox, and faced unremitting hostility from white neighbors, who thought they smelled a whiff of communism coming from the New Communities land. Sherrod’s husband, Charles Sherrod, was an early member of SNCC, the crucial group behind what Beck might call the “civil unrest” of the 1960s. SNCC eventually became a seedbed of the Black Panther Party, which has lately been resurrected by Fox News to stir up racial panic.

It’s hard to miss all the historical echoes here. After a couple of years of ritual denunciations of officials and activists somehow associated with Barack Obama — loosely or not really at all — as Marxists or Maoists or communists or Black Panthers, we’re used to it. We get it already.

Laugh away at Glenn Beck’s paranoia, but — presumably unbeknownst to him — he’s actually got a point. The fact is that the basic norms of equality that we now think of as natural are indeed the result of radical agitation. Whatever her own politics are, Shirley Sherrod really was working in a tradition that goes back to people and groups whose beliefs Beck would find truly heinous. The grandparents of civil rights were folks who would never get through the vetting process for a job in the Obama administration today. They were much more like Van Jones than like his tormentor, Glenn Beck.

This August, Beck is planning a rally at the Lincoln Memorial, on the anniversary of the famous speech King gave there. The explicit point is to reclaim the legacy that the left has “perverted.” (This from the guy who accused Rep. John Lewis — one of King’s top lieutenants — of besmirching the memory of the Civil Rights Movement.)

Much as he’s done with the atheist radical Tom Paine, Beck is now trying to appropriate the memory of a cause that he’d undoubtedly fight tooth-and-nail if it were contemporary.  While bashing the NAACP as radical and anti-white, right-wing pundits like Beck have tried to identify themselves with true racial equality. But in trying to steal the legacy of the movement, they aren’t only scrubbing the truth about U.S. history. They’re making a mockery of the struggle for racial equality in one way, and of themselves in another. Beck and his comrades at Fox have robbed and defaced the graves of our heroes on the left, and are now strutting around in their stolen, ill-fitting burial suits. And if that’s grotesque and insulting, it’s also ironic beyond expression. If only Beck knew the real meaning of the ideas he pretends to believe.

It’s an amazing publication, committed all at once to serious news reporting, honest and hard-hitting opinion, the best popular feminist writing around, voluminous, brilliant books coverage, incisive and witty culture critics and a fantastic new food section. (Seriously, the number of these recipes I’ve used…) I could go on, but you can just click around for yourself. To manage all that while being independent, intimately involved with its readership, and, above all, good-humored makes this place a true treasure.

I’m leaving, but the truth is, you won’t be all the way rid of me just yet. This fall, I’ll be starting a PhD in American history. (I’ve been doing a master’s this year, and I imagine some readers have spotted the influence of my graduate work show up in my writing already.) A doctoral program is going to take up the better part of the time I can now give to Salon. But the folks here have generously offered to have me back to write more explicitly historically-informed commentary in the fall. I’ll do my solid best to bring important pieces of the past to bear on the present, and not to bore you to tears in the process.

For now, though, I’m going to go spend some time in California walking my dog, reading my books and playing my banjo — that kind of stuff. I’ll miss you guys, and hopefully see you again pretty soon. I hope you’ve liked what I’ve had to say. I’ve certainly appreciated the chance to say it.

Barton has apologized by now, under pressure from his party. But it’s too late: This was what Mickey Kaus, the former blogger and defeated Senate candidate, calls a Category II Kinsley gaffe, in which a politician says something he means, but is embarrassed by. As Joan Walsh pointed out yesterday, the impulse to shield BP from responsibility is pretty widespread on the right.

How is a party that is the devoted servant of corporate power still not only viable, but reliably able to win large chunks of the working-class vote? The right hand of the GOP plays a waltz for the party’s dance with big business; the left hand beats out a populist rhythm. Somehow, the two don’t cancel each other out. How can this be?

To try to understand this, we’ve got to go down a path that’ll take us pretty far from Joe Barton.

The classic treatment given to this question in the modern popular press comes from Thomas Frank. In his book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” Frank argued that the GOP’s corporate elite — the Bartons — spent the second half of the 20th century using social issues to misdirect populist anger. It’s more or less an argument for false consciousness, the outmoded but attractively simple idea that working people have failed to recognize that they’re locked in class conflict with their exploiters, and instead have come to believe in some other, false story of how society works. “Kansas” seems to have gained fairly widespread acceptance among mainstream, cosmopolitan liberals looking to diagnose the GOP’s success with the white working class as some kind of ailment. It’s the argument Barack Obama dug up when he made his infamous “cling to guns and religion” comment. (When it comes to Frank’s thesis, or the broader question, we are in particular talking about the white working class, and especially, the white male working class. Women and African-Americans have, for obvious reasons, been less tempted to identify with the powerful.)

Frank doesn’t say this in his book, but he was joining a rich and long-standing debate about this issue in history, philosophy and sociology. You could fill up a library with books on the question of working-class conservatism. And from all that writing, you’d find a good amount of criticism of Frank’s argument.

One problem with “Kansas” is that it casts the working-class Republican voter purely as a victim.  In doing this, Frank fails to ask how the political terrain might look to the people they pity, and what kind of action those people might be taking to help shape it.

The question to ask here if you are a white member of the working class — the demographic type around whom this debate swirls — is what can you do to gain more control over your life? Because that’s what politics is: people getting organized, or not, to control their lives. What are the weapons of this weak group?

You can’t form a union, most of the time. The combination of the global labor market, hostile labor law, implacable corporate opposition, and a desiccated union movement more or less rule that out. And why should you want to, really? Labor organizing incurs significant risks. Meanwhile, the union movement, for all of its value, remains bureaucratic and unimaginative, and has consistently failed to address the aspirations and desires of American workers.

Likewise, the Democratic Party won’t commit to a real relationship. Instead, it insists on the unconvincing proposition that workers can share it with business and professionals, and still get their needs met.

So that leaves you without tools to forthrightly conduct class politics in public. You’ve got no hope, and it seems almost foolish to dare to try. What’s left? Well, if you’re white, you can fall back on racism; if you’re a man, you can oppose gender equality. From one angle, the idea of social equality, whether along racial or gender lines, looks like a modern fabrication — just one more thing eating away at what’s precious and important. High capitalism does nothing if it doesn’t throw ancient values and habits up in the air like confetti, and make a mockery of the traditions of village, church and tribe. (That “ancient traditions” have themselves often been conditioned by American capitalism is of course also true. The more-or-less modern idea of “race” was invented to make slavery possible, but is felt no less genuinely for that. Nor has the origin of the idea of race limited in any way how we extravagantly reproduce it, year after year.)

It’s uncomfortable to think this way about egalitarian movements like feminism and the pursuit of racial equality. Obviously, nobody on the left should renounce gender equality or civil rights just because these ideas have produced enmity among a certain group that we might otherwise find sympathetic. But we also shouldn’t allow ourselves to slip into condescension, to imagine that people are just bigots and fools, tricked into opposing their own self-interest. They are participants in politics just like everyone else. Even the citizen who doesn’t vote at all is saying something about politics. The fact that some methods of political participation don’t make sense to liberals doesn’t mean that they don’t make sense at all.

By the way, this doesn’t exactly describe the Tea Party movement, which is less a workers’ populist movement than it is a middle-class one. Tea Partiers appear to be mainly small-business people and the like — petty bourgeois, as academics say. There’s frankly little use in agonizing over “why they hate us.” The resentments of the passed-by middle class have always fueled the most right-wing politics in modern democracies. If you go and read a good history of the second Ku Klux Klan – the 1920s movement – you’ll be amazed at how familiar much of the rhetoric is. But spare some sympathy, even for Glenn Beck’s most devoted followers. The democracy of Goldman Sachs and Wal-Mart is a tough place for the community bank and local hardware store.

This is a highly abbreviated summary of some of the issues around the weird dual nature of American conservatism. And as I warned, we’re awfully far now from Barton and BP. But it looks now like the GOP is set for some significant comeback in November. There’s not a bad chance that Barton will end up as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. And if he does, don’t groan about those idiot voters out in Texas and Kansas. Working-class voters don’t belong to the Democrats. They have a logic all their own, and liberals can only afford to ignore that for so long before, inevitably, it always finds a way to catch up with them, and sweep in corporate flunkies like Barton along with it.