Tag Archives: conservatives

The Old South Renews Its Assault on the LGBT Community

By William K. Black
April 17, 2016     Bloomington, MN

In the first installment of this column I showed how radically the states of the former Confederacy are acting to destroy the policies of the “New South” and disinter the Old South.  I used North Carolina as my example.  This second column focuses on the renewed assault of the Old South on the LGBT community.  In particular, I discuss why so much of the business community reacts so strongly in opposition to this assault.  But what I am most interested in is explaining why the political leaders of the Old South’s renewed assault are flabbergasted by the business community’s opposition and respond to it in ways that reinforce the opposition.  The emerging leaders of the Old South simply cannot understand why national and global business leaders see the assault on the LGBT community as a problem.  I think the anti-LGBT political leadership of the reemerged Old South have three problems that explains this lack of understanding.

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The “New South” Reverts to the Old South

By William K. Black
April 12, 2016     Bloomington, MN

The rise of the “New South” is generally dated to around 1970, when socially and economically conservative white Democratic politicians who were moderate on racial issues began to be elected as governors in many Southern states.  The timing was just right in that, due to hatred for the Republican Party’s role in stopping the spread of slavery and then winning the Civil War, that Party was still anathema to many Southern whites.  The Republican Party’s “Southern strategy” would soon reverse this process and lead to that party’s modern domination of the South.  Today, the New South is rapidly reverting back to the pathologies of the Old South.  This first column looks at North Carolina as an example of this reversion.  The second column discusses the most recent manifestation of disinterring the bigotry that defined the Old South – the atavistic assault on the LGBT community.

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The Curious Case of the English “Envenom” Meme about the Scots

By William K. Black
May 11, 2015

My intended series about the UK election is expanding because the material is just too good and too important. My “Kilkenomics” colleague Liam Halligan who is the lead economics writer for the Telegraph wrote a column dated May 10, 2015 about the election that sparked this column. The tag line for his column is: “Nigel Farage has opened a Pandora’s box that cannot now be closed.” Farage was the former (and likely future) leader of UKIP, the ultra-right party enraged by immigrants, particularly people of color.

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Prime Minister Cameron’s “Southern Strategy” Wins (and Loses)

By William K. Black
Quito: May 8, 2015

Paul Krugman has a good column today entitled “Triumph of the Unthinking” about the Tory electoral triumph in the UK. Krugman makes three central points. First, the Tories and the UK media have created a myth about austerity that is utterly false – and poison to Labour while falsely flattering to the Conservatives. Second, rather than fight the myth by explaining why austerity in response to the Great Recession was an insane policy that gratuitously forced the UK back into a severe recession, Labour has embraced austerity. Krugman opines that Labour felt that public support for austerity was so strong that the party’s leadership felt it was impossible to do the right thing.

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The Republican Campaign to Convince Missouri to Join in a Fiscal Suicide Pact with Kansas

By William K. Black
(Cross-posted at Benzinga.com and Huffington Post)

I have written previously to describe Kansas Republicans’ unholy war against moderate conservatives of their own Party.  Governor Brownback and Secretary of State Kobach led the successful purge in the primary elections of any Republican official who did not back dramatic changes in taxation and measures against “undocumented workers” or “illegal immigrants.”  The Kansas fiscal plan will end most income taxes, adopt highly regressive taxes that will not provide equivalent revenue, and sharply cut social programs such as education. Continue reading

New Sense—Common Sense

By J.D. ALT

The principal dilemma of the progressive cause is that it has allowed a bedrock conservative premise to go so long unchallenged; indeed the progressives themselves have either overtly or implicitly agreed with the premise, making it virtually impossible for them to effectively advocate their goals:

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Men on a Wall

By J.D. Alt

I recently saw a newspaper photo of ten or twelve men sitting on a crumbling stone wall beside a dirt road. It was somewhere in Africa, but the location doesn’t matter. What matters is that the men, as the caption made clear, were sitting on the wall because they had nothing else to do: they had no land to farm, there was no local job or employment available to them, they had no savings or credit with which to start some venture. Continue reading