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There’s a Bloomberg video link which I found quite interesting. It’s to a video where the most and least miserable states were ranked. And guess what? The most miserable ones are in that place of the country where (aside from roads built by convicts) there is no great tradition of publicly-built and publicly-owned infrastructure, where the middle class was never all that strong and is now nonexistent, where egalitarianism had no chance with a filthy-rich planter class lording it over everyone else (and which used racism to keep everyone else divided and thus unable to overthrow the planter class), and which has governors like Bobby Jindal and Haley Barbour:
Compare this to the five least miserable states, all of which have long egalitarian traditions and civic-mindedness and far less income inequality, and most of which have long histories of publicly-funded and publicly-owned infrastructure (one of them even has a state-owned bank that is the envy of Wall Street):
Now, there’s a message here. Think you can figure out what it is, FOX News watchers?
(Crossposted to Mercury Rising.)
2 Comments
Probably true regarding the ‘most miserable states,’ but it’s more complicated with the ‘least miserable states.’ People who have a problem with ultra-high taxes in Massachusetts tend to move away, especially to New Hampshire, so the worst malcontents might simply leave. In the 70s, though, plenty of people in Mass. were unhappy enough to throw rocks at buses over forced busing policies. Vermont, North Dakota and New Hampshire never did have a very big black underclass, which is where a lot of the misery comes from. Not sure about Minnesota, but I would guess it’s not too dissimilar to Vermont, though they have lately taken to accepting a lot of refuguess from Somalia. Maybe this will change the state’s misery ratings over time.
The misery in the South comes from divide and conquer — there is money in the South, but for centuries it’s been locked up in the hands of a small moneyed plantation class that was shaken but not dislodged by the nominal end of slavery. (All they did was expand the sharecropping system, which used debt peonage to keep blacks and most poor whites in a state of virtual slavery.) The moneyed class’ members, like those of all moneyed classes everywhere, are not interested in spending any of their money on improving even marginally the lives of the masses, because the masses might then realize that they have the power to take more than the crumbs the elites give them.
I can’t personally speak for Vermont and New Hampshire, but Minnesota’s been getting a lot less white over the past few decades — we have the second-largest Hmong, Cambodian and Vietnamese immigrant communities outside of California, and the Latino and African-American communities have always been prominent in our biggest cities — and it also has the infrastructure and the commitment to egalitarianism to handle the influx of new residents from other cultures. That being said, it has “white flight” issues like any other place in America, though those are starting to fade as more and more of the descendants of the people who first fled starting in the ’60s and ’70s are noticing the pinch in their wallets from the daily commutes (most still work in the downtowns their parents fled because none of the “white flight” communities have the business presence of the cities from whence the whites fled, as they’re too cheap to pay for it) more than they are flinching at the sight of people who were born with dark skin. You can even find Latino-oriented businesses like carnecerias and taquerias in rural farming communities nowadays.