The Civil War isn’t over. It can still be lost.
The Civil Rights movement isn’t over, either. It is being lost.
Nowhere is this truth more obvious than Mississippi.
Mississippi had about 2.1 million people in 1960. In 2020 it had 2.9 million. It was only two states to lose population during the decade of the cloud. Its economic growth is anemic. Growth is best when federal receipts expand during recessions, or during economic boom times when gambling rises.
If Mississippi were a country, and not getting federal aid, it would be part of the Third World. It tried to build an oil economy, and a lumbering economy, but the big draw is still casinos, which line the Mississippi, the Gulf Coast. What happens when online gambling, and online sports betting, eliminates the need for casinos? It’s a question no one even asks.
Mississippi is a case study for current Republican priorities. Jim Crow never left Mississippi. He just adapted, giving local power where blacks held local majorities, but maintaining power through an all-white power structure that still survives.
Where there’s talent in Mississippi there’s also emigration. Elvis was from Mississippi. Tennessee Williams was from Mississippi. But no one with money and talent ever made their fortune in Mississippi. There are no tech companies in Mississippi, just the shadow of LDDR, the phone roll-up Bernie Ebbers built. Bernie died last year, released from prison only because he was dying.
Mississippi is still dying. You don’t notice because our government keeps pumping money into it. Yet this is the model, of white political domination, that Republicans intend for the whole country. Find me one policy pursued by national Republicans that’s not also pursued by Mississippi Republicans.
This is controversial across the country only because Jim Crow’s followers are a minority among the American people. They’re the majority in Mississippi, an unshakeable majority. That’s because if you have the talent to make it elsewhere, you can.
Growth industries can’t stand governance that treats people as disposable. We can’t let America become Mississippi.
