There was a time – a very long time, in fact – when the U.S. economy was based in part on slave labor.

In a slave economy, legal entities like businesses and individual owners have the right to do with a worker entirely as they see fit. If they want to fire the worker, they can do so with impunity. If they want to set fire to that worker, they can do likewise.

In a slave economy, the worker is, first and foremost, property and that property is protected by the legitimate force of the state.

For example, in a slave economy, one owner can sue another for stealing a worker and the outcome of that suit will be enforced by the government, from the courts on down to the police. Since a runaway slave is a worker who would steal him or herself away from his or her owner, the police would rightfully be enlisted to capture or kill a person fleeing for their life and liberty in order to protect the rights of the owner.

It would be the law-abiding thing to do. Some might even say it would be the patriotic thing to do.

Our nation celebrated 86 independence days while enforcing the property rights of slave owners. Such is the power of tradition and the impulse to conserve the status quo no matter how immoral.

We don’t often think about just how such an economy was run on a day to day basis. Ask a young person born in the 1980s how to run a society where the majority are slaves and they might answer that you’d need machine guns at every corner.

In fact, such shows of force were not always needed. Instead, the slave economy was in part maintained by acts of state-sanctioned terrorism. Separating children from their parents – or threatening to do so – was one such act of terrorism. Depriving a father and mother of their child is a more cost-effective way to crush the human instinct to seek out freedom than the crushing of hands and feet.

There are yet more subtle and lasting ways to destroy the human spirit. For example, depriving children of an education induces mind-numbing hopelessness in parents and children alike.

It is worth remembering these details when thinking about the flag of the states that attempted to secede from the U.S.A. during the Civil War. Can the confederate flag represent merely the principle of local autonomy – can it be rehabilitated as a noble symbol of “states rights”?

Whatever someone might want it to mean today, it was intended to serve as the flag of an organized effort to protect a slave economy maintained by wealthy terrorists who justified their abomination using religious scripture.

Can such a loaded symbol really be rehabilitated? Is it too soon? After all, there are many people alive today, descendants of slaves, who were beaten by police a few decades ago for insisting on the right to send their children to the same schools as their fellow citizens.

It is also worth remembering these details of our national heritage when considering what people mean when they talk about shutting down public agencies or ending the public funding of schools.

chaser:

You cannot be betrayed by a stranger. Only an intimate can break that bond. You’re only disappointed by those you love.

The current populism being fanned by the right wing bloc is not, at heart, a fear of the other but a resentment of their own. A feeling of betrayal.

Here’s one tell: they don’t accuse the left of ignorance or incompetence but of arrogance – of arrogant deception.

Former governor Sarah Palin addressing a crowd a few months ago:

“They talk down to us. Especially here in the heartland. Oh, man. They think that, if we were just smart enough, we’d be able to understand their policies. And I so want to tell ’em, and I do tell ’em, Oh, we’re plenty smart, oh yeah—we know what’s goin’ on. And we don’t like what’s goin’ on. And we’re not gonna let them tell us to sit down and shut up.”

Palin’s most die-hard fans appreciate Palin the woman more than they do her specific proposals. (She doesn’t talk much about policy these days nor could she in 140 character Tweets, her preferred mode of public address other than the fundraising script and the Facebook update.)

So what positions does Palin support? Those suggested to her by luminaries like William Kristol.

Here is William Kristol endorsing Palin as McCain’s better half in their 2008 campaign:

Palin also made clear that she was eager for the McCain-Palin campaign to be more aggressive in helping the American people understand “who the real Barack Obama is.” Part of who Obama is, she said, has to do with his past associations, such as with the former bomber Bill Ayers. Palin had raised the topic of Ayers Saturday on the campaign trail, and she maintained to me that Obama, who’s minimized his relationship with Ayers, “hasn’t been wholly truthful” about this.

…And maybe I’d add, Hockey Mom knows best.

Did William Kristol believe President Obama was aligned with terrorists? Nope:

So McCain has to tie the economic crisis to Obama’s character and judgment and say who you want in charge in difficult years, who is up to the job, liberal democrats who has hung out with characters, do you want him to run the country. That’s got to be the core of McCain’s message.

Kristol, who was born into the elite of New York City and spent his formative years in Cambridge, Mass, knows all too well just who the questionable characters are in the drama that unfolded on Wall Street during the great unwinding. If there were any dubious associations for McCain to tie to Obama’s character, it would be Obama’s ties to the upper class.

But Kristol would never point the spotlight at his own people. Instead, Kristol supported Palin’s tactics of innuendo and character assassination in order to amass power by any means necessary. The real radical, it turns out, is Kristol.

So who is deceiving whom? Who is so arrogant as to believe they can cover their tracks by telling white lies?

Again, the feeling of betrayal being stoked by the right wing movement is of their own creation. It is a masterful act of misdirection that they, by repeatedly betraying the very people they claim to represent, can thus heighten the contradictions.