America: Savage Shackles of Trump's South!

Donald Trump's support comes primarily from the traditional and conservative ex-slaving South and rural agricultural states founded since the Civil War. Why is this support primarily Evangelical Christian? Indeed, how can a pro-slavery culture also call themselves "Christian?" These questions are not simple and they go far back in the history of our democracy itself... assuming that America can claim to be wholly democratic in the first place! We may still suffer from a cultural "mental illness!"

English adventurers who wanted to gain profitable advantage from the New World came to the West Indies, as Spain had before them. They had lived a century in the shadow of the more powerful Spain and planned to take what they could from their rival, especially after Elizabeth I's defeat of the mighty Spanish Armada in 1588. John Hawkins, Humphrey Gilbert, Sir Francis Drake and others were the famed pirates of Queen Elizabeth! Pirating became their blood, their raison d'etre. They stole gold, silver, land, and slaves from their long-time rivals. These pirates began a tradition of savagery and brutality, officially supported by their monarch in England. English America began "beyond the lines of amity" as a wild place where even the most civilized of men became unwelcome to their friends and relatives back home in European. Furthermore, these pirates said that every act they committed was endorsed by God, but they truly used "God" as rhetoric and established their dominion in the New World based on this "Evilly-Christian" ideology:

Despite defying his Queen, subjugating peoples around the world, bullying, threatening, and then lavishing gifts upon his victims, Sir Francis Drake epitomized the English hero of the age as a “Sea Hawk.”  Of Drake, historian Wade Dudley remarked that he used God as a fear-invoking device, personally conducted religious services on his ship, despite the presence of clergy on board.  After the execution of one of Drake’s own crew in the Straits of Magellan, Dudley remarked “Though Drake certainly used God’s words to bend his crew to his will, he may well have been salving his own troubled soul.”

Later, these merchant-pirates (with troubled souls) came to mainland America from Barbados, a colony that found it more expedient and profitable to work slaves to death and replace them, rather than preserve their lives - still, God supported this crime against humanity. They founded a colony in 1671 called Carolina - still with this same cruel conservative ideology. That colony became the womb of the South, spreading slavery and their brutal brand of Christianity across the lower half of North America. It would later follow the path of rural agricultural states formed after the Civil War, roughly the same region as shown in this map of Trump's support at the time of his inauguration:

Founding Carolina was not the gilded venture found in most early history textbooks, but an oft-ignored and religiously-justified immoral and bloody affair. To begin this new approach, to understand Barbadian ideology as it contributed to the Lower Cape Fear, necessitates a study of the commencement of America in the Caribbean. The sugar islands and the capital that they created contributed significantly to Carolina and the Lower Cape Fear’s development.  Tied in a great portion to West Indian sugar production, laissez-faire capitalism also developed “with the convergence of agricultural improvements, global explorations, and scientific advances.”

"Laissez-faire" or "to let be" these brutal institutionalized practices could never be truly justified by any benevolent God, but they still became recognizably American. These brutal merchant-kings, accurately styled "pirates" by the rest of the world, intended to create their own mini-monarchies away from England - independent of, and far from the control of the English civility, after 1713, led by a German foreigner who didn't even speak English. This racist American culture produced buccaneers like Sir Henry Morgan, a brutal governor who sacked Panama and abused the Spanish citizenry - also, pirates like Blackbeard, Henry Jennings, Charles Vane, and the brutal Edward Low.

These men were not only racist, but also greedy profiteers, desiring to be independent kings in the New World, with huge tracts of land (a rare commodity in England) worked by massive numbers of slaves that they had grown so dependent upon for their sugar plantations in Barbados. They did not shy away from theft as a means of supplying their needs. Independent authoritarian land-owners, with visions of great avarice, they would establish their immense profitable fiefdoms all across the South.The society that they created was strongly feudal in ideology - with haves and have-nots, each class decided by God primarily upon the color of their skin. African slaves, treated no better than animals, were the serfs that would work the plantations of the new American nobility, authoritarian and unquestioned - literally dictators of the New World.

In 1776, at the time the American colonies decided to make their break from Britain, these new Nobles of the South saw their opportunity to have their own domains to themselves once and for all. They would reaffirm their new American feudal society, without a king to tax them and free of British abolitionists - those who annoyingly told them that slavery was immoral. When the colonies proposed a unanimous "Declaration" against a king “whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people,” Thomas Jefferson realized that a "free nation" could not also enjoy slavery. Jefferson included an anti-slavery clause in that document to avoid hypocrisy and to form a true democracy that any benevolent "creator" would endorse. This did not sit well with Southern colonies. South Carolina and North Carolina held the rest of the colonies hostage... holding their vote until Thomas Jefferson's anti-slavery clause was removed from the "unanimous" Declaration. True "democracy" would have to wait. Even afterward, the South strangled the nascent "democracy" again in 1789, demonstrating, like Sir Francis Drake on the deck of his ship, that their "Godly" support was merely a political device. He exposed the true desire of these early brutal capitalists - profit:

Upon the Constitutional debate following the American Revolution, John Routledge of South Carolina argued that “Religion and morality have nothing to do with this… interest [profit] alone is the governing principle with Nations.” Routledge, with an eye toward protecting their lucrative institution of slavery, represented the Deep South as Woodard described.  Morality, or lack thereof, most certainly influenced his argument.  He used the South’s great plantation wealth, derived from slave labor, as leverage at the Constitutional Convention, leverage to force its legitimization.  “The true question,” he said, “is whether the Southn. States shall or shall not be parties to the Union.”   Routledge held the Union hostage to officially accept slavery and Deep South whims.

In only 70 years, the South eventually fought a Civil War against their old ideological enemy- the slavery-damaged democracy of the United States - over protecting slavery, firing the first shot in that bloody war that killed 600,000 Americans.  

The political device invoked by Drake reappeared once again: their more monarchical Constitution invoked "the favor and guidance of Almighty God," contrary to the United States' "separation of church and state" and the doctrine of "religious freedom." The Confederacy was to be a "Godly" nation that also protected their "peculiar" brutal and profitable institution of slavery by making it the law of the land. The conservative capitalists would even protect their profits from non-slave states: "Congress shall also have power to prohibit the introduction of slaves from any State not a member of, or Territory not belonging to, this Confederacy."

Wikipedia's article on the CSA Constitution explains "Whereas the original U.S. Constitution did not use the word 'slavery' or the term 'Negro Slaves,' but used instead 'Person[s] held to Service or Labor' which included whites in indentured servitude, the Confederate Constitution addresses the legality of slavery directly and by name." The Confederacy also sided with our old enemies England and France (much like Trump does with Russia today) against us. 

Thomas Jefferson's old thoughts come back, reflecting the old split-personality of a damaged democracy... how can any democracy, a desired humane and "free" society, be filled with slavers who own an entire population of people who are certainly not free? How can these slavers claim to be "Christian"?

This is cultural and not easily changed. American award winning journalist and writer Colin Woodard, best known for American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (2011) writes that artificial boundaries “mask the cultural lines along which attitudes toward violence fall.”  Social violence today, he thinks, has distinct ideological origins. Woodard’s view politically divides our nation into several parts, examples of which are “Yankeedom,” “Tidewater,” and “Deep South.” He ignores traditional state boundaries in an effort to analyze ideological variation in North America to understand its predilection for conflict. He affirms that the Deep South received their ideology almost directly from Barbados, a West-Indian style slave society, “where democracy was the privilege of the few and enslavement the natural lot of the many.” By great contrast, Yankeedom in the north put “great emphasis on perfecting earthly civilization through social engineering, denial of self for the common good, and assimilation of outsiders.” By far, the dominant ideological divisions were "Deep South" and "Yankeedom." These ideologies would never work well together - most notably, because the South was feudal and not democratic! Their original plantation/serfdom brutality was passed down through the generations, threatening our democracy at every turn.

Many profited from slavery, but only the South politically maneuvered to maintain this profit, insincerely citing God as an investor and promoter. At no time than the present is this ideological division more strenuous than in the political disunion we now experience.

Plainly put, a conservative culture which made profits on the whipped backs and deaths of other human beings could not truly be expected to rise to the level of humanitarian - especially not when they used the Bible to justify these acts. Southern Evangelist support for Donald Trump demonstrates the split-personality problem still infecting America today.

Trump's adopted ideology is the most conservative and the most inhumane that America has faced since 1861! 

Yes, this ideology is conservative. It is also the living embodiment of Barbadian or West-Indian Slave Society... it still exists - even if the original slavery has been forbidden, replaced by a searing desire to profit on the backs of the less fortunate - even still. The minds of these ex-slavers would take much more time to change - especially after their "property" had been forcefully taken from them - and especially if they, even insincerely, saw their culture as just - decreed as right and proper, even holy, by God himself! The uneducated of their society see nothing of the nuance between God and profit, only support the wealthy protectors of their time-honored feudal ideology.

In traditional Southern Evangelism, these pirate-descendants reinforce a violent, destructive, and vindictive God in great contrast to the “emphasis on perfecting earthly civilization," of Yankeedom or the North, "through social engineering [education], denial of self for the common good, and assimilation of outsiders, [or immigrants].” Deep South culture denies the fact that increased education provides better citizens -  ignorance makes for more obedient slaves or later, low-paid workers. Furthermore, Deep South culture fears outsiders. Southerners traditionally do not welcome other cultures to increase their variety - rather, they prefer to preserve their own possessions and purity of blood - an old desire descending from the days of their animosity toward Spain. In every respect, this ideology is definitely not democratic! But, the South still belongs to an American democracy? America attempts to progress and move forward, but is continuously held back by conservatives. 

Time have changed today, but little has changed to subdue the South's ideology or predilection for anti-democracy. When Pres. Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in June 1964, he told his aide Bill Moyers that Northern Democrats just "gave the South to the Republicans." And, he was right, dwindling Republican numbers encouraged Republican president Richard Nixon in 1968, to offer extremely conservative Southern Democrats, who were once the original slave owners of the South, to join the GOP, or the Republican Party.

This party has ignored all precedent in American History to support an authoritarian Donald Trump and many of his most fervent supporters come from traditional Southern states: Texas, Louisiana, and particularly Alabama, with alleged sexual abuser Roy Moore and his Attorney-General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.

Donald Trump drew his support from these Barbadian descendants and their extreme brutal conservative ideology. Look again, consider geographically the maps of slavery in the United States before the Civil War and those of his supporters, expanding to include rural states formed since 1860 - states with similar ideology. Combine maps of the slave states in the Civil War to Trump's support in January 2017:

The conclusion is clear. Trump's support comes from brutal, inhumane, undemocratic ,and crude, but "Godly," West Indian Pirate-Slaver ideology. The recent Trump policy (authored by Alabamian Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III) of separating children from their families at our Southern border with Mexico (a nation traditionally founded by the old English enemy of Spain) only illustrates the persistent cultural trends of racism and fear of outsiders brought to our shores by pirates! Trump and his supporters' reaction to our first African-American president is all too obvious. Many still believe that their brutal God endorsed this, too.

Recent Facebook meme.. about some Alabama Christian conservative ideology.

Note that this was written by a Southerner who understands his savage culture and wants it to be better! This has infected our democracy for far too long! Let's make new strides toward a true democracy! #BlueWave2018