There is a simple reason why South Carolina has been unable to properly address the problems of this epidemic, like so many other problems.
South Carolina, Wyoming and Idaho have been targeted by large, right wing organizations as test platforms for their model of neo libertarian government. These states are selected because the are poor, small and culturally insular. The voting population there has low expectations for government and elected officials. This makes manipulating the government inexpensive and easy. This has been going on for about ten years.
Being in the resistance here isn’t easy. We’ve just lost one of our states most dedicated activists, Tim Liszewski, to the virus. He was the leader of Occupy Columbia and part of the Obamacare Signup effort here. We’ve lost a lot of people to other states when they decide to move on to greener pastures. Obama and social media opened a lot of ways for young talent to escape SC. I can’t blame them for leaving. Our cadre of progressive activists here keeps getting older. Most meetings have an average age of over 60 now. The Civil Rights Activists and Hippies all have gray hair now. Their lives have been spent trying to save South Carolina. For those of you left here, this is what we’re up against. It’s not all bad. We’re still smarter than they are.
The Opposition is Organized, Funded and Fully Entrenched in the System
In SC the effort to turn our little state into a right wing demonstration project includes “volunteers” paid by organizations funded by the Koch Brothers who sit in on meetings and telephone conferences, hang out in the offices of elected officials and offer instruction on policy, budgets and day to day decisions. They maintain constant communication with teams of people working on our state government around the clock using private online and cell phone communication. They conduct their business in such a way that it’s not subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.
These operatives are connected to Lobbyists and grass roots organizations connected with right wing groups like Americans for Prosperity and the Tea Party. All of this activity is well funded and well disciplined. Many of the people involved have been doing paid work for this system for years. They recruit starting in High School feeding people into political office, private advocacy and right wing community organizing. While left wing and progressive organizations in SC struggle on peanuts, this network is very well funded. When an election comes, their massive grass roots network and coordinated right wing campaign donations make sure the candidates they support win. Any Republican who crosses them will find one or more of their trained people challenging them in the primary with a professional staff and a huge budget.
Most of this activity is perfectly legal. You too are allowed to visit the Governor’s office, attend meetings and communicate with your legislators and work within your community. You can organize support or opposition to candidates in a primary. We do all of these things. I have been working with the SC progressive network for 15 years. The network has an annual budget of less than 75 thousand dollars. My transit organization has an annual budget of $5,000 but as a 501c3 can’t fund campaigns. Many of you work with similar groups in the same way.
You just don’t do it with professional, full time support that has millions of dollars in ready money at its disposal coordinated by groups like the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, CATO Institute and other groups. These groups now write the policy and tell our elected officials in SC what to do. It’s less work for the elected officials. They can sign the policies, press releases and legislation which is put in front of them. They are after all, conservative and so are these organizations. Many of them have been trained and put in office by these organizations. There is very little conflict. There is very little thought. They’re trained and dismissing public input effectively. The system has been fully evolved for years and now it determines the shape of the environment. The alligators build the swamp.
A Little Help from the 1%
The people running these organizations, most of which operate out of public view, are the people who have driven our nation into the current crisis. They have fought the creation of a real healthcare system. They blocked the Medicaid expansion in SC. They have delayed the actions which would have constrained the spread of the virus and the policies which have made testing here so slow and ineffective that at the moment, it looks like SC doesn’t have a problem. They work to maintain that illusion until the generalized disaster of the epidemic obliterates the population’s capacity to parse out the issues and facts and organize any response. In the chaos and death ahead of us, nobody will be filing Freedom of Information Act Requests to track down the faceless operative that held up shutting down activity here for a few additional weeks while the virus seized a grip on poor South Carolina. If they do file, most of the records will be private and not on the file with any government agency. No one will be dumb enough to file a memo from some right wing organization saying it’s more important to let people die than to shut down a flea market in a government filing cabinet. It will appear as if all of this just erupted from the head of someone working in the office. If it slips from a flash drive into a computer so staff doesn’t have to type it themselves, there will be no record of that. Even if such mistakes are made, it will take months or years of litigation and some luck to find it. People know what to shred and clean up their messes.
When Disaster Strikes, That Too is Useful
When the disaster fully arrives, these same people will blame the government they control for the suffering and death. They’ll say that private enterprise would do better. They’ll demand budget cuts and hiring private companies to do the testing in the future. They’ll say DHEC didn’t do it’s job and promote hiring a private company to supervise the testing. When they’re done, a handful of people they’ve selected will just sign the checks to the private companies that write the checks to keep the full right wing control system in place.
Once they get this dialed in for little, weak states like SC, they can start on bigger states like Georgia and North Carolina. In the Disunited States of America where state governments fight for masks in the midst of an epidemic, they’ll just work their way up the food chain until they’re left in a fight for what’s left with a handful of big, blue states. We’ll see how long the People’s Republic of California and what’s left of New York can hold out.
This is how South Carolina’s government works now. It has little to do with what you were taught in school. We have some fine people in our legislature and state agencies. They do the best they can to stay under the radar and serve the people they care about. If they resist they’re sidelined in the legislature or fired from their job. They have the perfectly valid defense that whoever gets selected to replace them will probably be worse.
When this is over, there will be a huge effort to consolidate corporate and right wing power in the United States. We can’t bring thousands of people to the State Capital to protest in the middle of an epidemic. We can make their phones ring. We should let them know that we know how the system is rigged. We can’t be certain that democracy and a peaceful transition of power are certain results of a win in the next round of elections.
Winning in SC, the Big Dog Principle
However, if we understand them, we can fight them. It isn’t essential to them that they win the fight for your school board, City Council or even our state. If it’s too much trouble and gets too expensive, they’ll just take their money elsewhere and return here when they’re stronger. We don’t have to beat them, we just need to make it easier and cheaper for them to go mess with someone else. If you have the biggest meanest dog on your block, someone else’s house gets robbed. I’m not worried about how miserable life might get in Idaho. As we well know in SC, there is always Mississippi.
My ancestors fought with Francis Marion in the American Revolution. They lost nearly every battle they participated in when the sun was up. However at night, in the swamps, the British died a few at a time. They found their wagons robbed and burned. The population, encouraged and increasingly angry, turned on the British and fed intelligence to Marion. SC, which had been securely under British Control became a miserable, expensive and frustrating struggle. The British decided to gamble by moving North to destroy Washington’s continental army and wound up cornered at Yorktown.
(Note- I already know that Marion was a slaveholder and committed atrocities against African Americans fighting for the British. If you like neat history, the bloody civil war which was the revolution in SC is sure to disappoint your search for heroes. We don’t have the time to quantify the atrocities on both sides and pick winners at the moment. Just understand that SC is and has always been a place where the fights are viscous and life is cheap. Hypocrisy, racism, and religion make it work.)
That is the fight we have now. We’re in territory controlled by the enemy. We’re outnumbered and underfunded. Most of the population supports the redcoat right wing. They’re happy to sell us out. We have to seek out targets of opportunity without betraying our position or making the structure of our resistance apparent. In the chaos the right is counting on to crush the resistance to their agenda, we have to find and use the cover it provides. We need to understand that our opponents are desperate and vicious and if you are caught, you’ll lose your job and maybe your property. Banastre Tarleton was a Tory who fought for the British. He was happy to burn people houses and crops. He killed prisoners. Some of your neighbors are his kin now. There is no dishonor in keeping your head down, protecting your family and taking the occasional shot from the dark. My ancestors did it, riding out from snow island from the big swamp. Most of them survived the war. Their fight wasn’t classically heroic. Ours doesn’t have to be either.
I’m not suggesting your resort to violence. The other side has far more guns that we have. Some are in the hands of the government. Plenty more are in the hands of people like Dylan Roof who will start shooting when the dog whistle or hatred tells them too. Like Roof, they may find themselves as disposable as he was, outed and repudiated by the people so pleased at who they shot.
Keeping it Legal and Keeping Your Head Down
We have to fight our partisan war within the limits of the law and while avoiding the considerable coercive power of the rights grip on our state. Tactics have to be tried and evolved. Living to fight another day really matters. We should try to avoid solving our opponent’s problems for them. If children are hungry, we should make sure they demand that their government do something about it. If people are dying, we should force the state government to bury them. The tea party will be happy to watch us work ourselves into the ground trying to save people from suffering who ought to be angry. They’re aren’t a lot of us. No liberal, progressive cavalry is waiting to ride into SC. They have their own problems.
The struggle is upon us. We don’t have any choice. We have to dodge the virus and make the opposition pay for every acre of ground they occupy. We must make them fear the night. If we do that, tomorrow, at least some of it, might still be ours.