Must-Read: Matthew Yglesias: What About the South?

**Must-Read: It does seem obvious that an unaccountable government is certain to be bad for those excluded from the franchise–those outside the political nation. But in the case of the American South we have more: A government that has been unaccountable to some–Blacks, poor whites whose grandfathers did not themselves vote–has been bad for nearly all. Thus Yglesias’s take is much too simple…

Matthew Yglesias: What about the South?: “I would have an easier time trusting American conservatives…

…if they had a clearer theory for why the US South is so poor and… fares very badly in public health and other non-economic indicators…. It’s not… just… right-of-center… but the meta-political context in which those policies are made. The over-arching theme of Southern political economy throughout American history has been massive resistance to the principle of widespread participation in democracy… [that] continues to be the case to the present day that voting access is at its worst in the south. The disenfranchisors tell themselves that the people they are stopping from voting are ‘dumb’ or ‘lazy’ or have ‘bad ideas’ and that excluding them is improving policy outcomes. But the reality is that democratically-accountable government is a good idea, and the US South’s longtime obsession with trying to avoid it leaves the region in a backwards state.