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A rare (and short) Saturday post from me to express my puzzlement with certain recent events related to the Big 3 bridge loan.
It was not puzzling to me that this critical relief was derailed by conservative Southern Senators. I would have expected nothing less from that batch of individuals. What is somewhat amazing to me is that among those Senators were both of the Senators from Kentucky - Senior Senator Mitch McConnell, and Junior Senator Jim Bunning.
Yes, I'm aware that both of them are rabid fiscal and social conservatives. Yes, I'm aware that if anything, Kentucky - marginally Southern at best, and certainly never very amicable to "Solid South" politics - has been gravitating more towards their brand of hyper-conservatism over the last few decades. This has troubled me for some time. Would modern-day Kentucky even elect someone like John Sherman Cooper, the Kentuckian Senator who voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 while other Southern states were busy signing the Southern Manifesto and attempting to vigorously resist integration? I'm honestly not sure about that, so warped and distorted by cultural conservatism has the state's culture been as of late. It pains me greatly to see the state that was the first among the ex-slave states to adopt comprehensive Civil Rights legislation on its own - a state that never disenfranchised blacks like her neighbors to the South, a state that never signed the Southern Manifesto, a state separated from Illinois only by a river - now become virtually indiscernible, in terms of political culture, from reactionary, racist hellholes such as Alabama and Mississippi.
Yet even as Kentucky shifts more and more towards the politics of the Deep South, one thing remains remarkably clear: the state's economy has absolutely nothing in common with her Sunbelt neighbors. Republicans and Southerners largely hate organized labor and the unions, and the South is the bastion of so-called "right-to-work" legislation. Notice which state doesn't fit into the picture:
Blue states are "right-to-work", the gray ones are not. Every state from Virginia to Florida, from Florida to Oklahoma, is "right-to-work." Kentucky is not. Kentucky also has unionization rates higher than all of the traditionally Southern states:
It was not puzzling to me that this critical relief was derailed by conservative Southern Senators. I would have expected nothing less from that batch of individuals. What is somewhat amazing to me is that among those Senators were both of the Senators from Kentucky - Senior Senator Mitch McConnell, and Junior Senator Jim Bunning.
Yes, I'm aware that both of them are rabid fiscal and social conservatives. Yes, I'm aware that if anything, Kentucky - marginally Southern at best, and certainly never very amicable to "Solid South" politics - has been gravitating more towards their brand of hyper-conservatism over the last few decades. This has troubled me for some time. Would modern-day Kentucky even elect someone like John Sherman Cooper, the Kentuckian Senator who voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 while other Southern states were busy signing the Southern Manifesto and attempting to vigorously resist integration? I'm honestly not sure about that, so warped and distorted by cultural conservatism has the state's culture been as of late. It pains me greatly to see the state that was the first among the ex-slave states to adopt comprehensive Civil Rights legislation on its own - a state that never disenfranchised blacks like her neighbors to the South, a state that never signed the Southern Manifesto, a state separated from Illinois only by a river - now become virtually indiscernible, in terms of political culture, from reactionary, racist hellholes such as Alabama and Mississippi.
Yet even as Kentucky shifts more and more towards the politics of the Deep South, one thing remains remarkably clear: the state's economy has absolutely nothing in common with her Sunbelt neighbors. Republicans and Southerners largely hate organized labor and the unions, and the South is the bastion of so-called "right-to-work" legislation. Notice which state doesn't fit into the picture:
Blue states are "right-to-work", the gray ones are not. Every state from Virginia to Florida, from Florida to Oklahoma, is "right-to-work." Kentucky is not. Kentucky also has unionization rates higher than all of the traditionally Southern states:
| State | Percent Unionized |
| Kentucky | 11.2% |
| Alabama | 10.0% |
| Oklahoma | 7.7% |
| Mississippi | 7.3% |
| Louisiana | 7.2% |
| Tennessee | 6.8% |
| Florida | 6.5% |
| Arkansas | 6.0% |
| Texas | 5.9% |
| Georgia | 5.8% |
| Virginia | 5.2% |
| South Carolina | 4.2% |
| North Carolina | 4.1% |
And last, but certainly not least, much attention has been focused on the fact that many of the Southern states have auto plants from foreign companies, but typically none from the Detroit Big 3. Kentucky does have a Toyota plant, but the state has two Ford plants and a General Motors plant. Apart from Michigan and Ohio, no state produces more cars and light trucks than Kentucky. Few people are aware that this is the state that produces all of the world's Corvettes, from a plant in Bowling Green.
So shame on Jim Bunning and Mitch McConnell for their ideology-driven votes, which clearly ignored the economic well-being of their (already largely impoverished) constituents. Shame on them for putting right-wing economics before the jobs that thousands of Kentuckians rely on to pay the bills. Shame on them for caring more about destroying the unions than they do about ensuring the economic prosperity of their state.
But perhaps just as importantly, maybe it's about time that Kentuckians learn where their political allegiance should truly lie? Maybe it is time that Kentuckians decide if they want the political culture of Alabama, or of Ohio? The state has been marginalized in both importance and development throughout history because it was content to remain on a precarious cultural fault line, never firmly choosing sides, never comfortable unequivocally choosing whether it wanted to play with the Midwestern kids or the Southern ones. The state permitted slavery before proceeding to fight with the Union in the Civil War. After the Civil War, the state failed to industrialize in the manner common to states north of the Ohio River because it was too busy placing dozens of corrupt, backwards ex-Confederates in high state offices, even though it clearly had little in common with Dixie's cotton-dominated economies. The state adopted Jim Crow segregation while eschewing the types of hard-handed tactics seen in places such as Arkansas and Mississippi; my grandparents were never denied the right to vote in Kentucky, and the state never attempted to resist the integration of schools after the Brown decision. And now, the state - with a union-labor economy that looks far more like that of Indiana than that of Arkansas - can't make up its mind on the economic issues, either.
Nobody would ever claim that Covington is culturally identical to as Franklin, but it is time to either split the state into multiple parts or take your pick, Kentuckians. Your Senators already have clearly chosen sides, and you can't have it both ways.
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