The Urban Plantation

Starting at about the 29 minute mark of this interview on Louder with Crowder, Dinesh D’Souza makes the argument that today’s inner cities are similar to the plantations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in five important ways.  Compare D’Souza’s comments with the map from USA Today and the Associated Press, below, depicting the results of the 2004 Presidential election. 

D’Souza  (29:00): Neither, you know, neither party is involved in racism in the old sense.  And so for example a good metaphor of this would be the Klan. The Klan today is essentially defunct.  There’s no real effective organization called the Klan.  I mean the Klan used to have two to five million members.  They could march tens of thousands of people down fifth avenue in the twenties, burning crosses and shouting racist slogans.  That Klan does not exist.  But I would argue, I was actually reading a book by the historian Kenneth Stampp, and it’s on the old slave plantation.  It’s called The Peculiar Institution. And he describes the five features of the slave plantation.  I think this is really interesting because all the five features he mentions are present today.  But they’re present on the urban plantations that the democrats are running in the inner cities.  And so Kenneth Stampp says number one on the typical old slave plantation you have ramshackle dwellings.  Houses but they’re in disarray.  Second you have the family structure is all broken down, a lot if illegitimacy, whose kids are whose, you don’t really know, that’s the nature of slavery.  Third, a lot of the violence that’s necessary to hold the, to keep the place together because slavery is based on coercion, you have to force people, you have to whip them, beat them, etc.  Fourth, everybody has a minimum provision.  You get food, you get health care, but nobody gets ahead.  Nobody gets a good education.  No ladders of opportunity.  Nihilism, hopelessness, and despair.  So you take all these elements and ask, “How’s it really different today in inner city Oakland, or Detroit, or Chicago?  I think the main difference is that in the old days the Democrats who ran those slave plantations too, wanted to steal people’s labor.  They wanted labor, and they wanted labor for free.  Now what they want is votes.  They want votes, and they don’t care about these people. And that’s why they remain in misery and the Democrats are perfectly happy to keep ‘em there as long as they keep voting eighty to ninety percent for the party that’s running the plantation.

In this graphic each electoral district won by each candidate in the 2004 Presidential election is shown as a column.  The red map shows the districts Bush won.  The blue map shows the districts Kerry won.  The height of each column shows the margin of victory. The blue map seems to corroborate D’Souza’s description of the urban plantation.   

The following image of the 2012 Presidential election from Princeton University tells the same story.  It seems that if not for the virtually guaranteed votes from the inhabitants trapped in the urban plantations the Democrats have practically no hope of winning a presidential election.