Is the entire U.S. becoming like the South after 1877?

Here is an interesting view of how the South regressed as it was exploited by the North after Reconstruction. The author then suggests that rather than the South taking on the characteristics of the North, instead the rest of the U.S. is taking on more of the worst characteristics of the South.

Go read The United States Becomes Its Own Worst Enemy by Douglas Dowd.

TalkLeft offers this quotation from a description of "The New South."

Violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism and a too narrow concept of social responsibiity, attachment to fictions and false values..., too great an attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values, sentimentality and a lack of realism... .

I see America as taking a similar set of social, governmental, and economic paths that are leading us to become uncompetitive in the international economy and willing to accept extreme injustice here at home. Dowd's description of the South as:

The symbol of what ensued in the South [after the compromise of 1877] became the hooded Klansman at a riotous lynching party; for the North, its easy access to the South's cheap natural and human resources served both to strengthen and greatly to speed up overall industrialization. Over the next several decades, the South's economy became "modernized," with what were almost entirely northern-owned -- with "whites only" workers -- textile factories, mines, railroads, steel mills and banks. However, in that "modernization" the overwhelming majority of both its white and its black population sank into deep poverty. What is especially striking were the political attitudes of the "poor whites" as their material lives worsened.

We no longer accept the KKK lynching parties, but we avoid providing social help to the poor, probably because so many of them have Black or Brown skins and clearly because of disdain for the poor. We are already the major single market helping to modernize the Chinese economy, and our Universities have trained the entrepreneurs and scientists in both China and India that are causing us to lose competitiveness to those nations.

The key is going to be human resources, not capital. We may have the finest capital markets in the world, but without nurturing, developing and using our human resources - all of them no matter what race - we are losing our global competitiveness. We are also ignoring what Paul Kennedy wrote in his book "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" about imperial overreach and spending so much on the military that the economy was damaged.

I may be reading more into what Dowd wrote than is really there, but then, maybe I'm not. China and India are growing in both power and economic effectiveness. America is declining in both. The economic conservatives want to take us back to the economics of Adam Smith and early Industrialism, and the religious conservatives want to take us back to Medieval religious control of government and society. Somehow I don't think either provide an adequate solution to the problems being presented by the 21st century.