Nineteenth-century slavery still predicts low civic engagement today.

Evidence

Still more striking is the spatial correlation between low social capital at the end of the twentieth century and slavery in the first half of the nineteenth century. The more virulent the system of slavery then, the less civic the state today. Slavery was, in fact, a social system designed to destroy social capital among slaves and between slaves and freemen. Well-established networks of reciprocity among the oppressed would have raised the risk of rebellion, and egalitarian bonds of sympathy between slave and free would have undermined the very legitimacy of the system. After emancipation the dominant classes in the South continued to have a strong interest in inhibiting horizontal social networks. It is not happenstance that the lowest levels of community-based social capital are found where a century of plantation slavery was followed by a century of Jim Crow politics. Inequality and social solidarity are deeply incompatible. — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 1028

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that a deliberately anti-social institution (slavery) casts a two-century shadow over civic life, via designed destruction of horizontal networks, is a dense causal-historical argument that one sits with.
• XREF: Connects to work on path dependence in social institutions and the long shadow of extractive vs. inclusive institutions, e.g. Acemoglu and Robinson’s colonial settler-vs-extractive argument. — connects to: An ideology of reaction rooted in slavery persists in modern American politics — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project: A New American Origin…, 649; Slave-economy speculation seeded a persistent culture of American capitalism — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project: A New American Origin…, 559; Post-emancipation Black Americans still lacked civic rights amid mob violence — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project: A New American Origin…, 666

Broader Connections

• An ideology of reaction rooted in slavery persists in modern American politics #expands (0.82) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 649
• Post-emancipation Black Americans still lacked civic rights amid mob violence #expands (0.75) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 666
• Slave-economy speculation seeded a persistent culture of American capitalism #expands (0.72) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 559