[Colonel Kangaroo]

He's scared to death, like all his liberal pals, that culturally conservative Southern blacks and whites will eventually reach some sort of down-home modus vivendi without liberal supervision......and that it might prove tough, later on, to split the vote in Southern States along racial lines by talking about "them" (sc., redneck knuckle-dragging etc. etc. honkies etc. etc.).

In my opinion that was the goal of Reconstruction Republican policies. But a independent yeomanry of the freed slaves politically allied with the white yeomanry was not in the economic interest of the Democratic plantation class and their desire for a "disciplined" labor force. Thus they condemned the South to a long term condition of us versus them tribalism.

[lentulusgracchus]

But a independent yeomanry of the freed slaves politically allied with the white yeomanry was not in the economic interest of the Democratic plantation class and their desire for a "disciplined" labor force

We seem to agree, then, that a rotating incumbency of elite, alienated political groups interested in splitting up the yeomanry, as you refer to the middle and lower economic classes, have played at the same politics of division without discernible differences in their m.o., despite overall differences in their own larger goals.