Planter Politics: Bossism in the Jim Crow South and the Caribbean

The Jim Crow South was both a region within the United States, but also part of a transnational, hemispheric community of strongmen regimes around the Gulf of Mexico. In this conference, we discussed “spaces of exception” and also American exceptionalism, or the persistent idea that the United States somehow is a special nation when it comes to constitutional, democratic government. But the Trump presidency demonstrates that an authoritarian style of strongman politics, based on and financed by environmentally harmful business practices such as the oil industry, is also very much part of U.S. political culture. In the post-Cold War world we now inhabit, with a (soon to be former) president openly praising anti-democratic leaders in Russia, Turkey, and North Korea, and 74 million voters supporting him in the 2020 elections, the strongman tendencies in American politics have been exposed in a very blatant way.