Expectations for moral systems

One thing I think gets missed -- or maybe I am just being alien -- is that whiteness is a moral system.  It's not a material thing.  (Being easily sunburned is a material thing.  The idea that being easily sunburned puts you in a moral category where it's OK to loot, rape, and murder is NOT a material thing.)

Moral systems don't have a common anything as a means of comparison; there's no lurking equivalent of speed-of-light-in-a-vacuum or a-mole-of-C12-atoms to start a measurement system.  People seem to miss this, because "moral" (conforming to the precepts of the system) gets conflated with "right and proper" in some absolute sense.  (There's no absolute sense; getting the job is good for you and bad for everyone else who applied.  All these things are always relative.)

What moral systems do have is a centre; there's a pattern of behaviour where someone adhering to any particular moral system is least-stressed.

The thing about the "Southern Strategy" is that is amounts to "the Confederacy was good"; the moral system used by the Confederacy is a strong form of patriarchal white supremacy in which slavery is a positive good.  This doesn't have to have anything at all to do with material reality.  Once the moral system gets re-adopted, you get slavery.  (Private prisons, what's happening with ICE and separating families, the de-facto removal of anyone non-white from legal protections against violence by whites...)  The ICE reports are indicating something that is formally chattel slavery; they're selling kids.

Most of the response could be paraphrased as "don't they realize how bad that is?"

In the moral system they're using, it's a positive good. 

Trying to get someone to admit they're being bad for doing something they know, axiomatically, is absolutely necessary, right, good, and proper is a pointless waste of effort.  (Leaning really hard on a common universe of discourse in the education system and banning private education is NOT a waste of effort if you can do it.  Probably futile in the US because any white supremacy is necessarily really, really opposed to that.  Iffy in Ontario.)

Moral systems go away when they become unbearably economically expensive (which takes a couple-five generations and don't suppose you've got a good definition of "unbearably" on hand; "disadvantageous" won't do it) or when they're obliterated because all the adherents are dead.

If it becomes economically advantageous to be pro-slavery, well, the moral system involved will spread.