How President* Trump Surrendered The Civil War To The Confederacy

John Kelly, the operator of an adult daycare in Washington, recently questioned the legitimacy of the Union’s victory in the Civil War. It’s worthwhile to revisit crucial issues now and again, but in 1865 most Americans thought the issue of slavery had been well and truly (and finally) buried with a stake through its cruel heart. Apparently not, at least in the Republican half of the country.

Some useful reading on the topic:

A tutorial from The Atlantic. (Summary: The Union Won)

The New Yorker is right when it describes Gen. Kelly's Civil War beliefs as "bizarre mythology"

And by the way, the South was not at all in favor of states’ rights until they lost their stranglehold on the national government. The Southern states were, and still are, all about rejecting any regulation or instruction from the democratic majority of other states, but are insistent upon other states following, without question, the South’s regulations and instructions whenever they are given.

The Atlantic dissects and debunks the old States' Rights myth

When in doubt, representatives of the old Confederacy do not hesitate to have preachers come in and pray their beliefs into law. From TalkingPointsMemo

Then there is the daily ignorance of this White House...

DailyKos reports on the White House's refusal to say slavery is wrong and over

In today’s Republican Party, if you are asked what your opinion is on the subject of slavery it is best to say “No Comment” as Sarah Huckabee Sanders did.

If not best, safest.

I’ve been commenting this too often lately, and it’s a sad comment on us. But it’s true. President* Trump has unilaterally surrendered the total victory achieved by the United States in its costliest wars. Trump has in one year surrendered the Civil War to the Confederacy, WW2 to the fascists who still live and march among us, and the Cold War to the Russians, of whom the White House now operates as a wholly owned subsidiary.

Sad.

The Confederacy Has Won The Civil War

POLITICO has a very good article today about how the Republicans have managed to break our democracy.

The American people have, for over a decade, been saying they are sick and tired of government that doesn’t work.

Which is why they have elected the party that made government stop working.

It is a Southern revolt, Southern-driven, a revolt led by men with Southern accents and Southern roots and values. A barely disguised racism plays a key part. Racism seems to work for the Republican Party. The Republican Party is the Old Confederacy reborn.

If you dig a little you’ll find some racism in most white Americans, not a basic or an overriding racism but a small tumor of racism that you can cultivate and prod into metastasizing if you work at it. The Republican Party has become very good at cultivating this tumor in a lot of people.

John Dean famously said “There is a cancer on the presidency.” He was trying to warn Richard Nixon that his problems were fatal. Now you could say cancer has won the presidency. The Republican Party, which most of this past year seemed in the final stages of collapse has regained its vigor. They have done this by realizing they are the cancer.

Cancer is practically unstoppable without very unpleasant side effects. Nobody likes cancer. Everybody is deathly afraid of cancer. This explains its power, and maybe it explains the power of the Republican Party right now. They are the party of failing government and a degraded working class and racism and the theft of our American Dream by Wall Street billionaires and banking billionaires and healthcare billionaires. Why have we voted to empower the same people who have degraded our lives?

This election has played out like the Chris Rock joke: “I’m really angry that Obama hasn’t cured cancer. So you know what? I’m gonna vote for cancer!”

It makes no sense, that’s why it’s a good joke. It makes no sense but it is exactly what has happened. Reality doesn’t have to make sense. People behave stupidly. Large groups of people are especially prone to stupidity. Which is why the Founding Fathers invented the Electoral College, which tomorrow will finalize the election of a stupid, corrupt, ignorant, treasonous man to the presidency over the objections of a majority of the voters.

The Electoral College isn’t a perfect thing. It isn’t just a safeguard against mob rule. It’s also a relic of America’s slave past, designed to safeguard the less populous states (The South) from having their slaves freed.

It’s as if the Civil War hadn’t ended in 1865 with the defeat of Lee. It’s as if the assassination of Lincoln was the more important event, the continuation of war that led to Jim Crow and the murders and lynchings of many thousands of black citizens.

It seems like the dominant rump of our Congress is itself a recidivist remnant of the old Confederacy. The American flag pins in their lapels are only a disguise. The South never forgot the Civil War cause. They never really surrendered as a people, never accepted the values Lincoln set out for us, never relinquished the comfortable idea that whiteness is superior. And they have been an invading army long after Meade turned Lee back at Gettysburg. They have invaded, infiltrated and infected the northern states with their bigotry. Bigotry isn’t the goal, though, it is simply a tool.

Of course all white Americans have bigotry in them. It just needs bringing out. The racism in northern cities is different from the racism of the South. In some cases it seems more virulent.

The material that helps breed racism and division is what Republicanism has been manufacturing for decades: the careful degradation of working lives, the careful degradation of public sector protections of working people, the careful degradation of our democratic institutions which guarantee our rights.

The Republican goal has been to break the whole American democracy so people feel powerless, because powerlessness makes people angry, and anger makes them more easily divided and defeated.

In a way these unreconstructed Confederates have taken the Union strategy that defeated them in 1865 and turned it upon the North itself. Grant and most memorably Sherman took the war directly to the Southern infrastructure and broke it down. Sherman’s march to the sea burned a wide path of destruction from Atlanta to the sea, cutting the Confederacy in two.

Look at the Republican strategy unfolding this weekend in North Carolina. (Described here at MEDIUM) The defeated Republican governor is hurriedly destroying the power of his office before he surrenders it to the Democrat who defeated him.

Look at what Republican rule has done in Kansas (reported by USNews) and in Michigan (...Yo––Flint? Poisoned drinking water?) or what Scott Walker has done to Wisconsin, or just go read Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann's books about the march of Republican dysfunction from DC to the states

The modern Republican Confederates have brought their industrial and infrastructure and political destruction north to Michigan, to Ohio, to Wisconsin, to western Pennsylvania. Those places now feel like the old South––poorer working people, jobs gone, water systems broken, universities in decline (the Southern universities––not all of them certainly but many––have long been a great example of poorer education and superior football), bridges decaying, social fabric frayed, systems dysfunctional––and the dysfunction has been carefully achieved under strict Republican principles. Principles very unlike the ones that shaped the party under Lincoln, principles directly opposed to the founding ones, just as the designs of the modern “conservative” Republicans directly contradict the pocket Constitutions they carry around in their pockets and the flag pins they wear on their lapels.

Confederate Flaggery

People so want the Civil War not to be about slavery. They so want that old plantation way of life to be some kind of jolly role playing, instead of the brutal ownership of human beings of color by human beings of no color. It says something that people are still asking stupid questions like “Didn’t the slaves actually have it pretty good back then?” Uh…no.

This story from VOX tells about the stupid questions the tour guides get at Mount Vernon.

As FoxNews sees it, removing the flag of the traitors who fought a bloody war against the United States to preserve slavery… is a kind of fascism.

There’s such pervasive certainty about this across the South people get confused.

From Salon: This Confederate-flag-wearing woman of color thinks slavery was a choice. Like on a menu. Uh huh.

It’s what they are taught.

This article from Salon describes some of the ways school districts try to pretty up the old South and slavery.

And it doesn’t only happen in the South. Here's an instance from a grade school in suburban Boston.

100 years ago you could be considered progressive and still be a deep dyed racist. Woodrow Wilson, a progressive by most standards, purged black workers from the federal government. Hell, 75 years ago The New Deal was created by FDR––but only with the help of similar racists from the South. Which is why the New Deal didn’t help people of color.

Republicans might not know this: 40 years ago President Nixon had the idea of inviting all the white supremacists and racists and segregationists to come and join his party. Which is why now the Party of Lincoln is the one most associated with the Confederate Flag. Nixon’s Southern Strategy is (to borrow an old line from Edmund Wilson) “...the worst thing that has happened to Lincoln since Booth shot him.” (Wilson was referring to Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln biography.)

The New Yorker's John Cassidy on the racist strain in the Republican Party today.

This is how our best satirists have commented on the Confederate flag issue.

From the Daily Show this past week.

Bloomberg has an article about Stephen Colbert's war on the Confederate flag.

The best piece of patriotic performance art was this woman’s heroic climb. From Mother Jones.

By the way, the first casualty in the Civil War was a Union officer who was shot dead while trying to remove a Confederate flag from the roof of a hotel in Alexandria, Virginia. I remember this story from my grade school book of the Civil War. I remember the story well. It was illustrated with the same painting Smithsonian includes in their story here. Hard to believe we still see people proudly flying the flag of a treasonous army the U.S. defeated 150 years ago this year.

On a more self-aggrandizing note, media critic Jim Romenesko ran my short piece about the group that kidnapped the New York Times url (or a very convincing counterfeit of it) to prank people. It is getting harder to tell news from satire these days, especially when the stories are about Republicans. But it doesn’t help us when the joke makes people cynical.

The Civil War Never Ended

I came across this NYTimes essay today, which says the Civil War persists to this day. It's less simple than you think. The Civil War changed more than the slave issue; it recast our nation as an economy in which larger players dominated. Those who lost out economically were instructed to blame the freedom of the black man for their reduced status. The old hatred was recast and became very useful. The battlefield was still in the South.

The pleasure of old hatreds explains a lot about our present dysfunction. Hatred is a great business model; consider FoxNews. Disinformation is another wonderful profit engine, and Fox knows that too.

Here’s an example of how people’s ignorance and easy gullibility can be shaped into an eager and militant constituency.

A Union Soldier's grave allegedly predicted the disaster of having a black president.

What this dead Union Soldier and Republican did not know (and this ignorant readership would rather not know) is that the Democratic Party that favored slavery in the 19th century would repudiate racism in the 20th and that his and Lincoln’s beloved Republican Party would seize the opportunity to invite those white racists to become Republicans. Nixon’s White House would formally devise The Southern Strategy, which adopted all those unhappy worshippers of the Old Confederacy and made them diehard Republicans, who would vote down their own economic interests for the pure joy of suppressing black and brown people (…and women… and foreigners… and non-Evangelical Christians… and Muslims… etc.) “I may be poor and ignorant but I still get to feel superior to somebody!”

That is the legacy of the perpetual Civil War. Today’s Republicans are actually the New Confederacy. As a recent Washington Post essay pointed out.

It’s worth noting that Nixon, whose minions came up with the Southern Strategy also invented FoxNews.

The Washington Post reports on the invention of FoxNews by Nixon's backroom boys.

Bloomberg on the invention of the Southern Strategy.

How Racist Is This Rabid Hatred Of Obama?

Is it all about race? Being so angry there's a black president that you'd just as soon shut the whole thing down?

Shucks, we're way yonder past racism in this here country, aren't we?

It's gotten worse in the past five years, but the recent mutation of race hatred goes back to Lee Atwater's Willie Horton dog whistle ad in 1988. (The Nation has some interesting recorded conversations in which Atwater lays it all out.)

It goes back to Nixon's infamous Southern Strategy to win the racist white southerners who abandoned the Democratic Party after the Civil Rights Amendment. The voters who'd gone for George Wallace twice. (The New York Times archive spells out the Southern Strategy in its wonderful cynical detail.)

But if anyone wants to discuss the unspoken racial content in Republican hatred for this president they are accused of "playing the race card." Because Southerners are much much too polite to ever ever get racial about anything. Never have, never will.

Slate ran a very good piece about this Southern complexion, pure white Southern, in the new Republican Party.

The dog whistle of racist politics has just added another veneer on top of the old Southern gentility, which was a mask to begin with. That mask came off whenever a neatly dressed black student tried to go to a white's only school, but otherwise was as sweet as molasses, as polite and inoffensive as a pure white woman at a cotillion.

Want to know the code words? The secret handshakes and secret signals? The New Statesman listed them in a recent story.

The South and the Republican Party it dominates have learned to change the tone of their message without changing the message. The dog whistle alerts the party faithful the way it alerts hound dogs, by going directly to the lizard part of the brain that responds reflexively to fear and loathing.

A good explanation for the five year long fever of race hatred that's causing this, from Joan Walsh at Salon. (She followed up with a piece describing the angry Republican responses she got.)

To explain why this is happening now, when we finally managed to elect and re-elect our first black president, we almost have to go back to the Civil War, which certain states never recognized they lost, and certainly never recognized they were wrong about.

So it is about race. Still. Stubbornly and ignorantly.

And the Republican Party would just as soon take the whole country down as give in. In their slow, patient way they are trying to take our country back to the old Southern ways. A small aristocracy and white trash and blacks with no rights. Low wages and a small comfortable elite. Bad roads, bad water, bad sanitation, worn out soil, poor education, poor public health. That is the ideal model. What are the standards in the Reddest of the Red Republican districts? They look like the South in the 19th Century. Mostly white, mostly rural, mostly poor. Mostly taking far more in federal aid than they pay in federal taxes. We are being led backward by a backward set of backwater politicians and their extremist (but dependent) voters.

For 148 years since 1865, white southerners have done everything they could to keep African Americans down. Prevented them from voting. Stolen their property. Lynched them. Rounded them up routinely to use as free labor. Prevented them from owning homes, getting educated, getting loans, being tried fairly or being able to press charges against a white person, prevented them from using a drinking fountain designed for white people, prevented them from using the same bathroom facilities. The list is endless and the nasty unChristian southern habit of racial hatred is unending. The aim is to humiliate and degrade the other race so they are lower than you are, which is pretty low considering the ugliness of the mindset.

This ugly and difficult and expensive experiment in social engineering has been paid for by a small set of white folks who'd rather not pay enough for their white social inferiors to live decently so instead of fair pay they promise the lower class whites to make sure the black population is inferior to their own unpleasant inferiority. And they deputize the white lowlifes to enforce this.

So it's no coincidence that they believe (and persist in saying despite evidence that any normal sane intelligent person would understand) that the first black president is A. Kenyan. B. Muslim C. a communist D. a Nazi E. part of a nefarious foreign plot F. the antichrist. Whatever he is, he's got to be illegitimate because of what they've been told all these years. There can't be a black president because they all know that any dumb poor white no account is always and in every way better than a black man. Because everybody has told southern whites that every white person is superior to every black person regardless of achievements or abilities or college degrees. What gave Obama that ticket to Harvard which was rightfully meant for some proper white person?

It's hard to channel this race-hating stupidity without becoming physically sick. And it makes a person mad to think racists and racist-abetters of this sort of stupidity are in control of a whole political party. That they have enough power to shut down our democracy. But I guess that makes it easier to understand how the bigots feel. Something is wrong. Sadly, the ones who are causing the problem are too dumb and hateful to understand what it is.

The Confederate States of America still exist and are now Republican

From Ron Paul's favorite website comes this frank declaration that Lincoln was a murdering Yankee meddler who violated the sacred rights of Southern planters to keep human beings as slaves. An idea that is still prevalent in the states which dominate the Republican Party.

Here's a map of this "New Confederacy". (Thanks to the well-known and rational conservative writer Andrew Sullivan for the map.) These members of Congress are willing to derail the US economy in order to humiliate the black guy who got into the White House by mistake.

The rationale is usually that the federal government is spending too much of their god-given money on people and places that don't deserve it (other liberal states with lots of poor people or foreign countries), but it's interesting to look at decades of tax data and see that the states with the stingiest attitudes towards taxation tend to get more in tax dollars than they pay in. Here's the data, state by state, published by the Tax Foundation.

These Red States get more than they pay because they tend to be poorer and more dysfunctional, meaning they need federal help. Notice also that these legislators (mostly Republican) are also the ones who loudly refuse to vote aid for areas hit by devastating hurricanes, but they immediately demand aid when their districts are hit by tornadoes and floods. (They also tend to claim that these more devastating storms and floods and droughts are not caused by high levels of fossil fuel use as scientists say is happening but are caused by homosexuality in the US.)

There have been a lot of website postings of how Red and Blue States compare in terms of various problems like divorce rates, teen pregnancy, gun deaths, low education rates, low life expectancy, infant death rates, etc.

The red states tend to have more of these problems, which might be directly correlated to their stubborn refusal to deal with those problems. But if they have these problems they should stop preaching reform to the rest of us, or they should at least stop taking our money. Of course their most vulnerable people would be the ones to suffer. And those are the citizens they work hard to prevent from voting. If those people were allowed to vote and their votes were counted honestly, there would be fewer Red States.

The Supreme Court ruling on Citizen's United gave the Republicans the 2010 elections, which allowed them to redraw the congressional districts across the country into safe seats for dangerously insane right wing radicals whose sole aim in life is to make sure the black guy isn't allowed to fulfill his campaign promises. It's worth noting that the Republicans held the House of Representatives in 2012 despite Republican congressmen receiving more than a million fewer votes nationally. The Dems got more votes and fewer seats in the House.

This is a what happens when the Republican strategy of suppressing voting takes hold. They don't like democracy. They don't want to do what the people would like them to do. They have other clients who pay their bills for them. They are the representatives of big money, the representatives of corporations foreign and domestic. Suppressing the vote is a timeworn Republican strategy. Because they dislike democracy. Just listen to Paul Weyrich speaking in the 1980s. He helped get Ronald Reagan elected. He also helped found the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank which is helping take the democracy out of our political system, the think tank which helped the Supreme Court reach the conclusion that corporations are people and money is speech.

The Heritage Foundation is also where the system of private insurance exchanges was invented. The system now called ObamaCare. The system they are willing to derail the US economy to prevent from being put in place, because they hate anything enacted by the current black president.

Or, in the immortal words of Quincy Adams Wagstaff (Groucho Marx):

"I don't know what they have to say
It makes no difference anyway
Whatever it is, I'm against it!
No matter what it is
Or who commenced it
I'm against it!

Your proposition may be good
But let's have one thing understood
Whatever it is, I'm against it!
And even when you've changed it
Or condensed it
I'm against it!"

(Harry Ruby, Bert Kalmar, from the Marx Brothers film Horsefeathers)