The current wave of confederatist bilge and bile goes back to the end of the Cold War. When we didn't have an external enemy, national unity and identity slackened and people started to look for an internal enemy and some great narrative to account for everything that seemed wrong with the country. Not having a British or German, or Japanese, or Soviet empire overseas, they fixed on the remaining empire, ours, but didn't quite understand how that empire had been formed, or what their role in it was.
A decade or so ago, people must have gotten a thrill attacking not the usual targets, Wilson, FDR, LBJ, the Kennedys, but Lincoln himself. And the idea that somehow all our problems could be traced back to the maintenance of the Union in the 1860s appealed to the hunger of some for all-encompassing, "big" explanation. As did the idea that, but for Lincoln and the Union Army, "we" would have been "truly free." The holes in this theory have been amply discussed, but it has acquired a religious hold on some people's minds. It is the Garden of Eden story all over again.
The realignment of American politics along North-South lines, and the fact that the passions and controversies of the civil rights movement were a generation in the past also contributed. The NAACP and the various confederatist groups feed off each other, the outrages of the one leading to the outrages of the other. The purposelessness of one and the hopelessness of the other resolved by their confrontation.
Confederatism comes to be seen as a defense of Southern honor and virtue. Unfortunately, history has to proceed in a "let the chips fall where they may" spirit, and not be tied to defending wounded pride. There may be some points where the confederatists are right, but their approach is to create some "stainless myth" of pure good and evil that doesn't allow for complexities and the humanity of both sides. The emphasis is not on putting together all that we know, but on using allegations and charges to depose some alleged myth and enthrone another in its place.
So little of what one finds in today's confederatist writing is new. So much goes back to previous generations. But clearly, in the 1960s, this sort of thing didn't have the appeal it does today because it was saddled with segregationism.
The present generation takes pride in the fact that it doesn't carry around the racial baggage previous generations did, and should do so. But surely the fact that other generations of Americans -- and of Southerners -- did have racial attitudes that we would regard as pernicious shouldn't be ignored or forgotten. You can mentally construct a version of the Confederacy that had neither slavery nor ideologies of racial superiority. You can imagine that slavery would have been abolished by the victorious Confederacy simply by snapping its fingers. But your conceiving these things doesn't make them true.
So why do some react so strongly against contemporary confederatism? Many reasons. The contempt for our united country. The desire to break it up into ineffectual or tyrannical smaller units. The slurs of Nazi or Communist that idiots hurl at Lincoln. The abuse of fine Northern writers. Washington's views ignored or traduced. The willful distortion of history. The amnesia about the conflicts of the 1850s. The endless repetition of the same lines that we've heard so often and ought to be moving beyond. The neglect of all counterarguments to those confederatist slogans. The sloppiness and contempt for the intelligence of readers that so many neo-confederate writers show. The reasons are many, but I don't think it adds up to a hatred of the South or any other part of our country. Don't make the mistake of thinking that anyone here speaks for anything other than one person.
The world has grown dangerous again, and if we really are to be locked in a conflict that will last for many years and hit home again, we can expect this confederatist sentiment to subside, as we recognize that we are one country again. We will come togther as we did in 1941. Indeed most of us alredy have. But if the war against terrorism is already behind us, one can expect neo-confederatism, like other pernicious post-modern fashions, to persist and attract followers.
The world has grown dangerous again, and if we really are to be locked in a conflict that will last for many years and hit home again, we can expect this confederatist sentiment to subside, as we recognize that we are one country again. We will come togther as we did in 1941. Indeed most of us alredy have. But if the war against terrorism is already behind us, one can expect neo-confederatism, like other pernicious post-modern fashions, to persist and attract followers.
How could smaller units possibly be more ineffectual and tyrannical than the current status quo? Is yours an argument for One World Government as well? I thought competition and choice were good things to be encouraged, especially in commerce and government.
How can a return to a homogeneous culture under a severely limited government be a "pernicious post-modern fashion"? It is so 18th Century.