Spurred by White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s recent remarks on how a lack of “compromise” helped cause the Civil War, New Republic’s Jeet Heer is making the case that arguments over the causes and morality of that conflict are ones that progressives should whole-heartedly engage in. As he summarizes,
Some analysts think such debates over history only serve to empower Trump, giving him a phony culture war to distract from his political failures. But Trumpism is a byproduct of the unfinished conflicts produced by the Civil War; thus, combatting Trumpism requires combatting this pernicious view of the war. Avoiding the subject would cede the central narrative of American history to people like Trump, and would fatally damage our ability to understand and fight one of our core political problems: the endurance of racism in America.
Heer provides a good rundown of how the idea that extremists and failed compromises led to the Civil War has actually dominated historical thinking for long stretches of time, and of how views of the war expose two opposing sides in American narrative-making: those who believe that our societal differences can always be “solved by white people finding common ground,” and those who believe “racism is deeply embedded in American society and can’t be defeated without a fight.”
This conflict is obviously also being played out in the ongoing battles over the presence of monuments to the Confederacy throughout the South, where their defenders’ vague references to protecting “our heritage” mask the white supremacist origins and current racist message of these statues. We can’t allow apologists for treason and racism to set the terms of this debate; we can’t let them hide behind anodyne generalities in their defense, and need to make explicit what they’d rather keep at the level of dog-whistle politics. They are playing with fire in their defense of the Confederacy, and we need to make sure they burn themselves, badly. This cause gains even greater importance when you consider how important racism and white nationalism are for Donald Trump and the Republican Party as a whole; indeed, in its transformation into a white nationalist party in the mold of the Trump-Bannon vision for America, the GOP is beginning to look more and more like a one-trick pony — except, in place of the pony, you should feel free to substitute the image of a horse, astride which sits a defeated Confederate general stained with pigeon shit.
