Even though I grew up in Texas, a Confederate state, it was West Texas, the fringes of the Confederacy and an unpopulated area during the war. My hometown is barely 100 years old today, it was not to exist until several decades after the war ended. So I saw zero Confederate pride when I was growing up. Even the KKK was an East Texas phenomenon, there just wasn’t any Klan in West Texas. But white extremist sentiment was every bit as strong. You don’t need the Confederacy for these clowns to flourish.
There are “white extremists” throughout Europe, so yeah, they maybe often be fellow travelers in the US, but you you’re going to get them pretty much everywhere you get white folks.
The Union weren’t invaders. The poor southerners took up arms against their own country and their fellow countrymen, in defense of slavery.
I don’t believe for a minute that any one of them was divorced from the wish to perpetuate slavery, if they weren’t currently slave owners. It’s no different from the many poverty-stricken Americans today who will cut their own throats to provide tax cuts for billionaires, because in their hearts they think they’re the same as the billionaire class.
And the reason that poor Americans see themselves as part of the billionaire class is because in America, “class” is based on skin color. Poor whites vote against their self-interest constantly, just because they think that by emphasizing their whiteness, that makes them winners. They have no other way to reach the top of the class structure, but fortunately, they’re already kings - if their skin is white.
The poor Southerners, who made up the bulk of the Confederate army, were fighting to keep black people subjugated so that they could perpetuate their own self-identification with a ruling class they could not otherwise hope to approach.
This, incidentally, is what Democrats need to do for working class whites: provide them an easier and richer chance to join the upper class via money and opportunities, while encouraging them to see that they don’t need to oppress anyone else to climb up.
I am … not optimistic. I would suggest the Democrats just focus on building the path to social mobility and then tell working-class whites in stark terms that they better drag their asses up that path or get left behind. I wouldn’t try to appeal to them, I’d try to harness their fear of being passed by. I’m not optimistic about this plan, either, but I think appealing to the worst instincts of the sort of people who cling to racism is more likely to get results.
This is why
I used to get bent out of shape over this, but the historical argument has some merit. History isn’t about just the winners, heroes, and patriots. It’s also about the losers, assholes, and traitors. If you want a convenient way for these groups and their cheerleaders to self-identify, how can you beat a flag?
There’s a good argument that Lincoln aimed the Gettysburg Address at those rebel soldiers and their families, to get them to see the rebellion as just another case of poor men being suckered into dying to defend rich men’s property, and that it had the intended strong effect on rebel recruiting and retention.
The Civil War ended in 1865. What evidence is there people who feel strongly about Confederate statues are dying off?
Most of the white supremacists who invaded Charlottesville (the town’s quite liberal; I assure you most of the neo-Nazis were not from there) are in their 20s and 30s; these are “men” who were born in the 1980s and 1990s. What makes you think this is in any way dying out?
You know, it seems if some folks of the right ethnic derivation and sufficient chutzpah (wow that word choice is gonna seem REALLY ironic in a few seconds) were so inclined, they might make a really fascinating point.
Just imagine if the next time “Confederates” and Nazis started parading around with their flags, they were joined by American Arabs flying ISIL’s colors. Joined, not “countered”. Seems like they are more alike than dissimilar.
I think it was a little more subtle than that. Johnson was a southerner. But he wasn’t sympathetic to the entire south. He was a self-made man who had raised himself up from poverty. So Johnson sympathized with poor white people. But he didn’t like black people and he didn’t like the wealthy people who had controlled the south before the war. What Johnson wanted was a transfer of power from the southern elite to the southern white masses.
Lincoln didn’t hate the south. Lincoln didn’t really have any deep sectional loyalty. He saw himself as a national representative not a regional one. Lincoln personally hated slavery but he didn’t seem to regard black people as the social equals of whites (which was a common view in his time). However he seemed to support the idea that black people were entitled to the same legal rights as white people. But he also seemed to have no problem with the reality that in a democratic political system the white majority would control politics.
So I feel Lincoln and Johnson were actually not all that far apart. Both were self-made men who had grown up poor. Both distrusted political elites and wanted the people to have power. The main difference between them would be Johnson would have accepted the idea of black people not being able to vote while Lincoln would have wanted them to be able to vote but would have accepted the political reality that white people would have outvoted black people.
Well, speaking of irony, the whole driving a car into a crowd of people has been adopted as a tactic of choice by Islamic radicals in Europe.
There was no reliable public polling. People can cherry-pick their anecdotes or the diary entries they like best. The only real poll was secession itself. Lots of enfranchised southerners opposed it, often because they had no interest in fighting for slavery. Many secessionists fretted over whether upland Southern whites would be sufficiently motivated to fight for slavery. They argued that whether or not these whites had a direct financial interest, the institution of slavery was good for poor white people because it kept a caste of people permanently below them for the most menial labor.
In the end, enough Southern whites supported secession, which was the only poll that mattered.
Of course, there’s plenty of anecdotal data to also explore your thesis. Look, for example, at how Confederates tortured and killed captured Black Union soldiers.
I certainly wouldn’t argue that the Southern elites (both economic and political) cast their vote in defense of slavery. But much of the scholarship since the Civil War concluded that the “average” Confederate soldier was fighting for the same things most soldiers fight for - home, family, and honor. Expecting them to run away with their loved ones to a different country is unrealistic - philosophically and economically.
Yes thats just the recipe for a successful representative democracy, an unprecedented and prolonged military occupation of a huge portion of the country.
I wasn’t there, so take this with a grain of salt, but there was another expectation. They could just stop fighting against the country in which they currently lived.
(I thought you left, BTW. ??)
Not to mention many of them were conscripts. Only a ridiculously comic-book portrayal like Richard Parker’s would omit such information.
There were very very few of them and they hold no political power to speak of.
You’re not answering the question; why should I think they’re dying off?
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Do you have evidence their numbers are shrinking?
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Do you have evidence that counters the simple observation that Nazis and white supremacists skew young, to demonstrate they are “Dying off”?
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Do you have evidence their influence is shrinking?
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Given there are at least two known white supremacists in the White House (Miller and Gorka) and one person (Bannon) who at least uses white supremacy to further his aims, and given that this is totally unprecedented in recent history, can you explain how this is consistent with the notion white supremacy is waning?
You mean like the Neo-Confederates and the Lost Causers who have for years paint the Confederacy as being pure and never needing to resort to the authoritarian-style conscription like that dirty Union side did?
That’s basically correct, but if fails to acknowledge that, for the South, ideas of home and honor were inextricably tied to slavery and racial caste. When confederates talked about fighting for their property, they were talking principally about slaves. When they talked of having their way of life violated, they were talking about restrictions on slavery. Many soldiers fought for slavery. Many more did not. But the they often fought for things one order removed from slavery: opposition to Black Republicans who threaten the South’s special “way of life.”
More to the point, the lowly soldiers are not who the South made statues out of. They made statues out of men whose ideologies we know a lot more about. Lee was a slavemaster who beat his slaves and sold their children. Under his command, his soldiers captured, tortured, and killed free blacks–some soldiers and some not. You should not try to defend him by pointing to why some ordinary soldiers fought.
Mind you, the Germans from the western part actually did came OK from their prolonged military occupation, even the ones from the east did manage to realize that their anti democratic Nazi past was deader than dead thanks to that prolonged occupation.
Seriously, anyone who thinks that denying that history happened is a fucking idiot.