Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 28: Robert E. Lee as Lost Cause icon

Donald Trump has emphasized Robert E. Lee as a hero for his white nationalist movement.

One thing about about fanaticism is that its motivational claims don't have to be based on empirical reality. It's often said, for instance, that you don't need Jews to have anti-Semitism. If people in Poland, for instance, believe the world is controlled by a sinister Jewish conspriracy, the notion came become a big influence politically even though very few people in the country have any regular contact with actual Jews at all. In some ways, not having actual contact with a stigmatized group make be helpful in making a politics targeting them as the enemy earsier. Polls in Germany, Austria, and the US repeatedly show that areas with higher proportions of immigrants are less open to xenophobic appeals that areas with a much lower immigrant presence.

Neo-Confederate ideology also doesn't have to bear any close resemblance to actual history for it to serve as pseudohistorical ideology for present-day white supremacist politics.

But facts do matter, even in historical outlooks. I haven't seen any polls on the topic. But I think there is more awareness among Americans today than, say, 20 years ago that neo-Confederate/Lost Cause pseudohistory does play a role in current political ideology, and that it's based on shameless distortions of history.

Adam Serwer did a helpful article a couple of years ago addressing the scam version of Trump's hero Robert E. Lee, The Myth of the Kindly General Lee 06/04/2017:

The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together.

There is little truth in this. Lee was a devout Christian, and historians regard him as an accomplished tactician. But despite his ability to win individual battles, his decision to fight a conventional war against the more densely populated and industrialized North is considered by many historians to have been a fatal strategic error.

But even if one conceded Lee’s military prowess, he would still be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in defense of the South’s authority to own millions of human beings as property because they are black. Lee’s elevation is a key part of a 150-year-old propaganda campaign designed to erase slavery as the cause of the war and whitewash the Confederate cause as a noble one. That ideology is known as the Lost Cause, and as historian David Blight writes, it provided a “foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow system.” [my emphasis]

His article debunks Lee's postwar status as an advocate for racial moderation and political reconcilation in the South. The Lost Cause narrative served to facilitate a post-Reconstrution political reconciliation between white Northerners and white Southerners, very much at the expense of African-American rights, particularly but by no means exclusively in the former Confederate states.