Reconstruction as a guiding concept for 2021 American politics

I've been critical of a shift that's been especially notable the last 20 years in the understanding of historical symbolism in politics on the left and center-left in the United States. During my first year of blogging (2003-4), I started a practice I've followed every year since then of posting daily in April in counter-celebration of Confederate "Heritage" Month. It focuses broadly on debunking neo-Confederate/Lost Cause ideology. But I've also looked more broadly at the history leading up to the Civil War, the wartime itself, Reconstruction, and the later use of neo-Confederate narratives and symbols.

In the last 18 years, the general understanding of the problems of the Lost Cause historical-political narrative has definitely increased, while the QAnon-ized Republican Party are polarizing in favor of it. To the point that former President Trump actually vetoed the defense appropriation - heretofore sacred to the Republican Party - in defense of his desire to keep the names of Confederate traitors on the names of US military bases.

Meanwhile, in the Democratic Party, even the two major founders of the party, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, have largely fallen out of favor. Both were slaveowners who viewed American Indians largely as enemies. Jackson in particular has become notorious for his policy of Indian removal.

It's true that the United States and the colonies that were its forerunners were based on settler colonialism, a local variant of the kind that displaced and largely destroyed the native tribes of North and South America and was a huge factor in the history of Africa. It's also very much the case that the American economy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were produced in major part by the slave system. With the current popularity of "postcolonialism" in conceptualizing history, I would expect scholarly and public understanding of those issues to evolve siginificantly in the coming years, as well.

The historian Heather Cox Richardson formulates the challenge as recognizing that good aspects of Amerian history like the growth of democracy, the recognition of human rights, and the development of economic prosperity, were connected to and even dependent on some massively evil things like slavery, settler colonialism, and imperialism. This is my interpretation of her perspective. For more of her outlook, see ny post Heather Cox Richardson on "The American Paradox": equal rights in theory with actual inequality 08/08/2020 and others that followed.

One encouraging result of this broadening of perspective on the left/center-left is that there is a much greater appreciation today of the significance of Reconstruction as an important moment and a radical advance in American democracy. It was primarily an advance for men formerly held in slavery, although women also started winning the right to vote ("women's suffrage") with Wyoming's entry to the Union as a state in 1869. (Women's History Timeline, BBC News n/d)

This recent piece by Manisha Sinha, The Case for a Third Reconstruction New York Review of Books 02/03/2021), is a good example of looking at Reconstruction as an experience offering insights for American politics today

American democracy is once again at a crossroads, as it was during the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the postwar period when the former Confederate states were readmitted to the Union. Like the secessionist slaveholders who would break the republic rather than accept the election of an antislavery president, Trump and his enablers tried to disrupt the electoral process rather than accept his decisive defeat in the election. One of the main inciters of the failed Capitol Hill putsch, Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, is reminiscent of another politician from that state: the rabidly proslavery David Atchison, whose “Border Ruffians” regularly stole elections in Kansas in the 1850s through a campaign of terror and intimidation. “Bleeding Kansas” was a dress rehearsal for the Civil War that came soon after.

It is not a coincidence that the Capitol Hill rioters carried the battle flag of the Confederacy. The last large-scale instances of domestic insurrection in American history were the slaveholders’ rebellion of 1861 and the racist Draft Riots of 1863 in New York City. Both were quelled by the armed might of the federal government.

The history of Reconstruction reveals that moments of crisis can also provide opportunities to strengthen our experiment in democracy. With a Democratic-controlled Congress, the new administration has just such a chance to inaugurate a much needed “third reconstruction” of American democracy. Trump’s “Big Lie” parroted by large sections of the Republican Party and his attempts to interfere with the certifying of votes in several states expose how vulnerable our complicated electoral system is to illegal meddling. During the original Reconstruction, the republic rid itself of another faithless president, Andrew Johnson. As I have argued elsewhere, Trump’s true antecedent is not the oft-compared Andrew Jackson, who threatened to hang secessionists, but Andrew Johnson, who humored traitors and peddled racial bigotry. Like Johnson, Trump and his followers are fond of Confederate generals and their rebel rag of treaon. [my emphasis]

We always need to be cautious with historical analogies. The history of the Munich analogy in American foreign policy is an excellent cautionary example. But since the US has an evolving written Constitution that dates back to 1789, previous events in the US can be very relevant to current events and to realtime jurisprudence.

I originally called this blog "Old Hickory's Weblog" with reference to the democratic/reformist/proto-left-populist aspect of Andrew Jackson' politics and that of the movement that came to bear his name, Jacksonian democracy. I've posted numerous times about Jackson's Indian policy, so anyone can judge for themselves to what extent I may have defended or minimized it. Here is a post of mine from the time when I decided reluctantly that it was time to change the blog's name, grumping about the fact that Trump and Bannon were able to coopt the symbolism of Andrew Jackson, mortal foe of the Money Power and of pro-slavery secessionism, for their own reactionary political project: Trump puts Andrew Jackson back in the news 05/03/2017.

But Sinha's reference to Jackson bolded above is key to what I think is a reasonable, historical, democratic understanding of Jackson and his politics. When first confronted with a serious pro-slavery secessionist movement in the Nullification Controversy, one led by John Calhoun, the slaveowner Jackson came down hard against it. And despite being himself a wealthy man, Jackson enunciated a concept of American patriotism that saw democracy and allegiance to the Constitution as an essential element of patriotism. It was at least a rudimentary predecessor of Jürgen Habermas' notion of "constitutional patriotism".

That's why it was so bizarre to me to see even liberals and leftists accept Trump's bogus Steve-Bannon-ish embrace of Andrew Jackson as a symbol. Any remotely realistic comprarison of Trumpism to the politics of the time of the Nullification Controversy would have to put Trump and his idolators in the John Calhoun camp. It's Calhoun's rancid soul that goes marching on today in the form of Trumpism.

Since the left still accepts Abraham Lincoln the Great Liberator as a tolerable symbol of the best of the American tradition, it's worth remembering that Lincoln cited Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson as his two most important models for his Presidency. It's important to think of early and antebellum American history in a nuanced way with a realistic understanding of the prevalent forms of government and politics of those times. Or, if one isn't allergic to Hegelian terminology, to think of it dialectically.

But I'm very happy to see what appears to be a renewed awareness of and interest in Reconstruction. I've been there for a long time. Sinha reminds us of some unpleasant but relevant facts above the overthrow of the democratic governments in the former Confederacy by the violent, anti-democracy "Redemption" movement: "Periodic riots and massacres in the postwar South upended the rule of law and democracy itself by overturning interracial state governments. Small wonder that Hitler bemoaned the defeat of the Confederacy and held up the Jim Crow South, as well as the violent dispossession of Native Americans in the West, as historical role models for the Third Reich." That's not hyperbole. The Nazis and similar European movements in the 20th century really looked to post-Reconstruction racial policies in the US as desirable model.

And this is a legitimate and important lesson to draw for today from the experience of Reconstruction: "The end of Reconstruction illustrates that the lack of political will to hold domestic terrorists accountable can be far too costly for American democracy."