Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 12: Understand current politics in their historical context

Dale Kretz in an article for the social-democratic website Jacobin writes about different ways that the same history can be evaluated and valued (The Abolitionist Legacy of the Civil War Belongs to the Left 04/06/2022):

How should we remember the Civil War? For many liberals today, the story is one of the North winning the war but losing the peace, acquiescing to a sectional reconciliation that left white supremacy intact. Racism won out, plain and simple.

But this is only part of the story. The precipitous decline in union membership, labor militancy in the workplace, and Marxist scholars in academia have conspired to obscure what historian Matthew Stanley brings to light in his recent book: that the Civil War, for black and white workers alike, was an enduring touchstone for popular struggles from Reconstruction to the New Deal, shaping class consciousness in the process.

I would argue that Kretz draws too sharp a difference there. I'm sure there are a lot of liberals who haven't spent a lot of time reading up on Reconstruction. But during the Jim Crow years basically until the 1960s, liberals did accept a Lost Cause view of Reconstruction as a terrible time of corruption by Republicans and Black officeholders in the South in a process imposed by fanatical Radical Republicans.

And for decades it really was more left-leaning historians writing in publications like the Journal of Negro History (now Journal of African American History) who validated Reconstruction as an important time of democratic reform that could have succeeded if the federal government had been willing to enforce civil rights in the South more vigorously and suppress violent, anti-democratic terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan more diligently.

But mainstream historiography - which the Republican moral panic over "critical race theory" aims to ban from public schools - has recognized a more realistic and positive view of Reconstruction. Most liberals - and conservatives, too, if they were paying attention - have had at least some decent exposure to those views the last several decades.

I do think that one reason that today's Democratic Party has such a hard time coming to grips with the asymmetric polarization that has made today's Republican Party an authoritarian, radical-right party is that mainstream liberals do tend to operate from a reflexive attitude that progress in democracy and a social state are essentially part of a process in which setbacks are minor and temporary.

But Reconstruction and its overthrow - as well as the Civil War itself - are major reminders that progress in democracy and basic government services can be and have been drastically set back for long periods of time.

And the Republican Party's current push to use voter suppression and election subversion to undermine democracy in real time is very much based on the unfortunately successful efforts of the opponents of Reconstruction used to disenfranchise generations of African-Americans in the former Confederacy.