No Confederate “Heritage” Month Series This Year

I first started in 2004 making daily posts in April of each year focused on debunking the racist and reactionary Lost Cause ideology associated with “Confederate Heritage” groups and celebrations.

This year I’m not planning to do daily posts on the topic. It’s not because rightwing ideology around American history and the Civil War in particular has become less aggressive. On the contrary. The project has actually become much bigger with Trump 2.0 by being absorbed into the larger anti-democracy MAGA ideology: which is first and foremost the worship of the Orange Anomaly, Donald Trump.

And it’s certainly not as though ethnonationalist Republicans have given up on idolizing the Confederacy. USA Today just reported:

• President Trump signed an executive order calling for the reinstatement of monuments and memorials removed for ideological reasons.
• The debate over Confederate memorials centers on whether they represent heritage or  glorification of slavery and intimidation.
• Numerous Confederate statues, monuments, school names, and park names have been changed or removed in Florida since 2015. (1)

Kevin Levin, who covers Civil War memory issues regularly, comments on this story:

This offers a nice summary of the Confederate monuments/statues that have recently been removed in Florida, but none of them were located on federal property. It's hard to imagine why they should be concerned with Trump's recent executive order. The other thing to keep in mind is that there is no reference to the Confederacy in the executive order. (2)

Kevin has actually made a career out of Civil War Memory, which is also the name of his Substack newsletter. He also does live video chats on his Substack page. As he writes in a recent post, the Trumpista era of historical revisionism is looking to become far more intense that anything we’ve seen before. Trump lieutenants like Steve Bannon and Steve Miller see themselves as leaders in a culture war against “woke,” by which they mean, well, any kind of democratic notion of equality before the law.

Kevin notes in one of his recent newsletters:

As a historian of the Civil War era and historical memory, I often find myself asking groups to think about some of the toughest and most divisive questions about our collective past.

In doing this important work, I have always felt as if I was pushing back against a certain amount of resistance. For example, there are some people who refuse to see any acknowledgement of the history and legacy of slavery as anything other than an attempt to dismiss the entire experiment that is the United States of America or as a threat to some narrow idea of ‘American Exceptionalism.’

Such people have always been with us and always will, but that element in our society has been emboldened in recent months and in ways that I never could have anticipated just a few months ago. The war on history and history education that we are currently witnessing has never before been so openly conducted by the President of the United States. [my emphasis] (3)

So, I expect to be doing posts this month on issues relating to the politics of history. But not exclusively or daily on the Confederate “Heritage” scam as such.

The quote from William Faulkner that I see cited more than any other is actually a line from one of Faulkner’s characters in Requiem for a Nun, Gavin Stevens: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” (4)

The past does impose a heavy mortgage on the present. But for post-truth zealots like today’s Trumpistas, history doesn’t exist in its own right, only as ideology to serve the Leader’s goals of the moment.

With Trump 2.0 already entangled in conflicts with the courts, whose judicial independence has been seriously compromised by the corrupt, rogue Supreme Court of the present moment. But judicial and legal issues are also a processing of the past and its adaptation to the present. The democratic concept of “rule of law” has a very specific history. Modern democratic theory assumes that for laws to be legitimate, they have to be made by representatives of the people, not just by a sovereign or a dictator or an oligarchic clique.

As Maximilian Pichl puts it, the “rule of law in not merely a negligible add-on to democracy, but its foundation." (5)

Jürgen Habermas formulated it as a dictum: “No autonomous law without a realized democracy.” (6)

There is such a thing as a democratic view of history. Which among other things, people have to argue about what exactly that means. And, as Kevin mentions in his description of Trump’s 2025 Executive Order for the Gleichschaltung of the Smithsonian Museum: “It’s incredibly sloppy and does little more than highlight the typical fascist-minded talking points about how our understanding of history must be forced to align with ideas of past greatness.” (7)

And “useful history” is not just what is explicitly included in constitutions, laws, and judicial precedents. Nationalism is a real phenomenon: it often has its dark side, but it is real. One recent example we see as a response to the military threats that Trump 2.0 is making against Canada, repeatedly threatening to annex it as American territory, i.e., a 51st state. Faced with these challenges people draw not only on their current positions but also on history for both understanding and inspiration.

Laurence Mussio of the Canadian Globe and Mail recently reached back to the 1840s, when American military belligerence was at one of its most toxic moments: the Mexican-American War, aka, la guerra de Estados Unidos contra México, took place in 1846-48.This was during the Presidency of James K. Polk, whose signature slogan, “Fifty-four Forty or Fight” was a threat to militarily seize the then-British territory of Oregon.

In January, 1846, Lewis Cass of Michigan spoke on the floor of the U.S. Senate, giving a full-throated defence of American expansionism. “Oregon belongs to the United States by the right of destiny and the spirit of our institutions,” the senator thundered, his words carefully noted in Toronto’s newly established Globe newspaper. …

As the crisis unfolded, another veteran of 1812 – Colonel Étienne-Paschal Taché, a warrior, physician, statesman and future premier of Canada – rose to address the Legislative Assembly of the United Province in April, 1846. The galleries were filled to capacity as members debated a new militia bill. In that charged atmosphere, Taché delivered words that would resonate down the decades: “Be satisfied we will never forget our allegiance till the last cannon which is shot on this continent in defence of Great Britain is fired by the hand of a French Canadian.”

The assembly erupted in cheers at this extraordinary declaration. A mere nine years earlier, French Canadians had taken up arms against the Crown in the Rebellions of 1837-38. Now, confronted with American aggression, former rebels had transformed into steadfast defenders of British sovereignty. External threat had achieved what decades of internal politics could not: a fundamental realignment of loyalties. (8)

The point is not whether such analogies are perfect. They never are. The point is that the past, including the past that no person currently alive experienced themselves, is part of how we understand and form emotional response to events in the present.

Mussio doesn’t completely resist the common impulse to get a bit maudlin about such things, concluding with this:

The question persists: Are we prepared, like earlier generations of Canadians, to choose principle over prosperity? History suggests that when truly pressed, Canadians find reserves of resolve. It’s likely that senator Lewis Cass, with his firsthand experience fighting Anglo-Canadian forces, would grudgingly acknowledge that when threatened, the Canadian spirit proves more resilient than anticipated.

But maudlin can also be emotionally evocative for many people.

I’ll conclude by noting that the US expansionism of the 1840s against Mexico was very much driven by the desire of the planter class in the South to expand the number of slave states in the Union. Including Texas, which had broken away from Mexico before the Mexican-America War and become a half-assed “nation” when Mexico abolished slavery in its territory in 1829. Thirty-six years before the United States did so with the 13th Amendment of 1865.

Notes:

(1) Bridges, C.A. (2025): Are Florida’s Confederate statues coming back? Trump orders restoration of monuments. <https://eu.jacksonville.com/story/news/politics/2025/03/28/confederate-monuments-florida-will-trumpexecutive-order/82702263007/> USA Today Network 03/28/2025. (Accessed: 2025-29-03).

(2) Levin, Kevin (2025): Substack Note 03/28/2025. <https://substack.com/@kevinmlevin/note/c-104090007> (Accessed: 2025-29-03).

(3) Levin, Kevin (2025): Only Through History Can We Move Forward Together. Civil War Memory 03/23/2025. <https://kevinmlevin.substack.com/p/only-through-history-can-we-move> (Accessed: 2025-29-03).

(4) Requiem for a Nun (1951), Act 1, Scene 3.

(5) Pichl, M. (2024): Law statt Order.Der Kampf um den Rechtsstaat, 226. Berlin: Suhrkamp. My translation from German.

(6) Habermas, Jürgen (1997 [5.Auflage]): Faktizität und Geltung. Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats, 599. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. My translation from German.

(7) Levin, Kevin (2025): Trump Targets Smithsonian Institution. Civil War Memory 03/28/2025. <https://kevinmlevin.substack.com/p/trump-targets-smithsonian-institution> (Accessed: 2025-29-03).

(8) Mussio, Laurence (2025): A new nationalism is emerging in Canada. Globe and Mail 03/29/2025. <https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-a-new-nationalism-is-emerging-in-canada/> (Accessed: 2025-30-03).