Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 30: Parting shots for this year

I've been doing this counter-observance of Confederate "Heritage" Month since 2004. Every year I wonder if I'll be able to come up with enough material in the available time to use during April. Invariably, I wind up with more than enough. And so I'll condlude this year's serious with the following links.

When Did Reconstruction End-- Jesse Kass, reply by James Oakes New York Review of Books 03/12/2020 issue. Oakes is addressing a point that Heather Cox Richardson has also recently emphasized. It had become conventional to talk about the end of Reconstruction as involving the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, where they had been tasked with supporting democracy in face of massive attempts, often violent ones, to undermine democracy there.

All that happened in 1877 was the shift of a small number of federal troops from the statehouse in South Carolina to their nearby barracks, but the absolute number of troops in the Southern states remained unchanged and quite small. This fact became especially clear in 2015 with the publication of the “Mapping Occupation” website to which Kass refers. He is also right that nearly all historians of Reconstruction, as well as the PBS documentary Reconstruction: America After the Civil War, make this mistake.

The insignificance of the troop numbers raises a concern I’ve long felt about the conventional use of 1877 as the year Reconstruction ended; 1875, the year Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives to the Democrats, strikes me as a better date for the effective end of federal Reconstruction policy. But in the Southern states, Reconstruction in many ways continued as long as blacks could vote and hold office, which is why another reasonable date for the end of Reconstruction might be 1890, when the Mississippi Plan inaugurated the sweeping policy of disfranchisement that eventually engulfed most of the South. With good reason William Archibald Dunning described disfranchisement as “the undoing of Reconstruction.” Either date - 1875 or 1890 - would probably be better than 1877, when, as Kass indicates, not much of anything actually happened. [my emphasis]

This podcast segment has a good discussion with historian Matt Karp about different ways that left-leaning historians look at the American past, particularly the antebellum past, Left-Wing History, Fake Radical History, and Antislavery Jacobin 04/26/2021.

The discussion has to do with the work of Howard Zinn in particular. It involves some consideration of the approach that New Left historians in the 1960s and 1970s took. They don't use this phrase, but they talk about the approach that is also called fundamental criticism. An advantage to that approach is that it rejects any facile celebration of of particular leaders or accomplishments. But it can also give an impression that outcomes, mostly bad or inadequate outcomes, were predestined. A better approach is one that recognizes that good things and bad things happen, and that there are cycles in political and economic developments, but those don't fit an easy narrative of continuing and inevitable progress. And, in particular, a history from a left perspective in particular needs to recognize the successes as well as shortcomings and failures of popular social and political movements.

Conor Friedersdorf face-plants once again in this column which tries to find a way to promote a version of a "1776" outlook on American history, 1776 Honors America’s Diversity in a Way 1619 Does Not The Atlantic 01/06/2020. (His article doesn't seem to be endorsing the particular Rpublican project that became the "1776 Project". Trump's 1776 Commission to promote "patriotic history" was established months later, in September 2020.)

When it comes to the New York Times' 1619 project about the role of slavery in American history, he does have some valid criticisms to draw upon. For instance, he cites the historian Gordon Wood:

... who was irked most by the Times Magazine’s doubling down on the claim that a primary reason American colonists favored independence was to protect slavery. “I don’t know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves,” he wrote. “No colonist expressed alarm that the mother country was out to abolish slavery in 1776.”

That is the kind of misguided conclusion coming from the "fundamental criticism" approach.

But the obsessively moderate Friedersdorf in this case positions himself as the sensible middle between "Trotskyist[s] and movement conservatives." There's seems to be a bit of old-fashioned redbaiting in that he goes out of the way to associate several historians with a Trotskyist magazine to which they gave interviews, including Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum, James Oakes, Adolph Reed Jr., and James McPherson. All of whom are well-establishd, prominent academic historians. In fact, he spends a large part of the article griping about the World Socialist Web Site, his main Trotsyist bogeyman.

Friedersdorf's middle way, if you make through his rambling comments on Trotskyists, seems to be, gee, I just prefer to celebrate how the Unitd States sprang to life from the text of the Declaration of Independence and began an continuous march of progress in freedom and virtue ever since then. "To assert such ideals as our exalted beginning is to intensify the pressure to live up to them." Fine, but that's not reasons to avoid a serious study of history. Hegel believed in an Enlightment view of historical progress. But he also observed, ""history is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history." You don't have to be quite that pessimistic to realize that history composed of happy talk is not worth a lot.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 29; Far-Right Is Fueling Secession Fantasies

The neo-Confederate attitude is unfortunately alive and well. And, at the moment, flourishing.

Tess Owen reports (The Far-Right Is Fueling Secession Fantasies Across the US Vice News 03/10/2021):

Secession fantasies are once again rumbling on America’s fringes, where a small but growing cadre of disaffected nationalists say they’ve had it with the U.S. and want out.

While secession movements are nothing new in the U.S., experts say the energy feels different now. It’s partly because, for the first time in recent history, the movements are drawing support from state-level GOP officials and right-wing media personalities with huge platforms, who are entertaining these fringe ideas. ...

The renewed energy behind these secession and separatist movements —specifically the “Texit” movement in Texas—comes during intense polarization, raging culture wars, a surge in political violence and in the wake of a conspiracy-driven insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. A poll last month from Quinnipiac University found that 76% of self-identified Republicans believe the lie that the 2020 election was plagued by widespread fraud, which offers some insight into how many people question the legitimacy of the Biden Administration. [my emphasis]

The white supremacist tradition in the US is strong. And the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate narrative still plays a big role in it. It's not just for elderly John Birch Society cranks, either. Many younger cranks - and a large portion of the Republican Parrty - are on board with the current secessionist sentiment.

Confederate Heritage Month 2021, April 28: Nullification fever in Arkansas

"Look, it’s pretty basic. A large proportion of America’s rural white folks lost it over Barack Obama, and they ain’t come back yet. They thought Trump was going to return America to 1954, but now he’s gone, and they’re still hiding out in the woods."

So writes Gene Lyons in a column about the state of Arkansas' current effort to return to the Jim Crow era of white supremacy, Arkansas keeps trying to return to 1954 Chicago Sun-Times 04/16/2021

The column is in particular about legislation against transgender children. But he also cites a March anti-abortion bill and also an outright nullification bill against federal gun laws.

While none of those three actions have directly to do with race, they are actions aimed at challenging the authority of the federal government to protect the civil rights of people in the US from states violating them, and legislating a Christian fundamentalist version of so-called traditional values. But all of those are efforts to validate the same kind of abuse of state power to suppress African-Americans from voting and acting that were part of the original Jim Crow segregation system. And every Arkansas legislator and pretty much all their constituents know that.

As Austin Bailey wrote of one of the gun nullification bills as it was making its way through the legislature, "Anyone who has ever taken a United States civics class will recognize the unconstitutionality of the bill." (Arkansas senators declare federal gun laws null and void within state borders Arkansas Times 03/31/2021)

And he elaborates, "[this] audacious bill is a huge F.U. to the federal government, practically a declaration of secession. Its message essentially is that the guys in D.C. can take their laws and shove it."

Gene Lyons diagnosis of the nullification fad:

Arkansas legislators also have declared all federal gun laws null and void within the state, a direct challenge to the Constitution’s supremacy clause that is absolutely certain to fail. Serious gun nuts don’t care. They don’t expect to win. They just want their collective amygdala massaged — the fight-or-flight organ buried deep in the limbic brain.

Pretty much the reason they’re gun nuts to begin with.

See also: Andrew DeMillo, Arkansas lawmakers OK reworked bill that nullifies gun laws AP 04/28/2021;

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 27: The illegal international slave trade after 1808

James Oakes is a Civil War historian who has what I consider to be a good sense of the contradictory nature of historical trends, in which good things and bad things not only happen at the same time, but they can be intimately connected to each other.

In Why Did the Slave Trade Survive So Long? New York Review of Books 04/08/2021 issue; accessed 03/29/2021, he discuss how the American Revolution created a contradictory world" int he United States "that simultaneously encouraged and abolished slavery."

In his classic study Capitalism and Slavery (1944), Eric Williams posited a historic reversal of fortune brought on by the American Revolution. Throughout most of the eighteenth century, Williams argued, the profits from slavery and the slave trade proved crucial to financing the early stage of the British Industrial Revolution. But when Americans secured their independence, they broke free from Britain’s imperial trade restrictions, undermining their efficacy. British capitalists quickly became converts to free trade and began denouncing the West Indian “monopoly” for using mercantilist protections to keep the slave economies artificially afloat. In Williams’s telling, the capitalists turned against slavery out of cupidity rather than humanity.

This two-part story has come to be known as the Williams thesis, and although it has provoked decades of debate it has largely survived, albeit in somewhat modified form. Most scholars now agree that slavery and the slave trade were integral, though not necessarily indispensable, to British economic development in the eighteenth century. And most agree that the world’s first abolitionist movement emerged in both the US and Britain as a consequence of the American Revolution, especially in the 1780s, though not necessarily because capitalists began assailing slavery.

What the Williams thesis could not explain was the dramatic revival of slave economies in the first half of the nineteenth century. No doubt something changed in the late eighteenth century, but it was not simply a case of capitalists suddenly turning against slavery. Rather, as Leonardo Marques points out in his exceptional survey of US efforts to suppress the slave trade [The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776–1867 (2016)], the Age of Revolution created a contradictory world that simultaneously encouraged and abolished slavery. [my emphasis]

He points to post-Revolutionary events like the gradual emancipation laws in the North and the anti-slavery Haitian Revolution as boosting the anti-slavery cause, while rapid economic growth in the US and Britain and the growth of slavery in other places like Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico as expressions of a contrary strengthening of the institution.

Oakes explains that despite the US banning of the international slave trade in 1808, practice still continued. And there were Americans, like shipbuilding enterprises that profited from the ongoing international slave trade. And there still were a significant number of slaves coming from the illegal international slave trade still entered the US after 1808. It took decades of international treaties and elaborate efforts by Britain and the US to suppress the international trade. And it was still going on right up until the Civil War. Lincoln began much more vigorous enforcement of US and international laws against the trade, while preceding Democratic administrations had preferred to turn a blind eye to it as much as possible.

Oakes closes with this important observation, "The slave trade did not die on its own; it had to be killed. It took sustained political opposition to overcome the powerful economic incentives that kept the slavers in business. The same could be said of slavery itself."

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 26: Slave traders

The Majority Report How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America w/ Joshua D. Rothman 04/19/21 featured an interview with a historian of the slave trade in the USJoshua Rothman, author of The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America (2021).

One notable item in the interview is that Rothman challenges the common notion that slave traders were held in contempt even by slaveowners who used their services.

An article by Rothman appears in the Smithsonian Magazine Before the Civil War, New Orleans Was the Center of the U.S. Slave Trade 04/19/2021:

The city of New Orleans was the largest slave market in the United States, ultimately serving as the site for the purchase and sale of more than 135,000 people. In 1808, Congress exercised its constitutional prerogative to end the legal importation of enslaved people from outside the United States. But it did not end domestic slave trading, effectively creating a federally protected internal market for human beings.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 25: More on the Tulsa race massacre of 1921

It will be interesting to see how much attention the 100th anniversary year of the gruesome Tulsa race massacre of 1921 gets in the press. I assume it will be quite a bit.

Rachel Maddow recently did a retrospective on the event, Rachel Maddow Remembering The Tulsa Race Massacre As The 100th Anniversary Approaches MSNBC 04/20/2021:

A very important source on the incident is the one I quoted in an earlier post, Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 02/28/2001. One of its sections is "Assessing State and City Culpability: The Riot and the Law" by law professor Alfred Brophy, which looks at the role of public officials whose purpose is to enforce the law in blatantly violating it instead:

The Tulsa riot represented the break down of the rule of law. As Bishop Mouzon told the congregation of the city’s Boston Avenue Methodist Church just after the riot, “Civilization broke down in Tulsa.” I do not attempt to place the blame, the mob spirit broke and hell was let loose. Then things happened that were on a footing with what the Germans did in Belgium, what the Turks did in Armenia, what the Bolshevists did in Russia. That break down of law is central to understanding the riot, the response afterwards, and the decision over what, if anything, should be done now.

That opening paragraph shows both the strength and weakness of many of these official commission reports. Studies like this are good to have. Historical commissions can actually contribute to their purpose of describing and situating the history of the events in question. While official commissions on current issues are very often just stunts to substitute for actual action. (Although their reports can also be valuable for people who actually care about the issue in question.)

It's good to see Brophy defining this straightforwardly as an instance of "the breakdown of the rule of law." But why does he say he does "not attempt to place the blame," my question is, why not? That's actually part of what historical accounts should do. And he follows it in the ame sentence with "the mob spirit broke and hell was let loose." Which is true, but could also be taken as some kind of excuse for the guilty. I don't think that's what he is trying to do here. In the bulk of the chapter, he focuses on the question of ongoing legal liability of official bodies. So in that context, the "mob spirir" has to be distinguished in some way from official culpability.

And with the three historical examples he gave of "things ... on a footing" the Tulsa massacre of 1921, it's not clear what he takes the parallel to be. I assume he's referring to the atrocities committed by Imperial Germany in Belgium during World War I (which were also famously an example of exaggerated claims being used as war propaganda by the Allies) and the Armenian genocide (which is not especially familiar to a lot of a American readers). But "what the Bolshevists did in Russia" refers to as a parallel, I can't even make a guess just reading that paragraph.

But Brophy does make an argument that public entities have a continuing legal culpability for the events. And the bulk of his essay is devoted to looking at the legal precedents for that. He writes:

Tulsa failed to take action to protect against the riot. More important, city officials deputized men right after the riot broke out. Some of those deputies — probably in conjunction with some uniformed police — officers were responsible for some of the burning of Green wood. After the riot, the city took further action to prevent rebuilding by passing a zoning ordinance that required the use of fire proof material in rebuilding.

He also cites contemporary accounts that provide damning details of the murderous incident. It's certainly not the case that white people across town in some other part of Tulsa had no idea what had happened. And it was not a matter of "rednecks from out in the country" doing the bad acts; that was a favorite line local officials used in the Jim Crow era.

Brophy is also the author of Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921, Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation (2002).

Confedertae "Heritage" Month 2021, April 23: James Monroe and the Missouri Compromise of 1820

John Craig Hammond has a new essay on the Missouri Compromise of 1820, "Mastery over Slaves, Sovereignty over Slavery: James Monroe, Virginia, and the Missouri Crisis," in Revolutionary Prophecies: The Founder and America's Future (2021), Robert McDonald and Peter Onuf, eds. (It incorporates material from Hamond's article, "President, Planter, Politician: James Monroe, the Missouri Crisis, and the Politics of Slavery," Journal of American History 105:4, Mar 2019.) Hammond's 2021 essay provides several stark reminders of how the world of 1820 is in some ways both familiar and in others strikingly alien. It was a whole two centuries ago.

The Trump Administration's white supremacist propaganda pamphlet The 1776 Project argues for an idealized view of American history that takes the span of US history as primarily an inspirational example of the development of the Exceptional America of the contemporary conservative Republican imagination.

Actual history, of course, is at least as complicated as the people who made it. Treating American history as some kind of sacred canon of wisdom and justice mainly leaves people open to dishonest and malicious versions of history like that promoted by The 1776 Project. The result of that kind of attitude was explained decades ago in this Tom Paxton song, performed here by Pete Seeger, What Did You Learn In School Today?:

On the other hand, there are things to be learned from history. How well we learn them is questionable. How we apply them often more so. It would be wrong and even silly to suggest that some "woke" interpretations of history that adopt a kind of mirror-image view have been as damaging as the triumphalist view has been and still is: Though it is also true that taking a kind of fundamental-opposition view of history in the mood of "it's-sin-and-we're-agin'-it" is also not very helpful in understanding history. Although it's sometimes convenient as a momentary polemic.

Certainly, in the case of the US, we are still living under the basic governmental form of the Constitution of 1789. So laws and court decisions going back to 1820 and before are relevant and often still binding. American society of today and the major changes in the Constitution is the product of historical developments since then, so we can still see and understood aspects of situations in 1820 in terms of our present experiences.

Hammond's essay is about one of the major inflection points in the antebellum (pre-Civil War) fight over slavery, the Missouri Compromise of 1820. I posted about Thomas Jefferson's position on that event in the third iteration of my annual Confederate "Heritage" Month cycle in 2006. That post discussed one of the events that seem so alien to us in retrospect, the pro-British sentiment in the Federalist Party during the War of 1812, which even included threats of secession on the part of some Northerners.

The Federalist Party had been in decline since 1801 and was practically dormant by 1817. But many of the politicians and political inclinations of that party were still active. And the experience with the Federalists during the war was still very much on President James Monroe's mind in 1819-20.

It's also more than a little strange to remember how important the planter class in the state of Virginia was in national politics at the time. From 1791 to 1825, John Adams was the only President (1795-1801) who was not from Virginia. The country was obvious much smaller then, although the number of states had grown considerably westward from the original 13 states to 22. And the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 had opened up a huge potential for American settlement west of the Mississippi River.

Since much of mainstream history today rightly recognizes the importance of slavery in modern history, we are more aware today of how of how drastically different our understanding of basic human rights is in the US today than prior to 1865. And thanks to the "postcolonial" perspective that increasingly influences academic history, we also now find it hard to avoid considering how pervasively the settler colonialism practiced by the European powers - and later by the US and the other newly independent states all over the Americas - against the native populations was largely taken to be unavoidable, desirable, and necessary by the European-descended citizens of those countries.

We see such considerations pop up in Hammond's account of the Missouri Compromise, which admitted the former territory of Missouri to the Union as a slave state, but also banned slavery in Louisiana Purchase territory north of a defined geographic line, the 36°30′ parallel, which ran along the south border of Missouri. Maine was also admitted as a free state at the same time, preserving was already and equal balance between slave and free states, which meant the two groups were equally represented in the Senate.

As in later such major compromises, the Missouri Compromise was a concession to the Slave Power, i.e., the ruling planter elite of the slave states.

Hammond does not mention in his article a key technological development that had radically changed the context in which slavery was understood in the US, Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin in 1793 (patented 1794), which drastically increased the profitability of cotton farming, which was done on a grand scale on the Southern slave plantations.

William Freehling has written valuable accounts of how slavery ended in the Northern states through "diffusion," as the proportion of slaves in those states grew smaller and the Southern plantation economies came to rely more heavily on slavery. This made "gradual emancipation" and/or compensated emancipation seem like a plausible way to end slavery, because that's how it had ended in the Northern states. And in the early years of the Republic, pro-slavery ideology tended to talk about slavery as a tragic but necessary evil that would and should disappear one day. It was a cynical ideology, no doubt. But the diffusion experience of the Northern states gave it some practical plausibility. (One of the effects that Freehling notes is that Northern whites in that process came to associate ending slavery with a decreased presence of black people, which is one way that hatred of slavery coexisted in the minds of many whites with hatred of black people as such.)

But the increasing viability of slavery went along with the development of a more explicit racist theory regarding blacks as inherently inferior to whites and by nature suited for slavery. If genes had been discovered yet, we could describe it as a genetic argument. But it was definitely pseudoscientific racism, even by the scientific standards o the time.

Though the "necessary evil" argument for slavery as something required to raise the black race to an acceptable state of civilization remained common among slavery defenders in Virginia up until the Civil War, Hammond notes that strong shift in the explicit position of even many Virginia planters to a more hardcore defense of the institution of slavery by the crisis that produced the Compromise of 1820. "The Missouri Crisis pushed Monroe and the Virginia planter class to accept a position they had long been moving toward: slavery in Virginia and the United States as a permanent institution."

Monroe himself was a slaveowner, like Washington and Jefferson and Madison were. "Although Monroe might have deprecated slavery’s existence and continuation in Virginia, like so many slaveholders he was financially dependent on his slaves, while his holdings in land and slaves solidified his family’s social status," writes Hammond. In his 2019 article, Hammond judged, "Monroe might have been a moderate, a unionist, and a nationalist on matters such as a national bank, but regarding slavery Monroe was as protective of the institution as the most radical Virginia planters." IN the 2021 essay, he presents Monroe's position in the moment as heavily tilting toward slavery, even beyond his considerable personal financial stake in the Peculiar Institution:

Historians typically take Monroe’s late support for the line as demonstration of his commitment to union and compromise. But Monroe’s actions during the Missouri Crisis were driven by his underlying concern for maintaining the planter class’s sovereignty over slavery as an institution, mastery over the lives of slaves, and Virginia’s preeminent place in the union. Monroe signed the Compromise into law in March 1820 because he feared that allowing the Missouri Crisis to continue promised a host of calamities far worse than a ban on slavery north of the 36–30 line.

Hammond explains that the two perceived potential calamities were (1) a complete ban on slavery, and (2) threat of secession by Northern states, which in turn would produce Southern secession. He also notes, "In the midst of the Missouri Compromise, he took an active part in selling slaves and his landholdings." Whether than was just routine business on Monroe's part or a sign of declining optimism about the survival of slavery would be an interesting question.

Hammond's 2021 essay provides a good sense of how intensely the tensions between the free states and slave states were becoming in 1820 compared to previous times.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 22: The Last Judgment, the Lost Cause, and "Southern [white] historical consciousness"

Oran Smith in his book on the Southern Baptist Convention and movement conservatism in the US, The Rise of Baptist Republicanism (1997), makes an intriguing observation about the mutual relationship between what we now call Christian fundamentalism and Lost Cause ideology in the years after the Civil War in what Smith calls "Southern historical consciousness," by which he means the understanding of history among the white majority.

His analysis involves the End Times theology embraced by many conservative Christians (fundamentalist and Pentecostal) in the United States called "dispensationalism." This is a theory originated and popularized by A British minister named John Nelson Darby (1800–1882), a leader in the Protestant sect, The Plymouth Brethren, who later led a split-off sect called the Exclusive Brethren. He began propagating a theory of the End Times that is known as "premillenial dispensationalism," which involved the Rapture that has become familiar in American popular culture in recent decades. In this view, true Christians will be "raptured" by being suddenly taken into Heaven, while on earth a thousand years of conflict and suffering will follow on Earth until Christ returns and puts an end to worldly history and conducts the Last Judgment.

Darby propagated his idea in the 1830s and 1840s in Europe. His Rapture notion of the End Times became a one of the two major doctrinal elements of what came to be known as Christian fundamentalism in the early 20th century, the other one being the notion of "Biblical literalism." Oran Smith describes how Southern Christians in the US had worked out a vision of the End Times that expected a millennium of progress based on their understanding of Southern slave society:

In the years before the American Civil War, a millennialist myth had already begun to develop, as theologians looked to the scriptures for lessons about the end of the world. With cotton the reigning king, evangelical ministers along with political leaders convinced many Southern elites in an upbeat, positive, “postmillennial” phase that, with its economic and spiritual prosperity, Southern society was so idyllic that this earthly perfection indicated that the thousand-year or “millennial” rein of Christ promised in the scriptures would be ushered in without judgment. Christ would return to earth at the end of a millennial reign of peace already begun.

Obviously the human property of the Southern planter elite weren't experiencing an idyllic life. But this religious propaganda support for the slave system was a triumphalist one, with a kind of Panglossian satisfaction in the society of the South, destined to civilize ever-larger portions of the world with its Christian institution of slavery.

But after the godly slave society was transformed by the Civil War that ended its Peculiar Institution of slavery, a more Darby-like vision of the End Times became popular, one that resonated more with white despair but also contained a more obvious angry and aggressive vision:

Then came the war. In the postwar phase, as the region lay in ruin, the positive postmillennialism gave way to dour premillennialism. A devastated South took Confederate defeat as a sign that Christ would soon rapture His church safely out of a world that was getting progressively hostile to His kingdom so that He might judge the sinful world before His thousand-year rein. In some sense, the [Southern Baptist denomination] remains in ... this latter phase, as deep within Southern Baptist religion and politics lies the notion that the South is separate from the rest of the nation: a little more righteous, a little more virtuous; believers in the absolutes of scripture surrounded by relativists, a Christian nation-state snuffed out by barbarians. [my emphasis in bold]

The Southern Baptists are still the largest Protestant denomination in the US, and is particularly strong in the states of the former Confederacy. It got the "Southern" part of its name in 1845 when it split off from its Northern wing in the lead-up to the Civil War, i.e., they split off because of their own support for slavery. Oran Smith poses the questions for the world of 1997, "Why does the Lost Cause myth remain important? Why is it important for political analysis?"

Simple. Because the myth lives. According to one cultural critic, “Southern Baptists have been the largest identifiable group of victims of [the Lost Cause] myth.” Southern Baptist religion scholar and moderate-faction activist Bill Leonard agrees that the myth is not a dusty fable. He writes that “the way in which Southern Baptist leaders sought to explain the defeat of the South’s righteous cause provides insight into their continuing response to divisive theological and cultural issues. The formula seems to be: When in doubt, spiritualize. That tendency remains a significant element of SBC life” (emphasis [from Smith]).

By "victims" in that quote, Leonard clearly means that white Southern Baptists were the biggest suckers for swallowing the Lost Cause ideology.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 20: The soul of Jim Crow goes marching on in voter suppression laws

Steven Wright explains some of the continuity betwee Jim Crow voter suppression measures directed against African-Americans in the 19th and 20th with their direct descendents in the 21st, like the recently adopted Georgia voter suppression law (Voter suppression bills are the first move in a bigger battle The Hill 04/18/21):

In the past, federal law provided safeguards to prevent legislatures from going too far in this direction [of voter restrictions]. Section Five of the Voting Rights Act, for example, required states like Georgia to receive federal approval of their redistricting plans. Indeed, in 1972, 1982, 1992, 1995, and 2001, the federal government or the federal courts objected to at least one of Georgia’s redistricting plans because the plan diminished the power of Black voters. Georgia isn’t an isolated example. As recently as 2017, federal courts have concluded that Texas Republicans intentionally discriminated against Latino and Black voters. But in 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, eliminating this approval process, and destroying African Americans' strongest weapon to combat attacks on their political power.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision, prominent African Americans have pursued several initiatives to combat the threat of discriminatory gerrymandering. Stacey Abrams, who served in the Georgia House during the 2011 redistricting, launched Fair Fight, in part, to combat the anticipated discriminatory redistricting process. Eric Holder, former U.S. attorney general, chairs the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a political action committee that tries to counter discriminatory gerrymandering in swing states.

The twin assault of Georgia’s current voting restrictions and its upcoming racial gerrymandering represents merely the first wave of a larger effort to diminish African American voting strength. [my emphasis]

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 17: Georgian Jim Crow, 2021

Republicans today know that blocking access to the ballot has always relied on legal maneuvering and political schemes.

Historian Jason Morgan Ward explains the precedents for Georgia's new voter suppression law in Georgia’s Voter Law Is Called ‘Jim Crow 2.0’ for a Reason New York Times 03/31/2021.

The Republicans' current stream of voter suppression laws and related chicanery is the same basic approach used by the enemies of Reconstruction after the Civil War to justify the disenfranchisement of black citizens. The disenfranchisement was de facto. The 14th Amendment flatly banned denying people the right to vote based on race.

So they used direct violence and threats along with laws and electoral practices that drastically reduced the number of African-American voters. This is important, because one Republican defense of the current round of voter-suppression laws is that they are not like the practices in former Confederate states during the Jim Crow era because none of the current laws specifically ban African-Americans from voting. The post-Reconstruction voter suppression didn't do that, either.

As Ward writes of voter suppression then and now:

The methods in the fight against voting rights have a common objective — an electorate narrowed along predictable and demonstrable fault lines. Many present-day proponents of voting restrictions are quick to distance themselves from the racist aims and attitudes of their forebears, but the most durable and enduring attacks on voting rights have long cloaked their goals in race-neutral language — at least in writing. [my emphasis]

And referring to the combination of violence and legalistic suppression of votes through most of the 20th century, he refers to former Georgia Gov. Eurgenen Talmadge in the 1940s:

Mr. Talmadge egged on supporters who intimidated and attacked Black voters, but his most enduring and effective tactics look much more like present-day voter suppression tactics. As the Emory researcher Hannah Charak has documented, Mr. Talmadge quietly collaborated with sympathetic local officials on illegal registration purges and blanketed the state with “challenge forms” that white residents could use to dispute Black votes.

Voter suppression tactics like literacy tests and Georgia’s infamous county unit system delivered racist leadership like Mr. Talmadge (and his son) while withstanding legal challenges and Supreme Court rulings for decades in part because such measures commonly avoided mention of race. [my emphasis]

The linked article on the county unit system summarizes its effect this way, "In effect, the system of allotting votes by county, with little regard for population differences, allowed rural counties to control Georgia elections by minimizing the impact of the growing urban centers, particularly Atlanta."

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 16: White racism and Oklahoma statehood

Victor Luckerson writes about racial politics in Oklahoma during the early 20th century in The Promise of Oklahoma Smithsonian Magazine Apr 2021.

Next month will be the 100-year anniversary of one of the most violent white racist atrocities in American history in Tulsa, Oklahoma. An official commission issued this report on the incident in 2001, Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 02/28/2001.

One chapter of the commission report, "History Knows No Fences: An Overview" by John Hope Franklin and Scott Ellsworth, gives this description:

For those hearing about the 1921 Tulsa race riot for the first time, the event seems almost impossible to believe. During the course of eighteen terrible hours, more than one thousand homes were burned to the ground. Practically overnight, entire neighborhoods where families had raised their children, visited with their neighbors, and hung their wash out on the line to dry, had been suddenly reduced to ashes. And as the homes burned, so did their contents, including furniture and family Bibles, rag dolls and hand-me-down quilts, cribs and photograph albums. In less than twenty-four hours, nearly all of Tulsa’s African American residential district — some forty-square-blocks in all — had been laid to waste, leaving nearly nine-thousand people homeless. [my emphasis]

And they describe the cost in human life this way:

All told, considerable evidence exists to suggest that at least seventy-five to one-hundred people, both black and white, were killed during the riot. It should be added, however, that at least one credible source from the period — Maurice Willows, who directed the relief operations of the American Red Cross in Tulsa following the riot — indicated in his official report that the total number of riot fatalities may have ran as high as three-hundred.

Luckerson's article focuses on efforts by African-American and Indian activists to influence the course of events that led up to Oklahoma's statehood. He reminds us that history is complicated:

Black people arrived in Oklahoma long before the prospect of statehood. The first to settle in the area were enslaved by Native American tribes in the Deep South, and they made the journey in the 1830s as hunters, nurses and cooks during the brutal forced exodus known as the Trail of Tears. In Indian Territory (much of today’s eastern Oklahoma) slavery as practiced by the Creek, Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw and Seminole tribes sometimes resembled the vicious plantation systems of the South. During the Civil War, the Five Tribes sided with the Confederacy, but after the war most of the tribes, bound by new treaties with the federal government, granted formerly enslaved people citizenship, autonomy and a level of respect unheard of in the post-Reconstruction South. In the Creek and Seminole tribes, black tribal members farmed alongside Native Americans on communally owned land, served as justices in tribal governments, and acted as interpreters for tribal leaders in negotiations with the growing American empire.

And he reports, "In pre-statehood Oklahoma, it was common for white and black children to attend the same schools as late as 1900. Black politicians held public office not only in tribal governments but also in Oklahoma Territory, the modern-day western half of the state. In the early days of Tulsa, black residents owned businesses in the predominantly white downtown district and even had white employees."

Indian leaders also knew their people had some to lose if Oklahoma were to become a state, since the Five Tribes had considerable autonomy in the pre-statehood situation. Luckerson argues, "Oklahoma was evolving into an unusually egalitarian place."

But he notes that the egalitarianism wasn't universal::

Black communities in the Twin Territories also wrestled with deep internal tensions. At first, black tribal members clashed with the African Americans who immigrated later. The freedmen viewed the black interlopers as participants in the white man’s plunder and called them “state Negroes” (or sometimes a Creek word for “white man’s Negro”). The new black migrants called the black tribal members “natives.” In Boley, an all-black town populated by migrants, freedmen would gallop through the streets at night shooting out residents’ windows. In the pages of the black press, businessmen admonished freedmen for betraying the race by selling their land allotments to white men instead of black entrepreneurs. Black migrants and freedmen, in other words, did not see themselves as sharing a racial identity.

But many of the the white advocates for statehood advocated Jim Crow type segregation lawswhich would be allowed under their proposed state constitution. Minority leaders appealed to President Theodore Roosevelt - the Republican who was a trust-busting hero of the Progressive movement of the time - to block the admission of Oklahoma with its bad state consitution. Roosevelt accepted Oklahoma as a state.

On November 16, 1907, the president signed the proclamation turning Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory into the 46th U.S. state, Oklahoma. Despite Roosevelt’s professed misgivings about admitting a state that discriminated against a portion of its citizens, the [new state's] constitution itself enshrined the segregation of schools. With the president’s signature secured, state leaders moved aggressively to enact the rest of their Jim Crow agenda.The very first law passed by the state legislature segregated train cars. Next, the legislature passed the so-called “grandfather clause,” which circumvented federal voter rights protections by instituting a literacy test on any person whose ancestors had not been allowed to vote before 1866. Naturally, that included all descendants of slaves. Ultimately, the legislature would segregate nearly every aspect of public life—hospitals, cemeteries, even phone booths. Oklahoma’s formal and fully legalized racism was actually more rigid than that in much of the Deep South, where Jim Crow was sometimes upheld by custom and violence rather than legal mandate. In the South, segregation emerged from the vestiges of slavery and failed Reconstruction; in Oklahoma, it was erected statute by statute. [my emphasis]

Confederate Heritage Month 2021, April 15: Justice delayed, but not entirely denied, in white supremacist terrorist cases

This is an informative discussion from earlier this week on "Confronting Domestic Terrorism" from Jerry Mitchell's Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting (MCIR). The event was co-sponsored by Millsaps College, my undergraduate alma mater in Jackson MS.

"Confronting Domestic Terrorism" featuring Doug Jones, Lisa McNair, Andy Sheldon, and Bill Baxley 04/14/2021:

Most of the panelists speak with beautiful Southern accents, BTW.

One of the points stressed in the discussion toward the end is how important investigative journalism is and how little emphasis it receives from corporate media these days.

Interestingly enough, near the end Doug Jones and Jerry Mitchell get on to the relevance of how important the campaign financing issue is in determining whether prosecutors and investigators can do an adequate job in investigating crimes and corruption. Money in politics is messing up everything.

The ongoing investigative work of the MCIR can be found at their website, https://www.mississippicir.org

Their lead story at this writing is by Jerry Mitchell, George Floyd wasn’t the only one to die after an officer kneeled on him. So did Mississippi’s Robert Loggins. 04/14/2021.

The 1963 Birmingham church bombing is a main topic in this discussion. Here is a contemporary UPI report by William Handel on the event, Grief, rage hang over church blast scene 09/15/1963:

At the rear of the church basement there was an ugly hole which hours before was a door. Two cars sitting just outside the church were shattered wrecks. One had a door caved into the backseat from a chunk of stone, and holes big as footballs pierced it.

Other debris was hurled across the street, and amid the watermelon-sized stones was a twisted handrail for what once were steps. About 10 other cars with windows, hoods and roofs smashed were crazily parked where the blast had blown them.

They brought out the first shrouded body of a little girl and the crowd went wild.

"Let me look, I think it's my sister," said one Negro. They let him look.

"This is my sister, and she's dead," he said. The head was severed from the body. The young man was led to the same ambulance.

The current Britannica Online entry on the event Chelsey Parrott-Sheffer talks about the long-delayed justice in the courts:

Violence broke out across the city in the aftermath of the bombing. Two more young African Americans died, and the National Guard was called in to restore order. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke at the funeral of three of the girls. Despite repeated demands that the perpetrators be brought to justice, the first trial in the case was not held until 1977, when former clan member Robert E. Chambliss was convicted of murder (Chambliss, who continued to maintain his innocence, died in prison in 1985). The case was reopened in 1980, in 1988, and finally again in 1997, when two other former clan members—Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry—were brought to trial. Blanton was convicted in 2001 and Cherry in 2002; both received life sentences (Cherry died in 2004, Blanton in 2020). A fourth suspect, Herman Frank Cash, died in 1994 before he could be tried.

Confederate Heritage Month 2021, April 14: White Evangelical Racism and the history of slavery and white supremacy

Sam Seder's Majority Rupport yesterday feetured an interview with Anthea Butler, author of White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America (2021). The interview starts at aroun 21:00 in this YouTube video, White Evangelical Racism & The Politics of Morality in America w/ Anthea Butler- MR Live - 4/13/2018:

She provides a helpful historical overview of how evangelical Protestant Christians in the US developed religious justifications for slavery.

I found it particularly interesting how she talks about the way conservative Christians today adapt the idea - which they theoretically hold - that racism is un-Christian, with their political opposition to addressing systemic racism and even supporting suppression of black and brown voters. As she explains it, Christian evangelicalism (both the fundamentalist and more moderate versions) emphasize individual salvation and the relation of the individual to God.

In that religious construction, sin is a matter of individual choice and guilt, not a matter of systems or institutions. Structural racism doesn't fit into this framework.

Of course, this is also pretty obviously a convenient way to deny that there can or should be any systemic, political, or institutional solutions to racial discrimination. Yes, cops who murder black men for no good reason are committing a sin in religious terms and making the kind of "bad choices" that conservative Christians so often talk about.

But it's also happening all across the country and has been for a long time. And police departments are institutions, normally public institutions, and there is a national police culture that is more than one way is badly deficient. If the current problem of police murders of African-Americans is going to be solved, it will not only take determined state action, including federal action to make that happen.

We all live in society. And the Christians and conservatives who focus on individual "bad choices" do too. Conservative churches can contribute to ameliorating or even solving social problems. But they have to be recognized as social problems, not just an infinite number of individual choices.

Here's how Butler reacted to the January 6 lynch mob attack on the US Capitol in real time on Twitter:

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 13: The concept of "white supremacy"

Stephen Kantrowitz writes about how White Supremacy Has Always Been Mainstream 07/23/2018. Among other things, he says this about the origin of the term "white supremacy":

White supremacy connotes many grim and terrifying things, including inequality, exclusion, injustice, and state and vigilante violence. Like whiteness itself, white supremacy arose from the world of Atlantic slavery but survived its demise. Yet while the structures are old, the term “white supremacy” is not. Although it first appeared in British abolitionist critiques and U.S. proslavery defenses in the first half of the nineteenth century, it only became commonplace — and notably not as a pejorative—in U.S. whites’ post-emancipation calls for a racial order that would reinstitute slavery’s political and economic guarantees. [my emphasis]

And he notes how the more recent version has been facilitated by the laziness of the corporate media - and even PBS:

Consider how long Pat "Blood and Soil" Buchanan served as a respectable voice of the political and journalistic right, winning four states in the 1996 Republican primaries and later playing Rachel Maddow’s curmudgeonly uncle on MSNBC — all in spite of his longstanding support for white ethnonationalism. Or remember the PBS NewsHour profile of Trump supporter Grace Tilly that failed to note her neo-Nazi tattoos. The network’s post-backlash editor’s note treated Tilly’s claim that her tattoos were religious, not racist, as worthy of debate, as though an enormous “88” — code for “Heil Hitler”—paired with a bullseye cross, another white supremacy symbol, left room for uncertainty. The myth that white supremacy is a marginal political phenomenon has proved so durable that many people find it easier to deny its overt expression than confront a more troubling reality: “very fine people” — and not just fathers, husbands, and sons, but mothers, wives, and daughters as well — have always been central to the work of advancing white supremacist causes. [my emphasis]

This is one of the article featured in Boston Review's reading list on white supremacy.

Confederate Heritage Month 2021, April 12: Gov. Tater Tot declares Confederate Heritage Month in Mississippi

I guess it's a good sign that if the Mississippi governor wants to declare Confederate Heritage Month in his state, he feels the need to do it in the bureaucratic equivalent of spray-painting it on a wall in the middle of the night.

Donna Ladd reports (‘Darn’ Tootin’ It Is!’: Gov. Tate Reeves Again Declares Confederate Heritage Month, SCV Says Mississippi Free Press 04/12/2021):

Despite asking Gov. Tate Reeves’ office since late March if he planned to again declare April as Confederate Heritage Month with no response, this publication just found what appears to be this year’s proclamation. The new document, which Reeves apparently signed on April 7, 2021, appears on the Sons of Confederate Veterans’ Camp 265 Rankin Rough & Ready’s Facebook page. Reeves is from Rankin County.

The proclamation does not yet appear on the secretary of state’s official proclamations page at press time. The most recent one on the page is dated March 29, 2021.

This writer found last year’s proclamation on a Sons of Confederate Veterans Facebook page rather than through official government channels as well, breaking the news at the Jackson Free Press. In 2016, that publication had broken the news that Gov. Phil Bryant had quietly proclaimed Confederate Heritage Month, a long-time tradition by Mississippi governors, Democratic and Republican, that had flown under the media radar for years.

Ladd also describes some of the recent propaganda coming from the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SVC), one of the groups that glorifies slavery and white supremacy and violent treason in defense of them. Ladd notes that they run the private Beauvoir site, which was the coastal home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. It is currently "a museum that has long sold revisionist books about the Confederacy, as well as received state funds ...."

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 11: The Lost Cause view of American Indians

These tweets call attention to the nature of The 1776 Report and include an interesting observation about the native peoples of North America fit into the Lost Cause worldview.

Jeffrey Ostler is a historian of the American West and author of Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (2019).

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 10: The anti-democracy white supremacist zombie is still stalking around

The neo-Confederate/Lost Cause ideas were never some crackpot spin on American history. They were and are an ideology to support white supremacist actions, from segregated water fountains to blocking African-American from voting.

But it's important to remember that the latter - denial of the full rights of citizenship to black citizens - was always the core of the old segregationist system.

The classic "highbrow" American conservative journal, National Review, was on the bandwagon for the old segregation system in the 1950s and 1960s. And it's on board for the new Trumpist version, too, as Ben Mathis-Lilley discusses in National Review Comes Out Against Democracy, Explicitly 04/09/2012.

He describes NR's version from the 1950s:

Theories about moving the ballot box out of the easy reach of the masses also belong firmly within the magazine’s intellectual tradition. Here’s what the National Review’s founder and guiding spirit, William F. Buckley, had to say in 1957 on the subject of how widespread the franchise ought to be:

If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened . It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority…Millions who have the vote do not care to exercise it; millions who have it do not know how to exercise it and do not care to learn.

Sounds familiar! Unfortunately for the magazine’s current editor, Rich Lowry, who defended the Georgia law this week under the headline “Anyone Using the ‘Jim Crow’ Charge as a Political Weapon Should Hang His Head in Shame,” Buckley was specifically defending Jim Crow when he wrote it. His argument was that given “the median cultural superiority of White over Negro,” it was only appropriate to prevent Black people from joining a political majority that might favor things like integrated education—that, in the face of such a possibility, “the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically.” The magazine would make similar arguments for years about the white apartheid government in South Africa. [my emphasis]

Richard Hofstadter in his famous essay on the "paranoid style" distinguished between "highbrow" and "lowbrow" version of rightwing radicalism. He even suggested an intermediate "middlebrow" category, which apparently never caught on.

In 1950s/1960s terms, groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Citizens Council would have counted as part of the "lowbrow" part of the spectrum, although the Citizens Council tended to attract more white-color supporters. National Review positioned itself as an intellectually respectable, "highbrow" outlet. I think it's helpful to think of the John Birch Society as providing a "middlebrow" channel.

In business terms, we could describe this as a segregationist/Jim Crow market segmentation strategy: offering an (ideological) "product" to different tastes among the customers. When General Motors follows such of strategy, all customers still wind up with a car. And in the case of the anti-democracy, segregationist spectrum, sectarian and factional differences still provided variations of the same "product": the Jim Crow system that depended on suppressing Constitutional rights, promoting of white supremacist racist attitudes, and the violence of lynch murder to protect the entire Jim Crow system.

One of the best-known examples of such a marketing differentiation was Buckley's much-discussed but largely fake "purging" of the John Birch Society from the conservative movement. (Cormac Kelly, William F. Buckley and the Birchers: A myth, a history lesson and a moral Salon 04/03/2021) With zombie ideas, it's not surprising that they keep shuffling back from the grave. (John Savage, The John Birch Society Is Back Politico 07/16/2017; Rick Perlstein and Edward Miller, The John Birch Society Never Left New Republic 03/08/2021)

As Perlstein and Miller explain, St. Reagan brought the various strands together in his political career:

Although it wouldn’t be fair to beat up only on Buckley. It was Ronald Reagan, after all, remembered today as the avatar of the Republicans’ lost respectability, who in 1971 described African United Nations delegates to a chortling Richard Nixon as “monkeys … uncomfortable wearing shoes.” He espoused conspiracy theories like the claim that Gerald Ford staged assassination attempts against himself to win sympathy votes in the 1976 presidential primaries, and that the Soviet Union had removed 20 million young people to the countryside to practice for reconstructing their society after launching an offensive nuclear war. The newsletter of Reagan’s political action committee advocated the quack cancer cure (and pet Bircher cause) laetrile, which “[m]ay be efficacious against cancer but which government in its wisdom wants to keep people from using.” (The reason was that it didn’t work, and frequently killed people.)

Then Reagan became president—and the only thing that changed was the people around him worked harder to keep his wackiness from the public.

They were frequently frustrated — for instance when Reagan claimed the nuclear freeze movement that drew a million protesters to Central Park in 1982 had been engineered in the Kremlin, or the time he told reporters that apartheid South Africa had “eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country.” There was also the moment when he quoted to a group of college students visiting the White House Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s “eloquent statement” of his plan to conquer America: that he would first take Eastern Europe, then “organize the hordes of Asia,” then “move into Latin America”; then “we will not have to take the last bastion of capitalism, the United States. It will fall into our outstretched hand like overripe fruit.”

Except that Lenin never said it. But Robert Welch claimed he did, in The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, the ur-text of his movement. [my emphasis]

As Mathis-Lilley points out, the anti-democracy sentiment is part of the package.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 8: Real-time violent neo-Confederacy

The neo-Confederate/Lost Cause ideology is sadly a significant part of the radicalization of the Republican Party that led to the murderous lynch mob directly incited by Trump on January 6 to block Congress from certifying the results of the Presidential election. Even if Trump supporters weren't embracing major elements of the neo-Confederate/Lost Cause white supremacist ideology, the January 6 attack on the US Capitol by a murderous lynch mob directly incited by Donald Trump's speech beforehand, emphasizes the continuing relevance of the history of the Civil War, the events leading up to it, and the efforts during Reconstruction to cope with the aftermaths.

Dave Neiwert reports in Unlike the Guy Before, Biden is taking far-right terrorism seriously, and it’s making a difference (Daily Kos 04/06/2021). the Biden-Harris Administration is proceeding to treat the crimes involved as what they are:

Quietly and with little fanfare, the Biden administration has been taking all the right steps early in its tenure in confronting the threat of right-wing extremist violence and its spread—a mandate handed to Biden by the insurrectionists who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Rather than take a high-profile approach that might backfire, Biden’s Justice Department and FBI, and to a lesser extent its Department of Homeland Security, has wisely taken a low-key route that emphasizes competence and effectiveness, as a New York Times piece explored this weekend.

But make no mistake, it is taking the problem seriously. Indictments from the insurrection now number more than 300, prosecutors are establishing evidence of a clear chain of conspiracy leading to the attack focusing on Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, and arrests for criminal behavior by far-right extremists unrelated to the attack are occurring as well. It’s a welcome change from the malign neglect of the matter paid by Donald Trump and his administration.

As we have argued consistently since the insurrection, an effective approach to right-wing domestic terrorism necessarily will eschew the trappings of the post-9/11 “war on terror”—that is, instead of creating new laws and giving law enforcement unneeded new powers, the phenomenon can most effectively be attacked by smartly deploying law enforcement to enforce the many laws already on the books. [my emphasis]

One of the biggest mistakes the Obama-Biden Administration made was to cave in to Republican criticism that was directed against the federal government taking seriously actual threats from violent far-right groups.

See, for instance, the testimony of Daryl Johnson before a Senate Subcommittee, Hate Crimes and the Threat of Domestic Extremism 09/19/2012. See also Spencer Ackerman's report on Johnson, DHS Crushed This Analyst for Warning About Far-Right Terror Wired 08.07.2012 and Johnson's own op-ed, I warned of right-wing violence in 2009. Republicans objected. I was right. Washington Post 087/21/2017.

As Neiwert's current report notes, "A mid-March intelligence assessment commissioned by Biden concluded that far-right extremists—particularly those animated by racial and ethnic grievances—pose the most lethal domestic-terrorism threat to Americans for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, militia-like organizations pose an ongoing threat primarily to government and law-enforcement personnel." (my emphasis)

This is one of many ironies of the current far right in the US with its neo-Confederate type of seditious mentality.

Of course, this makes the sympathies and overlap between the violent radical right and police departments more complicated and more dangerous. Too many law-enforcement agencies are not only "blind in the right eye" when it come to such extremists. Some of them actively sympathize with and support such groups.

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 7: The white supremacist narrative for poor and working class whites, then and now

Frank Hyman is a critic of neo-Confederate ideology old and new. And in this essay, he gives his description of how white racism was used before the Civil War and right down to today to keep not just African-Americans but white working people as well as poor and powerless as possible, The Confederacy was a con job on whites. And still is. McClatchy 03/06/2017.

"How did the plantation owners mislead so many Southern whites?" he asks. And gives this answer:

They managed this con job partly with a propaganda technique that will be familiar to modern Americans, but hasn’t received the coverage it deserves in our sesquicentennial celebrations. Starting in the 1840s wealthy Southerners supported more than 30 regional pro-slavery magazines, many pamphlets, newspapers and novels that falsely touted slave ownership as having benefits that would – in today’s lingo – trickle down to benefit non-slave owning whites and even blacks. The flip side of the coin of this old-is-new trickle-down propaganda is the mistaken notion that any gain by blacks in wages, schools or health care comes at the expense of the white working class.

Today’s version of this con job no longer supports slavery, but still works in the South and thrives in pro trickle-down think tanks, magazines, newspapers, talk radio and TV news shows such as the Cato Foundation, Reason magazine, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. These sources are underwritten by pro trickle-down one-per-centers like the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch.

For example, a map of states that didn’t expand Medicaid – which would actually be a boon mostly to poor whites – resembles a map of the old Confederacy with a few other poor, rural states thrown in. Another indication that this divisive propaganda works on Southern whites came in 2012. Romney and Obama evenly split the white working class in the West, Midwest and Northeast. But in the South we went 2-1 for Romney.

Lowering the [Confederate battle] flag because of the harm done to blacks is the right thing to do. We also need to lower it because it symbolizes material harm the ideology of the Confederacy did to Southern whites that lasts even to this day. [my emphasis]

This message directed mainly to white workers to not be conned by billionaires and corporate lobbyists and their propagandists is an important one. It is not a substitute for understanding how white racism affects its main targets, obviously very much including African-Americans.

But it is very much a part of that story. Because you can't have racism without racists.

Confederate Heritage Month 2021, April 6: Bulwark article on 1776 Project

The Bulwark, a neoconservative site headed by NeverTrumper Charlie Sykes, offers an unsympathetic analysis of the ideological perspective of The 1776 Project: Joshua Tait, The Origins of Trump’s Slapdash, Last-Second ‘1776 Report’ 01/22/2021.

Tait calls the viewpoint of the report's brand of white supremacist ideological pseudohistory "Straussian Trumpism." The reference is to a branch of conservative thought identifying with the tradition of philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973). There was quite a bit of discussion and analysis of the Straussian perspective during the Bush-Cheney Administratio, when the neoconservative perspective was so influential in driving the disastrous foreign policy and warmongeing of that government. Strauss was a big influence among those who identified with the neoconservative viewpoint.

Tait writes:

The driving force behind this authorized history [The 1776 Report] is a group of conservative scholars colloquially called West Coast Straussians. Typically right-leaning, Straussians are the students—or, more likely, the students of students—of the German-American scholar Leo Strauss. During the 1970s and 1980s, Straussians divided more or less regionally over how best to understand the United States. Was it a decent regime, built on low but solid foundations, as the East Coasters had it? Or was it “broadly continuous with the classical and Biblical traditions” and in some respects “perfecting those traditions,” as the West Coasters, led by Strauss’s first student, Harry Jaffa, believed?

Jaffa not only celebrated the founding, but treated it as something sacrosanct. He believed the founding’s dedication to the Declaration of Independence, and its completion in the Civil War, made the United States a good regime dedicated to the universally valid principle of equality. [my emphasis]

This kind of "highbrow" pseudohistory typically includes quirky claims that are seemingly inconsistent with the broader vision, as with "the universally valid principle of equality" here. Because the Lost Cause narrative incorporated into The 1776 Report is definitely not concerned with equality: not equality of opportunity, not legal equality, not equality of votes, not equality of rights, not even equality among white men who are at the center of their narrative.

Jaffa's outlook may provide a clue to one of the strangest reversals of historical symbolism we saw in the Trump Administration, the adoption of Andrew Jackson as a symbol for Trumpism. Because Jackson's key stands against John Calhoun's secessionist position in the Nullification Controversy and against the concentrated economic power represented by the Bank of the United States are not remotely comparable to Donald Trump's political perspective, to the extent that he has one beyond demagoguery and grifting. The Lost Cause narrative and that of the 1776 Project are Calhounian to the core.

But conservatives are inordinately fond of such symbolic reversals, e.g., the people who criticize racism are the real racists. A perspectiv  e we see in the 1776 Project, as well.

Because they are ideological determinists, the West Coast Straussians struggle to see their opponents on their own terms. They reduce them and their ideas to “nihilistic” successors of John C. Calhoun, one of Jaffa’s punching bags. This is why the 1776 Report goes to such great lengths to connect modern identity politics to that “Marx of the master class,” [Calhoun] noting that “there are uncanny similarities between 21st century activists of identity politics and 19th century apologists for slavery.”

In other words, John Calhoun who put slavery above patriotism and above the interests of even Southern whites, the arch-reactionary who could rightly be considered the guiding spirit and political theorist of secession and civil war on behalf of slavery - that guy was like people today who want to combat racism against African-Americans, Latinos, and Asian-Americans.

This is basically smarmy small-town Bircherism. "West Coast Straussians" seems like far too pretentious a name for it.

But this West Coast Straussianism appars to be A Thing, as we say these days:

The 1776 Commission is dominated by these Straussians. Larry Arnn is its chair. The editor of the Claremont Review of Books, Charles Kesler, is a member. Matthew Spalding, the commission’s executive director, heads and teaches at Hillsdale’s D.C. center. The report lifts whole pages from Spalding’s previously published work. In short, the 1776 Report is simplified West Coast Straussianism with the presidential seal slapped on it. [my emphasis]

Unfortunately, these kinds of ideological constructions are very much a part of the present-day Republican Party that is operating in the reactionary insurrectionist spirit of January 6.

A copy of The 1776 Report as issued by the Trump White House is available from The 1776 Project.