The following speech critical of the conservative establishment is one that I did not give at The Charleston Meeting, in Charleston, S.C., whither I was invited by its organizer Gene d’Agostino, as a speaker for the evening of April 14. After espying copies of my book on antifascism for sale on a table in the room where I spoke, and after considering that my speech might unsettle some in the audience, I took the path of prudence (or perhaps timidity). I instead delivered my customary lecture on antifascism, which was well-received. But some of the audience, who are also Chronicles subscribers, expressed disappointment that I had “pulled my punches.” I therefore promised them that the remarks they did not hear would soon be appearing online. Here they are:
About three years ago, I made the mistake of joining an organization called the Association for Mature American Citizens. I sent in membership dues with the thought that I would be sponsoring a truly serious alternative to the AARP, which has become a tiresome appendage of the Democratic Party. Since then, I have been flooded with copies of AMAC’s monthly magazine, which offers what look like position papers produced for the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute. Some of these commentaries, particularly on economic questions, merit attention, but others most certainly do not. In just about every issue, one encounters tendentious comparisons between the current Democratic Party and the “Southern party of slavery” before and during the Civil War.
A feature article in the March AMAC magazine includes these lines: “This sort of absolutism and refusal to accept that Americans can be allowed to differ on important issues has been seen before in Democrats from another era—the Southern Fire-Eaters of the 1850s.” Further, “during the course of that decade, Southern politicians not only abandoned a previous willingness to compromise on policy, but also adopted an approach whereby northerners were asked not just to accept Southern demands, but to publicly state they were just.”
Unfortunately for the statement’s veracity, the situations being compared are totally different. Most Southern politicians in the 1850s did take a stand for slavery but were not demanding that the North adopt this institution or, in some cases, reintroduce it into their societies. Unlike all Democrats and some Republicans today, Southern senators were not demanding that transgendered men be allowed to compete in women’s athletic competitions or that our border with Mexico remain open. The social revolutionaries of the 1850s were not white Southerners but abolitionist Republicans, who in many cases expressed support for the violence against slaveowners unleashed by John Brown and his followers.
Please note that I am not defending human bondage any more than I am the violence committed by its more agitated opponents. But I find no honest reason to liken a conflict that took place 170 years ago to the one that is now raging between self-defined traditional Americans and cultural radicals. Republicans and authorized conservatives may be offering their comparison as virtue signaling, which is also why they extol Reconstruction, an unfortunate development that did nothing to further race relations or constitutional government in our country. Republican politicians also meekly accept and sometimes even actively support the dismantling of memorial monuments celebrating Confederate heroes. In any case, I haven’t heard many Republican politicians protest this practice. Also unsettling for me was listening two years ago to South Carolina’s senior senator Lindsey Graham chew out a NASCAR driver who dared to have a Confederate battle decal on his vehicle. Several years before that, the same image was on a flag hanging next to the statehouse in Columbia, a juxtaposition which, as far as I am aware, never caused Graham to lapse into spasms of outrage.
Recently I received a note from a Chronicles reader who praised our magazine for refusing to “bash the South.” I responded that I loathe that practice and never miss an opportunity to bash those who engage in it. At the same time, I hold no brief for slavery, although I do respect those who tried to protect their region against invasion, and it should be remembered that most Southern soldiers in the 1860s did not own slaves.
Finally, unlike Southern conservatives of my acquaintance, I respect Lincoln as an American nationalist who, in his mind, was holding the nation together, albeit through very brutal means. As an historian I can understand the values and concerns of the actors on both sides of what I view as a tragic, avoidable bloodbath. And no, I don’t think we’d be stuck with slavery in the present world even if the South had been allowed to secede. Slavery would have disappeared there as a socioeconomic anachronism, just as had happened earlier in my own state of Pennsylvania.
The more relevant question is why Republican publicists and organizations have made a fetish out of bashing the white South, from whence the GOP draws many of its votes. This behavior engages my interest more than the question of who took which side in the War of Southern Secession. Since most Southern whites don’t seem to care about how abusively politicians and journalists treat their ancestors, the bashers have been given a clear opening.
Further, given the demographic changes that have taken place in the South, much of its population is no longer even intergenerationally Southern. Atlanta and the surrounding area are filling up with newly arrived population, much of it from the Third World. Electorally and sociologically, this once recognizably Southern region is today closer to San Francisco than the Atlanta of 1960. Contrary to what I was told when I was young, race relations in the South, particularly in large cities, are no better than elsewhere. Black voters and black organizations view white Southerners as their historic oppressors. I am therefore led to believe that the inflammatory rhetoric of Stacey Abrams and Raphael Warnock fully reflect the attitudes of their nonwhite voters.
Since there seems to be an ever-shrinking base of support for the historic Southern heritage, politicians in neither national party are running to defend it. According to Aristotle’s Politics, if a region sees its original population replaced, it is no longer politically and socially what it had been. This truism applies to the South, which has lost its sense of a shared past. Certainly, the metropolitan South is no longer culturally and demographically what it once was, a difference that dawns on someone who, upon visiting an historic Southern city after an absence of many decades, notices what has been pulled down and renamed. The Charleston I first visited in 1967 now looks and feels different from, and is much less Southern than, the one I toured 55 years ago. This has come about partly because the indigenous population has not exerted itself to preserve politically incorrect historical sites. Moreover, except for an increasingly insignificant minority, Southern Republicans are not insisting that the Republican Party treat their Southern-ness with respect.
