On a repeat viewing of Steven Spielberg’s
over the New Year’s holiday, a scene I had barely noticed the first time jumped out at me. Confederate vice-president
aboard a steamboat with Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William
Seward, faces up to the reality that the era of slavery has come to an
end. Ratification of the 13th Amendment, Stephens muses, will destroy
the basis of the Southern economy and the South’s traditional way of
life. “We won’t know ourselves anymore,” he says.
If only it had
been so. What an affluent slaveowner like Stephens feared most, no
doubt, was the utopian vision of “radical Reconstruction” imagined by
legendary abolitionist
(Tommy Lee Jones in the movie), in an earlier conversation with Lincoln
in the White House kitchen. Stevens envisioned a future in which all
the land and property of the Southern aristocracy would be dispossessed
and divided among the emancipated slaves, building a new society of free
soil and free labor amid the ruins of tyranny. To put it in
contemporary social-studies terms, Stevens hoped that by uprooting and
destroying the South’s slave economy, one could also replace its
culture.
It didn’t quite work out that way. You can’t boil one of
the most tumultuous periods of American history down to one paragraph,
but here goes: Lincoln was assassinated by a domestic terrorist and
replaced by
who was an incompetent hothead and an unapologetic racist. Within a few years the ambitious project of
fell victim to a sustained insurgency led by the Ku Klux Klan and
similar white militia groups. By the late 1870s white supremacist
“Redeemers” controlled most local and state governments in the South,
and by the 1890s Southern blacks had been disenfranchised and thrust
into subservience positions by Jim Crow laws that were only slightly
preferable to slavery.
So
even though it’s a truism of American public discourse that the Civil
War never ended, it’s also literally true. We’re still reaping the
whirlwind from that long-ago conflict, and now we face a new Civil War,
one focused on divisive political issues of the 21st century – most
notably the rights and liberties of women and LGBT people – but rooted
in toxic rhetoric and ideas inherited from the 19th century.
We’ve
just emerged from a presidential campaign that exposed how hardened our
political and cultural divide has become, and how poorly the two sides
understand each other. Part of the Republican problem, in an election
that party thought it would win easily, was that those who felt a
visceral disgust toward both the idea and the reality of President
Barack Obama simply could not believe that they didn’t represent a
majority. As many Republicans are now aware, the party now faces an
existential crisis. It’s all very well to go on TV and talk about
attracting Latinos and downplaying cultural wedge issues. But the
activist core of the Republican Party is neo-Confederate, whether it
thinks of itself that way or not. It isn’t interested in common cause
with Mexicans or turning down the moral thermostat. Just ask Rick
Santorum: What it wants is war.
In the recent “fiscal cliff”
negotiations, which ended (of course) in yet another short-term stopgap
measure, most congressional Republicans, having sworn a blood oath never
to raise taxes on their millionaire patrons, were content to let the
nation slide into chaos and catastrophe rather than reach a compromise
with the president they have consistently depicted as a socialist
renegade or alien interloper. It was like a third-rate farcical reprise
of the great congressional struggle depicted by Spielberg and
screenwriter Tony Kushner in “Lincoln,” when the defeated and embittered
Democrats of 1864 fought a rear-guard action to defend slavery, in
defiance of not just history, morality and basic human decency but also
tactical judgment and common sense.
Thanks to Lincoln’s great
political victory in that Congress, slavery has faded into the history
books — maybe too much so. As the controversy over Quentin Tarantino’s
slave-revenge western
“Django Unchained”
demonstrates, it still isn’t a history we know how to talk about. It
may seem melodramatic to claim that the curse of slavery hangs over us
still, but Lincoln himself clearly foresaw that possibility, as his
slaveowning predecessor Thomas Jefferson had before him. In Lincoln’s
Second Inaugural Address,
he described slavery as an offense against God, and the bloodshed of
the Civil War “as the woe due to those [on both sides] by whom the
offense came.” Perhaps a cruel cosmic justice was now being extracted,
he concluded, and the war would go on “until all the wealth piled by the
bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every
drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with
the sword.”
I’m not sure America ever paid that debt, in blood or
money or any other currency. The lingering effects of our racist history
– from the resegregation of our public schools to the enduring and
astonishing
“wealth gap”
between whites and blacks – are national problems, not just Southern
problems. Our new Civil War is infused with the undead spirit of the old
one and waged by a rebellious neo-Confederacy rooted in the states of
the Old South, but its influence can be felt, as with the pro-slavery
forces of the 1860s, in every part of the country. (Fernando Wood, the
fiery pro-slavery Democrat played by Lee Pace in “Lincoln,” was a former
mayor of New York.)
The new Civil War is not entirely or even
principally about race, although there’s no mistaking its pernicious
racial component. Even making allowances for Bobby Jindal and Allen
West, the neo-Confederate forces are perhaps 99 percent white, in a
nation whose fastest-growing demographic groups are neither white nor
black. While the issues of the new Civil War are contemporary, its
rhetoric is ancient and all too familiar, from states’ rights and
resistance to Washington to claims of a special relationship with the
Almighty and vague appeals to distinctive “cultural traditions,”
employed as a justification for bigotry and oppression.
While the Civil War of the 1860s really
was
about slavery first and foremost – it was the foundation of the
Southern economy, and had concentrated immense wealth in the hands of a
small landowning caste – the true subject matter of the new Civil War is
much less clear. Abortion and same-sex marriage play a crucial role, to
be sure (and we may soon see guns and marijuana enter the picture as
well). Those are symbolic issues that reflect larger social tensions
around gender roles, sexuality and the “war on women,” but they are not
just
symbolic issues. Many people on the neo-Confederate side see abortion
and Adam-and-Steve marriage as moral outrages or offenses against God,
to borrow Lincoln’s phrasing, which must be stopped at almost any cost.
Of course, pro-choice activists and marriage-equality advocates see
those issues as matters of basic economic justice, guaranteeing to all
people the kind of basic personal autonomy that men take for granted, or
the common-law legal and medical rights that heterosexual married
couples have long enjoyed.
We appear to be moving into an unstable
Missouri Compromise
period of American history, in which regional tiers of states adopt
sharply different policies on reproductive rights and marriage rights in
particular, but also seem locked into fixed political identities and
differing views on fundamental questions of national identity and the
national future. Within the past week, we saw Illinois and Rhode Island –
core “neo-Union” states, if you will – move closer to legalizing gay
marriage, while the Republican governors of Michigan and Virginia
(exactly the kind of “border states” where these battles are being
fought on the ground) snuck new restrictions on abortion through the
legal back door.
If you correlate the states where both same-sex
marriage and same-sex civil unions have been banned and the states with
the harshest restrictions on abortion, you begin to measure the breadth
of the neo-Confederacy: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas,
Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, the Dakotas, the Carolinas,
Oklahoma, Texas, Utah. Most (but not all) are onetime Southern slave
states and hotbeds of evangelical Christianity, and most (but not all)
coincide with the familiar red-blue split between Republicans and
Democrats. The battleground states of the moment, on these issues as on
many others, are strikingly familiar: Florida, Michigan, Ohio and
Wisconsin. All four are currently in the grip of neo-Confederate forces
on a state level, and all four have enacted gay-marriage bans and
abortion restrictions, even though Obama won them all in both of his
election campaigns.
Do I even need to mention that none of the
neo-Confederate states are in the Northeast or on the West Coast,
regions where abortion remains widely available and same-sex marriage is
rapidly becoming routine? Or that the neo-Confederate states of the
South and the Plains States have sent nearly all of the intransigent,
anti-taxation Tea Party members to Congress, while the neo-Union states
of the East and West, with their polyglot, immigrant-rich populations,
have elected few or none?
Ultimately, the Missouri Compromise collapsed (as did the short-lived
Compromise of 1850
that followed it), tearing the nation apart and forcing a long overdue
reckoning with the enormous evil of slavery.. We are heading toward a
similar reckoning now. Secession is no longer an option (although many,
on both sides, might wish it were), so the new Civil War is not likely
to involve pitched battles in the meadows of Pennsylvania, or hundreds
of thousands of dead. Today’s fights over abortion and gays and God and
guns have a profound moral dimension, but don’t quite have the
world-historical weight of the slavery question. As with slavery,
however, it’s tough to imagine any viable long-term middle ground. At
the moment, two women who get married in Iowa will have no legal
relationship if they move to Kansas, and a teenage girl in Seattle can
easily get a safe and legal abortion while her cousin in Dallas faces
mandatory counseling, a 24-hour waiting period and a parental consent
law. (If they have another cousin in rural Mississippi, she probably
won’t find legal abortion services under any terms.)
Regardless of
how you feel about those issues, that’s nuts. No nation-state can
function indefinitely on that kind of patchwork-quilt basis. Then again,
this is the United States of America, land of semi-permanent political
paralysis, so “functional” doesn’t really apply. It’s tempting to call
upon history and proclaim that the only possible outcome of this new
Civil War, after many years of ugly politics and occasional outbreaks of
craziness and violence, will resemble the outcome of the last one: the
continued expansion of constitutional rights and freedoms and the final
defeat of the Confederate strain in American political and cultural
life. But other, darker outcomes are definitely possible, and I suspect
that as long as we’ve got a country, the Confederacy will still be with
us.
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