As a kid, I was growing up in an era of celebration of the Civil War centennial, with a lot of ‘Lost Cause’ emphasis on the Confederacy. I used to play Civil War soldiers with my brothers as a child, and my older brother always insisted that he got to be Lee, and I got be Grant. I never knew that Grant won until quite some time had passed.
There are few pages of American history that produce such a clear and decisive verdict to the objective analyst than the Civil War, particularly as to the victor and the vanquished. Nobody without an eye toward revision will argue who caused the conflict, why they seceded and what led to the defeated’s surrender. Yet and still, to this day, many will debate exactly those points, holding firm to tropes the facts have disqualified over and over again. The Lost Cause of the Confederacy remains our nation’s most enduring lie, influencing generations of southerners and their northern sympathizers to forsake truth in favor of a narrative meant primarily to justify grievances that retard their ability to accept change and the social progress it stimulates.
That so many in the south refuse to face the atrocity that defines their history speaks to the power of family and community lore. It’s hard to fashion a heroic epic around a basic premise that, in a nation founded on the equal rights of all to pursue happiness, one group should be entitled to own another. The math of that will never add up. So what you get is slavery as an economic and political abstraction, “a state’s right.” The victims become the slave owners, denied a sacred way of life by usurpers to the north, driven to impose their despicable tyranny on simple farmers and aristocrats, whose honor and civility will never be compromised, even if heroic armed struggle becomes necessary. And the slaves they claim a divine right to do with as they please? They are simplified as merely part and parcel of the “Dixie” way of life, which Yankees never could understand.
If this all sounds ridiculous, it should because, of course, it is and always has been. None of it makes any sense at all, as educated and self-aware southerners will be the first to tell you, think Pat Conroy. It is clinical character disorder passed on through the generations. It would constitute absurdist amusement if it wasn’t so damaging to so many, and so debilitating to American governance. But it is, and that’s not funny at all.
Through the decades its ugliness has endured, sometimes lying dormant, but never for too long. Lynchings to voter suppression, discrimination to police brutality, all a product to varying degree of this false narrative. And now it threatens American democracy as never before. Make no mistake, Trump/MAGA is simply the latest, and perhaps most virulent strain of Lost Cause madness.
Jasper County, Georgia is about 75 % white. However optimistic one wants to become about the victory Joe Biden eked out in the state, or the two Senate run-offs in January, they still have to contend with this voting bloc. In 2012 it gave GOP nominee, Mitt Romney almost 69% of its ballots. It’s a safe bet black residents contributed a statistically insignificant amount to that total. Eight years later Donald Trump, 22,000 lies in, impeached and fresh off miserably failing to contain a pandemic and the economic distress it wrought, and uninterested in presenting any vision at all received 75 % of Jasper County votes. Again, it’s a good bet the area’s black residents did not contribute much of anything to that total. Plenty of the same old thing.
Interviews of local Trump proponents provide a homogeneous symphony of MAGA rationale, a smorgasbord of Fox/AM staples. Everything from Biden within the throes of dementia to, incredibly, Kamala Harris the foreign-born Muslim, socialism to -the horror! – mask mandates, cancel culture phobia and always the baseless certainty Trump really won the election; “they” are stealing it right from under our noses. Just another southern tale of woe, more victimization at the hands of outsiders bent on their obsession to change us. As one Jasper County native made clear “my own children went off to college and came back brainwashed with socialism and Trump knows this. He’s done something about it.“
Like the way too many who lean on Lost Cause fiction to ennoble their festering biases, Trump is always looking to rationalize his rabid monomania. He only cares if you are with him or against him, and if ensuring fealty requires only pandering to shortcomings he happens to also possess in spades; well, that’s a done deal. It has been effortless for Trump to glom onto Lost Cause grievance and amplify it gratuitously from his bully pulpit. After all, Trump has been racist dog whistling his entire life; it’s symmetry that’s smack dab in his wheelhouse. Now, two lost causes have merged into one, with
Trump’s current break from reality the embodiment to millions of the south’s 150-year refusal to accept its abject defeat on the battlefield, not to mention America and the world’s rejection of the basic tenet its crusade was always about.
The pernicious refusal through the decades of misguided multitudes to accept any blame at all for the cataclysm their forbearers forced on our country generations ago has made healing impossible, and periodic national trauma leached from the same toxic well inevitable. It’s here again, perhaps more delusional and destructive than ever, our democracy pushed to the brink. That millions right now don’t just tolerate a President refusing to recognize a resounding electoral defeat, but convince themselves he is courageously carrying their civic banner by doing so, not only clarifies acute collective delusion, but employs it as righteous sedition. Sound familiar?
Roughly a century and a half ago, one northern lawmaker was asked whether the south was even capable of reunification. “Give them time,” the old pol said, “they suffer life the same as we do. Just give them time.” Watching thousands of Trump’s maskless and fully delusional wretched core amble up Pennsylvania Avenue last Saturday, it’s easy to believe that observation is even less reliable now as it was then, and considerably more expensive. Worse, time doesn’t seem much in abundance these days. Biden’s got two years, and the clock is running. BC