Right wing pro slavery12/1/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Even when the argument was less direct, its point was obvious. At the Virginia convention to ratify the Constitution, one reporter recounted, anti-Federalist Patrick Henry painted “in the most vivid colors the dangers likely to result to the black population from the unlimited power the general government, wielded by men with little or no interest in that species of property, and filled his audience with fear.” Then Henry exclaimed, “ They’ll free your _,” using the n-word. Unsurprisingly, race played the major role from the beginning even from before it. Starting in 1796, when the First Party System began, Federalists never-not once-comprised the majority of any House of Representatives state delegation south of the Potomac. After George Washington’s departure from the Presidency, the Federalist Party failed to win a single Southern state in a Presidential election, even when one of their own-South Carolina’s Charles Coatesworth Pinckney-was the party’s nominee. But Southern electors rejected the premise of competition entirely. America’s “First Party System” pitted the Federalists against the Jeffersonians, named the Democratic-Republicans. Southern politics rejected multi-party competition from the earliest days of the Republic. ![]() That war continues, and if we are to win it, we must focus on the underlying politics more than the symbols. But it was also, at its core, a war to determine if a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” would endure. The Civil War was originally a war for the Union, yet eventually became, almost in spite of itself, a war for abolition. Thus, finally and fully winning the Civil War does not mean simply taking down statues, or renaming buildings, or changing state flags. It seeks a form of one-party state: many can compete, but only one is allowed to win. Make no mistake: The Republican Party wishes to destroy democracy. The GOP has embraced this pattern vigorously, and it guides its actions on the federal and state level. It began in the Democratic Party, but subsequently migrated to the Republican Party, as segregationists did, in the wake of the civil rights movement. This pattern rejects the fundamental tenet of any democracy: namely, multi-party competition, with various rules and informal norms designed to ensure a modicum of fairness. In a non-trivial way, the Confederacy triumphed in the Civil War by establishing a particularly Southern pattern in national politics. Donald Trump has taken a strong stand defending the Confederacy, to the point that The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson declared that this the year when the nation must finally win the Civil War by taking the symbols down.īut it is much more than a matter of symbolism. In 2020, the issue of the Confederacy-be it on military bases, or on portraits in the halls of Congress, or connected to ubiquitous statues and road names throughout the nation-reverberated in policy debates. Lincoln’s first vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, came from there, and after the war, Mainers waved the bloody shirt with abandon, with several leading the Reconstruction-era GOP.Īnswering this question requires a deeper dive into American history and politics. But the Confederacy? Maine contributed the highest proportion of its population to the Union effort of any state, and was a hotbed of abolitionism. Maine is hardly free from racism, and like many northern states, had a KKK influence in the 1920s. When Donald Trump visited Maine in June 2020, his supporters greeted him with a symbol unfamiliar in the Pine Tree State: Confederate flags. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |