MSNBC’s documentary, “Civil War,” seems to have left little ripple in the currents of the internet since airing late Sunday on the east coast.
The documentary by executive producers Brad Pitt and Henry Louis Gates, and director Rachel Boynton is not about the history of the war as much as the history of its history: What is taught; what is not; and how southern traitors turned their loss into the noble “Lost Cause” still remembered today in monuments and collective selective memory.
The lesson, for those willing to learn it, is that not coming to terms with the past, not holding those accountable for their crimes, means they have a nasty way of resurfacing generation after generation. Or never really going away in the first place.
A friend who grew up in an abusive family once told me he was determined to confront his family’s history of abuse and break the chain lest he perpetuate it with his children. “This stops with me,” he said.
Dahlia Lithwick addresses American reluctance to confront the past as an expression of a naive optimism about the future. America is constantly being renewed, we tell ourselves. “Civil War” refutes that notion.
The admonishment to “get over it,” she writes is a colorless expression of privilege, even if mostly White:
For years after handing the 2000 election to George W. Bush, then-Justice Antonin Scalia would tell people who inquired about the court’s thin, poorly reasoned opinion in the case to “get over it.” It was easy for him to say that. His decision may have led to the disastrous war in Iraq, but he wasn’t fighting there. It’s a useful lesson to bear in mind when we contemplate what allows powerful people to instruct less powerful people that it is high time to move on: A lack of personal stake in the mess they seek to leave behind. We see this same dynamic when, after every shattering school shooting, politicians with the power to change laws, like Ted Cruz, explain that it is instead time to move on. It’s easy for Ted Cruz to move on when his children are still alive.
“Time to move on” has unsurprisingly come to represent the bulk of the GOP response to Donald Trump’s actions, both while he was in office and after. “Let’s move past this” was the best response to the behaviors that triggered both the first and second impeachments, and the behaviors that helped foment an insurrection at the Capitol that continue to undermine public confidence in the vote. “Let us look forward, not backward,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said on the House floor during the debate over Trump’s second impeachment, last January. “Let us come together, not apart. Let us celebrate the peaceful transition of power to a new president, rather than impeaching an old president.” Never mind that the failure to hold him to account in the first impeachment led to the horrors of a mass effort to subvert the election (an effort that we are still only starting to fathom) and also led to a failed second impeachment. No, the effort to impeach him most recently was still met with the insistence by the bulk of his party that it was time to move on. Of course it was easy for them to suggest that it’s time. It’s always time to move on if your life is unchanged by what came before.
The admonishment comes today from various Republican characters who, since they were or their families were not killed or injured in the Jan. 6 Trump insurrection, had no skin in the game. They think it wise to ignore George Santayana’s advice and simply just move on.
What Ted Cruz, and Condoleezza Rice, and all the generals of the move on army thus perform here isn’t just a cynical manipulation of tempting forward-looking ideas about “unity” and “priorities” and “real world problem solving.” This is, after all, the party of Benghazi and But Her Emails. It’s also a show of the kind of untouchable advantage they hold because they always remain wholly unaffected by what has occurred. To be able to ignore the Iraq War, to be free to ignore Trump’s pitiless immigration policies, to have the luxury of closing the door on January 6, is not so much a marker of an open mind, an objective and temperate worldview, or a more capacious perspective on what the country needs to see happen next. It is also a mirror of which classes of people were harmed by those events and who remained untouched by them. If you are unable to just “get over” the Trump team’s assaults on the levers of democracy themselves, it’s not necessarily because you are vengeful and bloodthirsty or transactional. It may simply be, as Chauncey DeVega wrote last winter in Salon, that “to put oneself outside or above this present moment is to exercise the privilege of being separate and apart from history and its pushes and its pulls, successes and failures, joy and pain, lived consequences and experiences.”
As soon as Whites reclaimed political power across the South after Reconstruction, they set about redeeming their ill-fated and deadly effort to preserve the economic system fueled by slavery by any means necessary. They crafted the Lost Cause narrative that still pertains a century and a half later, as “Civil War” demonstrates, and that sustained a system of apartheid across the South and elsewhere for a century after the supposed “War of Northern Aggression.”
The same flexible morality that prevented the country from confronting the crimes of the rebellion the South initiated in 1861 now presses us to move on from the insurrection we all witnessed on Jan. 6. Republicans don’t want to move on as much as memory-hole it and whitewash their parts in it the way the South rewrote treason as a patriotic rebellion.
There is a difference “between processing, addressing, and remediating past wrongs, and being directed by those in power to forget them,” Lithwick writes:
The former is the work of justice; the latter is the province of bullies. And as we enter another week in which the actions of January 6 are being probed and evaluated by a select committee that has been stymied by those who insist that it’s time we all move forward, or else, it’s worth saying out loud that this isn’t about one half of the country that seeks to look forward as another doggedly remains stuck in the past. This is, instead, about picking between two alternate stories we tell about the same past. One such story might at least pave a path forward to healthier democratic institutions. The other seems ever more destined to drag us into a future in which we are seemingly doomed to keep repeating the very horrors we are being told to forget.
We can confront what happened, punish and purge it, or let the pattern of patriotic rebellion persist another generation. It needs to stop with us.