The fall of “sanctified inequality”

“The Guns of the South” (1992) by Harry Turtledove is “speculative fiction” in which the South wins the Civil War. Time-traveling white supremacists from 21st-century South Africa supply Gen. Robert E. Lee and his troops with AK-47s plus the ammunition, training, and military intelligence to win the war. Lee does.

In the end, however, Lee discovers his benefactors’ origins. He becomes president of the Confederacy and, convinced slavery is both wrong and destined to fail, ends slavery himself.

Rebecca Solnit portrays present-day efforts to roll back progress towards greater equality as similarly doomed to fail. The anger and violence we’ve seen comes from people who know they are losing the fight for the future:

In 2018, halfway through the Trump presidency, Michelle Alexander wrote a powerful essay arguing that we are not the resistance. We, she declared, are the mighty river they are trying to dam. I see it flowing, and I see the tributaries that pour into it and swell its power, and I see that once firmly grounded statues and assumptions have become flotsam in its current. Similar shifts are happening far beyond the United States, but it is this turbulent nation of so much creation and destruction I know best and will speak of here.

When a regime falls, the new one sweeps away its monuments and erects its own. This is happening as the taking down of Confederate, Columbus and other statues commemorating oppressors across the country, the renaming of streets and buildings and other public places, the appearance of myriad statues and murals of Harriet Tubman and other liberators, the opening of the Legacy Museum documenting slavery and mass incarceration and housing a lynching memorial.

The “trophies of the ugly old world of sanctified inequality” falling today are replaced with monuments to “heroes of justice and liberation,” Solnit observes. There is no single moment of transformation, just as the Emancipation Proclamation and Appomattox did not end the culture of slavery. Neither did Reconstruction or Brown. Nor did the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts save the souls of those committed both to inequality and to faith in their own superiority. They enforced Jim Crow for a century.

Hearts and minds are as stubborn as Johnny Reb. But most will grow and change. Most have. Or else by now their children’s have. A lot of boys read Ayn Rand in high school. Most of them grow up, too.

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So like a river flows progress, Solnit continues:

What’s happening goes far beyond public monuments. The statues mark the rejection of old versions of who we are and what we value, but those versions and values matter most as they play out in everyday private and public life. We are only a few decades removed from a civilization in which corporal punishment of children by parents and teachers was an unquestioned norm; in which domestic violence and marital rape were seen as a husband’s prerogative and a wife surrendered financial and other agency; in which many forms of inequality and exclusion had hardly even been questioned, let alone amended; in which few questioned the rightness of a small minority – for white Christian men have always been a minority in the United States – holding almost all the power, politically, socially, economically, culturally; in which segregation and exclusion were pervasive and legal; in which Native Americans had been largely written out of history; in which environmental regulation and protection and awareness barely existed.

When my family moved south, the signs were barely down off the water fountains and, despite Brown, schools remained segregated. That change took federal action and, in some cases, federal troops.

What we see today is a rearguard action to force progress to flow in reverse by nominal Americans who can recite the words “all men are created equal” but never internalized their meaning. In fact, they reject their meaning. They just sound better than the words in their hearts.

“The right is trying to push the water back behind the dam,” as Solnit sees it, by trying to undo society as it is and return it to some imagined society as it was. The error, as they see it, is not in their hearts, but in Jefferson and in America’s liberal ideals. Some who read colonial news at the signing of the original Declaration were social Darwinists before Darwin. Their children’s children still are.

They have succeeded in passing laws at the state level against voting rights and reproductive rights, but they have not succeeded in pushing the majority’s imaginations back to 1960 or 1920 or whenever their version of when America was great stalled out. They can win the battles, but I do not believe they will, in the end, win the war.

While the right has become far more extreme and has its tens of millions of true believers, it is morphing into a minority sect. This has prompted their desperate scramble to overturn free and fair elections and other democratic processes. White Christians, who were 80% of the population in 1976, are now 44%. Mixed-race and non-white people are rapidly becoming the majority. On issues such as climate, people of color are far more progressive; if we can make it through the huge backlash of the present moment, the possibilities are dazzling.

That change requires agency. And agents. “We – a metamorphosing “we” – are sifting through an old and building a new canon,” Solnit concludes. Building requires builders. (That’s you.)

No doubt, if some of our white-nationalist neighbors could fashion a time machine, they would alter American history. The South would win the Civil War. Lee’s statues in Richmond and in New Orleans would stand for a time. But in the end, the river of progress cuts through stone hearts. It tears down dams and monuments to sanctified inequality. Revanchists cannot hold it back.

We shall overcome. But only if we refuse to “stand back and stand by” as Rebels scramble to erect more dams.

(h/t HCR)

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