Losers who cheat on their country
Mike Nelson, a retired Army Special Forces officer, writes at The Atlantic about the MAGAish fascination with the Confederacy and The Lost Cause:
Many Americans have ancestors who took up for bad causes. My children are descendants, on their maternal side, of two great-grandfathers who fought in Normandy on D-Day. One landed on Utah Beach. The other was already present as a soldier in the German army. I hope my kids never feel obliged to make excuses for the latter’s cause.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is scratching that itch. He is returning a Confederate memorial sculpture to Arlington National Cemetery.
Hegseth’s move is one of several by the Trump administration to bring Confederate commemorations back. On Thursday, The New York Times reported that the Pentagon is returning a portrait of Robert E. Lee to West Point. The Pentagon has reinstated old base names—in defiance of a law, enacted in 2021 over Donald Trump’s veto, that required their removal—by identifying honorable but previously obscure veterans who share a surname with rebel generals such as Lee and George Pickett. A statue of the Confederate general Albert Pike, pulled down during the 2020 George Floyd protests, is being reinstalled in Washington, D.C., by the National Park Service.
As The Washington Post reported it on August 7:
A Confederate memorial removed from Arlington National Cemetery in 2023 will be reinstalled, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Tuesday. The sculpture had been removed as part of a congressionally mandated effort to rid military bases and sites of Confederate names and images.
[…]
“I’m proud to announce that Moses Ezekiel’s beautiful and historic sculpture — often referred to as “The Reconciliation Monument” — will be rightfully be returned to Arlington National Cemetery near his burial site,” Hegseth posted on X, referring to the memorial’s creator. “It never should have been taken down by woke lemmings. Unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history — we honor it.”
The sculpture is another United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) monument erected to retcon the Civil War “as something other than bloody treason by an entire region of the country to prevent the future I saw at a northern Virginia Waffle House.”
The 32-foot bronze statue commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy was unveiled at a ceremony presided over by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914, almost 50 years after the Civil War ended. Its supporters said it was dedicated in part to promote reconciliation between the North and the South. But critics said the memorial glorified the Southern cause and glossed over slavery, with elements such as a frieze showing an enslaved Black man following his owner and an enslaved woman — described on the cemetery’s website as a “mammy” — holding the baby of a Confederate officer.
As Nelson sees it, the sculpture was removed in 2023 “as part of the Biden administration’s larger effort to remove memorials that glorified the Confederate cause and to rechristen bases whose names lionized traitors to the United States.” Hegseth trivializes the “300,000 members of the military that Hegseth leads … in his efforts to score political points against the left.”
It’s a bizarre obsession lost causes like Hegseth and Trump have with the Confederacy.
“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL,” Hegseth’s boss, President Donald Trump, posted on his Truth Social platform on August 19. Everything “is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.” Yet days earlier, Hegseth declared his intent to celebrate the past by reinstalling a monument to the failure of South’s treasonous effort to dissolve the very union Trump wants lionized. Trump himself ordered Confederate monuments restored back in March.
But perhaps more to the point of the right’s ongoing affair with insurrection is Stuart Stevens’s (“It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump”) brilliant tweet. One hundred sixty years after the retconned “War of Northern Aggression,” what motivates men like Trump and Hegseth to engage in masturbatory fantasies about cheating on their country? And for Trump to pardon nearly 1,600 Jan. 6 rioters for going all the way?
The former Republican strategist explains:
The question of “Why is the administration so keen on the Confederate side” is a companion question to “Why do men go to strip clubs?”
I think we know the answers to both.
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