The following quote hitherto unknown to me appears in David Graham’s new essay, “The New Lost Cause,” in The Atlantic. The quote references Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg:
“For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863,” William Faulkner wrote in 1948.
Two decades later during the latter part of the Civil Rights era when my high school in South Carolina had yet to integrate, those sentiments were still there just below the surface.
For students of military history worldwide, Pickett’s Charge was Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s epic military blunder. For believers in the Lost Cause, it was “the high water mark of the rebellion.” Jan. 6 is taking on that mantle for Trumpists and Christian Dominionists.
The New Lost Cause, Graham writes, has “many of the trappings of its neo-Confederate predecessor, which Trump also employed for political gain: a martyr cult, claims of anti-liberty political persecution, and veneration of artifacts.”
The catalyst for Graham’s essay was a rally last week for Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin in Virginia. Organizers trotted out an American flag carried at the Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection. The crowd of self-anointed patriots pledged allegiance to it, as if venerating a holy relic.
Among the ironies of Donald Trump is watching the long-running, opportunist “comic figure on the jokescape of New York” [timestamp 5:20] adopt Lost Cause rhetorical stylings and invoke insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt, killed by a Capitol Police officer on Jan. 6, as a martyr to his only real cause: himself.
Graham concludes:
The problem with these myths, the Lost Cause and the New Lost Cause, is that they emphasize the valor of the people involved while whitewashing what they were doing. The men who died in Pickett’s Charge might well have been brave, and they might well have been good fathers, brothers, and sons, but they died in service of a treasonous war to preserve the institution of slavery, and that is why their actions do not deserve celebration.
The January 6 insurrection was an attempt to subvert the Constitution and steal an election. Members of the crowd professed a desire to lynch the vice president and the speaker of the House, and they violently assaulted the seat of American government. They do not deserve celebration either.
A century and a half after Gettysburg, the first Lost Cause still holds sway in pockets across the South. Lynchings too, while finally memorialized in Montgomery, Ala., are not unknown (or at least strongly suspected) to this day. Perhaps the New Lost Cause will die out more quickly. But I’m not putting money on it.