Comments last night from Yale historian David W. Blight (“Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory“) are worth transcribing here.
Drawing on Blight and on historian Sean Wilentz of Princeton University, MSNBC’s Joy Reid drew parallels between the Reconstruction and Redemption eras in the South and now.
The refusal of the South to accept Abraham Lincoln’s presidency led to the bloodiest period in American history as well as to the Civil War’s bloody aftermath. “Rather than contest the correctness of the popular and electoral vote count, the pro-slavery southerners withdrew from the Union, state by state,” wrote Wilentz.
More recent subversions of democracy have occurred through means more subtle and less historically memorable.
The full scope of Richard Nixon’s perfidies were not public even at the time of the Watergate hearings and Nixon’s resignation. The notorious (and oft-forgotten) “Brooks Brothers” riot during the Florida vote count in 2000 halted vote counting in Al Gore-leaning Miami-Dade County, perhaps making it “one of the most consequential events in American political history.”
“[I]n national politics, the secessionists committed treason by repudiating the democratic Union,” Wilentz wrote, “but the Trump Republicans committed something akin to treason by repudiating democracy itself.” Wilentz adds (emphasis mine), “Trump and the GOP have in fact attempted nothing less than a kind of virtual secession from the American political system.”
Blight tells Reid:
The late 19th century is very instructive for this moment and it may be less about what happened to the memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction as it is remembering some other actual coups.
For example, what happened in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898. Just a quick note on that. Five days after this infamous coup, this riot conducted by a concerted conspiracy for white supremacy by the officials of the state of North Carolina in which almost 60 people were killed — black voters just murdered in the streets — a huge rally was held in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Huge, torchlight rally celebrating this white supremacist takeover. And … the platform met under a banner that read, “Victory, White Supremacy and Good Government.” By good government they meant getting corrupt Black people out of government. Just think of that banner: “Victory, White Supremacy and Good Government.” That’s almost the same banners that people had flying there on January 6th, in some ways.
We have to realize that just talking persuasion to Republicans is not going to work. Hypocrisy is not just a moral failure. It’s a strategy. And to keep telling them they’re hypocrites is getting us nowhere. Hypocrisy is a strategy in this case. And it has to be treated as a strategy for power by other power.
Republicans have divorced themselves from the very idea of a multi-racial democracy, said Reid. They claim for themselves the right to nullify the election of any non-white candidate. “Only the people that they decide should be allowed to win can.”
“If you liken the Obama era to something like Reconstruction, this is Redemption,” Reid said.
“Redemption on steroids,” said Blight. And a new Lost Cause with its own martyrs.
Change of strategy. But what?