Whistling Dixie past the graveyard
by Tom Sullivan
Photo via Duffel Blog (a satirical site)
The fringe right has dreamed of civil war for decades. Prepared for it. Stocked weapons. Filled bug-out bags. Constructed crude redoubts in the mountains. Emptied stores of ammunition after Democrats win the presidency. Battles over removal of monuments erected a century ago to root the myth of the “Lost Cause” demonstrate that for some of us the Civil War never really ended, as do displays of the Confederate battle flag from homes and pickup trucks and along roadsides.
“Heritage not hate.” The phrase has always captured the winsome irony of the expression, “when they say it’s not about sex….”
If before now the contagion of mass shootings since Columbine did not feel like the “slow pandemic” Rebecca Solnit describes,
an internet-created “guerrilla army of rightwing young white men infected by contagious and toxic ideas” makes it seem so this week. The guns and the flags have always been about how white men in control (and in fear of losing it) insisted things ought to be.
We were never not at war, Solnit writes:
In other words, the problem is the people who have always been in power and control. The government that is supposed to be in charge of protecting all of us is a partisan in this war and to some extent always has been. Now the Republican party is openly partisan, openly the enemy of a majority of people in this country that is less than a third white males.
We were never not at war, but in recent years the cold civil war has heated up. The white men who expected unquestioned supremacy, by race and by gender, have launched a civil war against the rest of us, not least by allowing a huge number of high-capacity weapons of war to circulate throughout the country and supporting the NRA’s propaganda project to further fortify a set of fears and identifications between freedom, guns, masculinity and white supremacy. The Republican party has in essence declared war against the United States – against the people, the environment, the constitution, the rule of law, against voting rights and free and fair elections. The threats are coming from inside the Capitol.
Reconstruction failed. The United States won the shooting war but failed to win the peace and secure citizenship rights for black citizens for a hundred years. The symbols and myth of rebellion persisted. White supremacists turned to lynching and terror. The Civil Rights era only drove them underground, away from Jim Crow Democrats into the welcoming arms of the Republican Southern Strategy.
Solnit continues:
We must remember that this war has stepped up because white men feel threatened in what they consider a zero-sum game: if they don’t have everything they imagine they won’t have enough, a threat whipped up by rightwing media and the Republican party. The Republican party’s decision to become the party of white grievance will be in the long run a losing strategy in an increasingly nonwhite nation. But conservative white Americans are determined to hold on to power, and will use gerrymandering, voting suppression and other tactics to openly defy the ideals of democracy and equality.
So long as their power remained unchallenged, it was easy for “the old white Christian male hegemony” to mouth faithless platitudes about equality and a constitution in which it never believed. The selective American faith that elevated “In God We Trust” (Guess whose?) as the official motto over e pluribus unum has broken under stress testing. E pluribus unum is making a comeback amidst the violence driven by shifting demography. The question now, Solnit concludes, is “how we survive the transition.”