Confederate flag

The right symbol for today's Republican Party?

Thinking about the white supremacists supporting Brother Huck in the South Carolina primary because he loyally defends their official display of the Confederate battle flag, it occurred to me that the Republicans could easily remove this as an issue. They could just adopt the Confederate battle flag as the official Party symbol! Maybe they could overlay a picture of Abraham Lincoln's face on part of their flag with a "No" symbol over it to emphasize how far they've come from their ancient roots.

Johnny Irion and Sara Lee Guthrie have a song about the South Carolina Confederate state flag, called "Gervais". Gervais Street is in Columbia, South Carolina's state capital. In 2000, the Confederate battle flag (aka, the Beaureguard flag), symbol of slavery and treason, was relocated from from the State Capitol to a Confederate memorial site nearby on the Statehouse grounds. (See Confederate flag's last day over South Carolina Capitol CNN.com 06/30/2000.)

Still flying the flag upon Gervais
Was a battle flag now we can put it away
Still flying the flag upon Gervais
Was a battle flag, was a battle flag, was a battle flag
Was a battle flag, was a battle flag, we can put it away

Back in 2000, Mississippi had a public vote on whether to replace its 1894 state flag, which prominently features the Confederate battle flag design, with one that didn't. The Confederate state flag won. That was the only issue on the ballot for a special election. The Confederate version won with 65% of the vote. The returns clearly indicated that the voted divided heavily on racial lines, with whites voting even more overwhelmingly for it.

That contest provoked quite a bit of discussion at the time. Diane McWhorter, author of Carry Me Home: Birmingham Alabama - The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution about her home time (and Condi Rice's), wrote about Mississippi's vote in, "Flag vote continues the quest for Dixie's soul" USA Today 04/17/2000 (I can't find an online link):

Mississippi white voters — four out of five of whom, according to a recent poll, will support the old flag — insist that they are motivated by the same historical memory that strummed my emotions as a child. But that romance of the loser is itself a delusion. For one thing, it ignores the experience of a sizable minority of the South's population, for whom the war represented, by contrast, a triumph: emancipation. And the fact that the hometown where I sorrowfully deplored the evils of slavery was the world's most segregated city outside Johannesburg, South Africa, suggests that Northern victory as well as Southern defeat was overrated. Indeed, the fight goes on and on.

It is, of course, a more recent war that Dixie's current last stand plainly echoes. The flag affray shares with the civil-rights drama of the 1960s a cast of characters as well as a central racial conflict ("white resistance to letting blacks change anything," as a retired Mississippi newspaper editor frames the current struggle). On one side are the "revolutionaries" — the civil-rights professionals and their increasingly commonplace bedfellow, a business establishment that abandoned its militant segregationist ideology as the farm-and-factory economy shifted to image-sensitive consumer services. The Mississippi Economic Council (the state Chamber of Commerce), buoyed by an unprecedented new contract with Nissan, almost single-handedly bankrolled the campaign for a new flag, featuring a former governor's laments that the hallowed stars and bars has been co-opted by the Klan and other white-supremacist groups.

The throwback racist organization leading the charge for the Confederate flag is the Council of Conservative Citizens. Powerful enough that Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., has been reluctant to repudiate his much-criticized ties to it, the CCC is a reincarnation of the White Citizens Councils, which were founded in 1954 as a discreet middle-class alternative to the Klan and dominated Mississippi politics throughout the 1960s.(my emphasis)

In this case, she may be giving too much credit to the White Citizens Council, because the League of the South and the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) were also very active in the pro-Confederate flag campaign. Also, calling the Council "discreet" is a very generous description. They have never made any secret of their racist and white supremacist views.

That business about the "romance of the loser" is also important. Rush Limbaugh's fans may be disproportionately white and male. But they often manage to imagine themselves to be a victimized minority. That doesn't mean others have to be sympathetic to their feeling. It's just a matter of understanding that psychological reference point. In my own experience, white Mississippians are the best in the world at whining about how persecuted they are. Maybe Serbians or Croatians are better at it, I don't know. But it's part of the segregationist mentality to which the Huck and the other Republican Presidential candidates have to appeal because it's now the core of their Party base.

McWhorter also writes:

There's an argument to be made that the South has not really lost the fight. Ever since Richard Nixon was elected in 1968 by the grace of a racially coded "Southern strategy," the Old Confederacy has been the electoral linchpin of the Republicans' domination of national politics. The Solid South that once repudiated the Republican Party of Lincoln has now turned just as monolithically away from the Democratic Party of Kennedy and Johnson, architects of the Second Emancipation. And powerful politicians — Attorney General John Ashcroft as well as [Mississippi Republican Sen. Trent] Lott (mum on the flag flap) - have pandered with impunity to extremist latter-day Southern secessionists. (my emphasis)

Add Brother Huck to the list.

She stated that well. This is the basic political fact about today's national Republican Party. It's most base is composed of conservative Southerners. I've been calling it "neosegregationist" for a while. But I'm starting to think that just plain old "segregationist" is a better name for it. Just look at the characters popping up in the Huck's campaign. Yikes!

McWhorter concluded, just before the Mississippi flag vote:

As a liberal-Democrat female who has lived "up North" for more than half of my life, I still define myself every day as a Southern-American. If Southernness is a condition, transcending reason as well as geography, the voters of Mississippi today have an opportunity to prove that it does not also have to be a sickness.

Oops! The Huck and his gaggle of segregationist fellow-travelers have raised a similar question. Brother Huck's friendly and kinda-goofy Gomer Pyle act shouldn't fool anyone.

Tags: authoritarianism, confederate flag, diane mcwhorter, mississippi politics, neo-confederate, neosegregation, segregation