Confederate "Heritage" Month 2010, April 21: Neo-Confederacy in present-day politics

Frank Rich, like most star pundits, is often careless in his analysis and not always as careful of factual narrative as we should be able to expect. But in Welcome to Confederate History Month New York Times 04/17/10, he does a reasonable job of placing the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate ideology into the context of today's politics. He gives an example of the kind of make-up-your-own-facts approach that the whole Lost Cause/neo-Confederate tradition has always promoted:

It's kind of like that legendary stunt on the prime-time soap "Dallas," where we learned that nothing bad had really happened because the previous season's episodes were all a dream. We now know that the wave of anger that crashed on the Capitol as the health care bill passed last month — the death threats and epithets hurled at members of Congress — was also a mirage.

Take it from the louder voices on the right. Because no tape has surfaced of anyone yelling racial slurs at the civil rights icon and Georgia Congressman John Lewis, it’s now a blogosphere “fact” that Lewis is a liar and the “lamestream media” concocted the entire incident. The same camp maintains as well that the spit landing on the Missouri Congressman Emanuel Cleaver was inadvertent spillover saliva from an over-frothing screamer — spittle, not spit, as it were.

Obviously, there are other sources of people making up their own facts, as we see with the creationists and climate-change deniers.

Rich mentions the long history of Lost Cause dogma:

In “Race and Reunion,” the definitive study of Civil War revisionism, the historian David W. Blight documents the long trajectory of the insidious campaign to erase slavery from the war’s history and reconfigure the lost Southern cause as a noble battle for states’ rights against an oppressive federal government. In its very first editorial upon resuming publication in postwar 1865, The Richmond Dispatch characterized the Civil War as a struggle for the South’s “sense of rights under the Constitution.” The editorial contained not “a single mention of slavery or black freedom,” Blight writes. That evasion would be a critical fixture of the myth-making to follow ever since. [my emphasis]

And Rich gives a good, brief description of the weird contradiction the present-day Republican Party has embraced:

What is known is that the nearly all-white G.O.P. is so traumatized by race it has now morphed into a bizarre paragon of both liberal and conservative racial political correctness. For irrefutable proof, look no further than the peculiar case of its chairman, Steele, whose reckless spending and incompetence would cost him his job at any other professional organization, let alone a political operation during an election year. Steele has job security only because he is the sole black man in a white party hierarchy. That hierarchy is as fearful of crossing him as it is of calling out the extreme Obama haters in its ranks.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, neo-confederate, slavery, us south