Trump's Defense of the South's Post Civil War Culture Goes Beyond Racism

[G_j]

https://portside.org/2020-07-11/trumps-defense-souths-post-civil-war-culture-goes-beyond-racism

Trump’s defense of Confederate culture is not only a defense of racism, but also of other Old South born attitudes towards women, guns, abortion, evangelical Christianity, paramilitary policing, crime and punishment, and the role of government.

July 11, 2020 Patrick Cockburn THE INDEPENDENT

President Trump is making plain the degree to which the country remains divided by the American Civil War. His threat to veto the $718bn Defence Bill if it renames military bases called after Confederate generals harks back to 1861. His stand highlights the bizarre way that the US military has named its biggest bases, like Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Fort Hood in Texas, after Confederate generals like Braxton Bragg and John Hood who fought a war to destroy the US.

Critics suggest derisively that this tradition of naming military installations after defeated enemies should mean that future bases will include at least one named after Osama bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaeda, and another after Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of Isis, both killed by US soldiers.

The fury generated by the dispute over the renaming of the bases and the removal of the statues of Confederate commanders underlines the contemporary relevance of the outcome of the civil war. A tweet by Trump gives a clue as to why this should be the case a century and a half after the Confederate surrender. “It was sad,” Trump wrote, “to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.”

But which “history and culture” is Trump talking about? The US has two sources of political culture: one derives from Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and a popular revolution against a distant imperial power, the other flows from the slave states with their vastly different tradition. Much of what non-Americans find peculiar and contradictory about the US stems from the uneasy cohabitation of these two cultures, whose democratic and authoritarian strands alternately repel each other and blend together. Americans are often in denial about this tainted legacy, preferring to see their past through the lens of the intentions of the founding fathers and the struggles of the frontier, playing down the civil war over slavery that left 750,000 dead.

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[poli-junkie]

1. He's a fascist.

[DBoon]

2. Yes

He is defending a culture similar to Latin American military dictatorships of the 1970s

[Thomas Hurt]

3. The christofascists swear that the confederates were all Democrats

and even today as back then, all Democrats are the real racists.

Out of their other face, they freak at the " Democrats' " attacks on their heritage.

Which is it...

[LastDemocratInSC]

4. The Confederate government had grand plans.

The "Golden Circle" was a plan to invade Mexico, some Central American nations and Caribbean islands with a goal of establishing an empire with a slave based economy. Prior to the war some who were working on the plan got control of a region of Mexico (for a short while). The Confederacy was quite open about its ambitions. This history undercuts the revisionist claims that slavery was not a reason for the war.

[Mopar151]

5. An illuminating comment

It explains, to an extent, the mindset that created "Bananna Republics".