My paternal and maternal families never embraced and, indeed, repudiated the "Lost Cause" (spectacularly, in the case of my maternal grandmother. This gives me a unique or, maybe, just peculiar perspective on Nina Burleigh's conflation of today's Republican (MAGA) Party frenzy today and the "Lost Cause" embraced by the Grand Army of the Republic and the United Confederate Veterans during the late 19th century.
Here in Texas, a civic coalition entailed a patriotic and diverse electorate of white settlers from both Northern and Southern U.S. states as well as from western Europe. In most of the other ex-Confederate states, that post-Reconstruction era was just a restoration of government, less by Democrats, than by an ex-Whig triumvir of Doctors, Lawyers, and Preachers who had elite connections with ex-Whigs in the Republican Party and with the sort of GOP leadership enshrined by Congress in the 1876 settlement of a disputed outcome of the Presidential election in Florida.
It was after WWI, when something very much like today's MAGA Party emerged as the Second KKK. Curiously, this bipartisan movement adopted both "Lost Cause" symbolism as cover for anti-black as well as a perversion of Bellamy's "Pledge of Allegiance" as cover for anti-immigrant policies. Those policies were bipartisan and pervasive in all, mostly not ex-Confederate, 48 states by World War II.
There is nothing helpful about Burleigh's attempt to "chicken-fry" the MAGA Party today. That allows moderate, meaning opportunistic, Democrats in Congress off the hook for stripping the elements of patriotism and military obligation from the foundations of the Democratic Party -- not to mention a knack for building and supporting patriotic and progressive institutions outside of party patronage-chains. Without today's white-washed triumvir of Doctors, Lawyers, and Preachers, loyal Democrats -- not today's concession-tending incumbents in cheap, safe seats gerrymandered by the GOP -- could build a post-Reconstruction national Party rooted in popular -- not populist -- traditions and folkways -- not the segmented marketing and discriminatory pricing or the pyramid pricing schemes that the Congressional leaders of both parties have legalized.
I watched "Lost Cause" historical scholarship, imagery, and literature fade away only to be replaced today by right-wing quackery, neoliberal legalism, prosperity-gospel entrepreneurship as well as left-wing catastrophism, critical race theory, and a Great Resignation replacing remnants of a recent not-so-great Awakening.
Thus, our end-stage post-Reconstruction bipartisanship leaves us with neither a republican nor a democratic party.
I liked this a lot: "Better known for his crazed opposition to abortion, he was also packing the federal judiciary with men and women whose rulings are never in favor of the working class and who are shaping, via the courts, America into a high-tech Dickensian hell." May he rest in peace. Soon.
Richmond is a Democratic stronghold these days.
And VA is getting purple, all good, but I suspect that’s not why it’s in the title of the song.
This column takes me right back to heady days in Zuccotti Park. Time to resurrect Occupy for educational purposes? Occupy South of Richmond?
My paternal and maternal families never embraced and, indeed, repudiated the "Lost Cause" (spectacularly, in the case of my maternal grandmother. This gives me a unique or, maybe, just peculiar perspective on Nina Burleigh's conflation of today's Republican (MAGA) Party frenzy today and the "Lost Cause" embraced by the Grand Army of the Republic and the United Confederate Veterans during the late 19th century.
Here in Texas, a civic coalition entailed a patriotic and diverse electorate of white settlers from both Northern and Southern U.S. states as well as from western Europe. In most of the other ex-Confederate states, that post-Reconstruction era was just a restoration of government, less by Democrats, than by an ex-Whig triumvir of Doctors, Lawyers, and Preachers who had elite connections with ex-Whigs in the Republican Party and with the sort of GOP leadership enshrined by Congress in the 1876 settlement of a disputed outcome of the Presidential election in Florida.
It was after WWI, when something very much like today's MAGA Party emerged as the Second KKK. Curiously, this bipartisan movement adopted both "Lost Cause" symbolism as cover for anti-black as well as a perversion of Bellamy's "Pledge of Allegiance" as cover for anti-immigrant policies. Those policies were bipartisan and pervasive in all, mostly not ex-Confederate, 48 states by World War II.
There is nothing helpful about Burleigh's attempt to "chicken-fry" the MAGA Party today. That allows moderate, meaning opportunistic, Democrats in Congress off the hook for stripping the elements of patriotism and military obligation from the foundations of the Democratic Party -- not to mention a knack for building and supporting patriotic and progressive institutions outside of party patronage-chains. Without today's white-washed triumvir of Doctors, Lawyers, and Preachers, loyal Democrats -- not today's concession-tending incumbents in cheap, safe seats gerrymandered by the GOP -- could build a post-Reconstruction national Party rooted in popular -- not populist -- traditions and folkways -- not the segmented marketing and discriminatory pricing or the pyramid pricing schemes that the Congressional leaders of both parties have legalized.
I watched "Lost Cause" historical scholarship, imagery, and literature fade away only to be replaced today by right-wing quackery, neoliberal legalism, prosperity-gospel entrepreneurship as well as left-wing catastrophism, critical race theory, and a Great Resignation replacing remnants of a recent not-so-great Awakening.
Thus, our end-stage post-Reconstruction bipartisanship leaves us with neither a republican nor a democratic party.
I liked this a lot: "Better known for his crazed opposition to abortion, he was also packing the federal judiciary with men and women whose rulings are never in favor of the working class and who are shaping, via the courts, America into a high-tech Dickensian hell." May he rest in peace. Soon.
It’s a catchy song until you pay attention to the lyrics