- Typical plantation house in South Carolina
Just back from a short trip out to The Carolinas and particularly a wonderful weekend in the company of ‘New Democrat’ Phil Noble in his home base in Charleston, South Carolina.
On this 150th Anniversary of the outbreak of the American Civil War – with the opening shots on Fort Sumter only a mile away from where we were standing a few days ago – it is interesting to see how some of the secessionist ambitions of the South live on still today, if heavily distorted by some self-righteous tub-thimping from the extreme right.
It’s not so much the likes of the Daughters of the Confederacy or the Sons of Confederate Veterans that bother me – a revisionist lot with some ugly successes to their names but more recently reduced to the sidelines of quaint peculiarity – but the fact that the noisy and media-attention seeking Tea Party of today and many of its supporters still look for inspiration to the Civil War as a lodestone for their odious policies.
As the Washington Post reported recently and others have commented upon, some see the current battles between the ‘evil’ federal government and the rights of ciziens as a re-enactment of the battle lines of 150 years ago. Conservative revisionists continue to claim that the civil war was just a struggle against big government. The Tea Party is playing on the nostalgia of the Civil War to promote the idea that they are simply maintaining a tradition of opposition to big government.
Presumably that would be the big government, who after the Yankee north defeated the southern secessionists, still had to impose martial law to ensure that the southern states implement and comply with those ‘terrible impositions’ such as the abolition of slavery and freedom and equality of all before the law?
Yes, sometimes federal governments have to reign in the excesses of some; act as a stabilizer against excessive inequality and greed; promote policies and actions that can’t possibly be handled at a state or local level; and promote and maintain the coherence of the Union as a whole. For the Tea Party to hark back to the Civil War and denounce everything that the federal government does puts them clearly on the side of the losing Confederates and in the same camp as those who would, still today, probably uphold slavery as a virtue and inequality as an objective in public policy.
It’s always easier to hark back to an older age and, aided with rose-tinted spectacles, believe that it was all better then – easier than having to grow up and face the realities of the decade and tackle them with honesty and imagination, whether dealing with mass unemployment alongside obscene pay and bonuses for an unelected few pirates of industry; health care denied or restricted to many despite often paying more, proportionately, to the public purse than others with clever accountants and tax deductions.
The Civil War was about slavery and injustice, not a popular battle against big government. If the Tea Party wants to draw the battle lines so – then we should be prepared to declare that we’re all Yankees now…
Brown in the USA 