These Days Before the Vote: "[T]hat cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought."

Whitewater, Wis. — This Sunday evening in Wisconsin ends the weekend cool and clear. Today continues These Days Before the Vote, a series addressing each day before the November election a principle or position on which our liberal democratic tradition rests.

That portion of U.S. Grant's autobiography in which he assesses the Confederacy returns occasionally to one's mind: "that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse." See Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, vol. 2, ch. LXVII (Charles L. Webster & Co. 1886), Project Gutenberg.

Much of the authoritarian populism we have today looks more like a revivified Confederacy, a neo-Confederacy, than a European fascist movement. We are not wrong to see the fascism in Trump's band; it's true nonetheless that Trumpism reaches back to oppressive movements found on this side of the Atlantic.

Trumpism's authoritarian populism is rooted in racism. It's impossible for an honest person to look at Trump and his MAGA movement without seeing its endemic bigotries: race first among them, but bigotries of creed, orientation, and gender also. (Indeed, of Muslims, MAGA vacillates between an expressed bigotry of creed and an equally immoral bigotry on the false theory that Muslims are a race or ethnicity.)

There was no Confederacy without slavery, and for the Confederates there was no slavery without race. The Confederacy was not merely a rebellious confederation of states in which slavery happened to exist. Its secession declarations, constitution, and leading officials expressly identified the new nation with African slavery, the legal subordination of Black people, and a political order premised upon white racial superiority. Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens was forthcoming about the Confederacy's deepest principle:

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea [of equality]; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.

See Alexander H. Stephens, Corner Stone Speech (Mar. 21, 1861), reprinted in Teaching American History. See also Charles B. Dew (establishing that officials throughout the Confederacy shared Stephens's view), Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War, Univ. Press of Va. 2001.

In defense of racial slavery, the Confederates refused to accept a legitimate and lawful electoral defeat in 1860. Indeed, South Carolina expressly grounded it secession in an unwillingness to accept electoral defeat to a political party averse to slavery. See Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union (Dec. 24, 1860), Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy (Yale L. Sch.). See also Georgia Declaration of Secession (Jan. 29, 1861), Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy (Yale L. Sch.) ("[t]he majority of the people of the North in 1860 decided it in their own favor. We refuse to submit to that judgment...")

The Confederate rejection of the lawful election result in 1860 preceded MAGA's rejection of the 2020 election result by a century and a half. Defeat in this view cannot be legitimate. Instead, it becomes evidence that the election itself must have been corrupt. The January 6 Committee established that Trump continued making claims of electoral fraud after his own advisers and officials told him they lacked evidentiary support and after more than sixty federal and state courts rejected efforts to reverse the result. See Select Comm. to Investigate the Jan. 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, Final Report, H.R. Rep. No. 117-663, at 2–5 (2022).

These MAGA men are as much neo-Confederates as they are European-style fascists. This ilk advances a version of Lost Cause rhetoric — portraying the Confederacy as noble, minimizing slavery, and romanticizing a bigoted Confederate socio-political culture — and adapts it to the 21st century. And so, and so, MAGA recasts past discrimination and oppression as merely respecting a 'heritage' culture, calling for a return to an earlier era (a pre-Reconstruction era, truly), and bemoaning the consequences of their own conduct as evidence of their supposed victimization.

The more one sees of Trump, the more one is reminded of Grant's incontrovertible observation about the cause for which his violent and racist adversaries fought.