Why MAGA Is Just The Confederacy With Newer Red Hats
Trump’s Civil War obsession is revealing.
Donald Trump unilaterally and illegally attacked Iran on Saturday. It’s consistent with his despotic approach to governance, but just last week, he was presenting himself as a man of peace, at least when it comes to white supremacist, enslaver regimes.
During a discussion about Israel’s strikes on Iran, Trump’s addled mind wandered off into a “Grandpa after third beer” non sequitur.
“I wonder if the Civil War — it always seemed to me maybe that could've been solved without losing 600,000 plus people.” said the man millions of Americans returned to the White House. (Watch below.)
Trump has often fantasized about a supposed quick fix to the Civil War. This is typical for a malignant narcissist who considers himself a master deal maker. Yes, 620,000 people (then 2 percent of the population) died during the Civil War, but there were also 3,953,760 enslaved humans in 1860. Slavery is itself a living death. Of course, Trump is a racist who probably can’t imagine why so many white people had to die to free Black people. Trump would own slaves right now if the Supreme Court gave the thumb’s up, so it’s hard for him to empathize with a war that only ends with emancipation. It’s not like the U.S. gained any land when it was over. Trump would easily sacrifice 600,000 people who aren’t him if it meant gaining Canada or Greenland, but the U.S. already had South Carolina in 1860.
It’s not surprising Trump’s so fixated on the Civil War, considering that his state of mind usually resides somewhere within Jim Crow and antebellum. During a campaign event in Newton, Iowa, last year, Trump lamented, “So many mistakes were made. See, there was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you. I think you could have negotiated that. All the people died. So many people died.”
It’s unclear who Trump believes made “so many mistakes,” but he has suggested that President Abraham Lincoln didn’t do enough to prevent the Civil War. The obvious irony is that Trump is hardly a master diplomat. He’s alienated our allies while cozying up to our enemies, who just laugh in his stupid round face. He bombs nations and follows up with an unhinged rant on social media.
Trump is an idiot whose knowledge of history is like a game of racist telephone. However, people ostensibly more intelligent — not a difficult achievement — have suggested that the Civil War was somehow avoidable.
Former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly defended Confederate traitors to Laura Ingraham during a 2017 interview.
“It’s inconceivable to me that you would take what we think now and apply it back then,” Kelly said. “I think it’s just very, very dangerous. It shows you what — how much of a lack of appreciation of history and what history is.”
Principled abolitionists existed at the same time as pro-slavery bigots. If American history valorizes Robert E. Lee more than Charles Sumner, that’s a deliberate choice.
“I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man,” Kelly went on. “He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which in 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days. Now it’s different today. But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War. And men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had to make their stand.”
This is Lost Cause narrative nonsense. In reality, the Confederacy’s motivation for secession was the same as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “Good faith” and “conscience” had nothing to do with either. What Kelly and others fail to understand is that the Confederacy — like Putin’s Russia — was an aggressor nation, even before the Civil War, and the only “compromise” that would satisfy them was total victory.
A supposed student of history, Kelly ignores that the U.S. had repeatedly compromised with enslavers since the nation’s founding. The compromises failed to maintain a lasting peace — not because Northerners relentlessly pushed for abolition, quite the opposite. The Northern states mistakenly assumed that Southern states would eventually get over slavery, as they had. This was incredibly naive. Human bondage wasn’t a mere passing fad, like a viral TikTok meme. Slavery was indelibly linked to the Southern economy and had become a way of life. Once you’ve grown accustomed to enslaved people doing all your work, it’s a hard habit to break. Quitting tobacco is easier, and that was yet another industry reliant on slave labor.
As the U.S. steadily expanded, enslavers wanted the freedom to deny Black people’s freedom across the nation. The Fugitive Slave Act demonstrated how little regard the South truly had for “states’ rights.” There was nothing noble or honorable about the South’s reaction to the 1860 election. Southerners refused to accept Lincoln as the duly elected president, rejecting the outcome of a free and fair election, much like MAGA did when Joe Biden won in 2020. Of course, the Southern states actually acknowledged that Lincoln won.
Once the South seceded, Lincoln’s primary objective was to preserve the union. There could be no compromise. The Confederacy had declared war on the United States and had expansionist ambitions. They had designs on the New Mexico Territory, parts of Mexico, and Cuba. The Confederacy envisioned a new Caribbean empire fueled on slavery. What remained of the U.S. would’ve been next on their list.
Historian Stephanie McCurry wrote in The Atlantic: “For the four years of its existence, until it was forced to surrender, the Confederate States of America was a pro-slavery nation at war against the United States. The C.S.A. was a big, centralized state, devoted to securing a society in which enslavement to white people was the permanent and inherited condition of all people of African descent. The Confederates built an explicitly white-supremacist, pro-slavery, and antidemocratic nation-state, dedicated to the principle that all men are not created equal.”
How the U.S. government views Iran also applies to the Confederacy — an “evil” nation, whose leaders are beyond diplomacy and compromise. There’s no reasoning with them. They will only respond to total force. Yet, Republicans in particular normalize and romanticize the Confederacy. It’s not hard to see why: The Confederate States of America more closely resemble the MAGA States of America. Yes, slavery isn’t (currently) legal in the MAGA U.S. but this current antidemocratic nation state is fundamentally opposed to multiracial liberal democracy and seeks to impose a rigid cultural hierarchy, with some of the most mediocre white men you can imagine at the very top.
Meanwhile, Trump is treating non-MAGA states the way the enslaver states (wrongly) believed Lincoln would treat them. Trump claims he could have avoided the first Civil War while he’s setting the stage for the next one.
My church was lead by a white abolitionist minister in 1825. Any suggestion that people "didn't know better" is Lost Cause hogwash. And these are the people who decry moral relativism.
IMO a war between north and south would STILL have happened had the south been let go to be a separate nation- the slavers were an expansionist fascist government- they even looked to take Cuba and Brazil and they did take Texas- their expansion westward would have had an inevitable clash with the north. And becoming two separate nations, the north would have repealed the Fugitive Slave Act, protecting escaped slaves enraging the south anyway.