The Lost Cause

They say a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing and a personal mission to try and understand what the hell Trump is up to has landed me at the American Civil War and some institutionalised revisionist history. My ignorance of US history and politics is so complete that I had not appreciated the extent to which the alternative title of The Lost Cause held sway to this day. This from Wikipedia:-

The Lost Cause of the Confederacy, or simply the Lost Cause, is an American pseudo-historical, negationist ideology that advocates the belief that the cause of the Confederate States during the American Civil War was a just and heroic one. This ideology has furthered the belief that slavery was just and moral, because it brought economic prosperity. The notion was used to perpetuate racism and racist power structures during the Jim Crow era in the American South. It emphasizes the supposed chivalric virtues of the antebellum South. It thus views the war as a struggle primarily waged to save the Southern way of life and to protect "states' rights", especially the right to secede from the Union. It casts that attempt as faced with "overwhelming Northern aggression". At the same time, it minimizes or completely denies the central role of slavery and white supremacy in the build-up to, and outbreak of, the war.

In a 2015 San Francisco Chronicle article about films depicting the Confederacy I was alarmed to read:-

They say that history is written by the victors, but the Civil War has been the rare exception. Perhaps the need for the country to stay together made it necessary for the North to sit silently and accept the South’s conception of the conflict. In any case, for most of the past 150 years, the South’s version of the war and Reconstruction has held sway in our schools, our literature and, since the dawn of feature films, our movies.

---//---

Over the past couple of decades, scholars such as Eric Foner and Bruce Levine have overturned most of the myths surrounding the Civil War and Reconstruction, but it took the British director Steve McQueen to put the truth about the horrific plantation era onto the screen and before the public, in “12 Years a Slave.” Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained,” the year before, was a big step in the right direction.

Recently, the mass killing in South Carolina and the subsequent outcry over the Confederate flag flying over statehouses brought the Civil War back into the national conversation, and for once public figures found the courage to say what that flag really means, and to repudiate it and its history.

It may be that in these past few weeks, we have finally turned a page, and the Confederacy will not rise again. If this is so, the truth will benefit the entire country, but especially the South. This is a region with a disproportionate number of our greatest writers, and most of our best soldiers. It has delicious cuisine, gracious women and a tradition of hospitality that is real and sincere. The musical traditions of the South, both white and black, are among the nation’s cultural glories. And America’s best raconteurs are from the South.

The South no longer needs — and never did need — the Confederacy as the organizing principle of its pride. It has many things to be proud of, and despite what the movies have tried to tell you, the Confederacy was never one of them.

So, if I've understood correctly, Trump's astonishing rise to power and subsequent fall from grace not only has its roots in unresolved matters from the 19th century, but has set the scene for a new 'lost cause' and even a virtual confederacy. This from Project Syndicate:-

The Lost Cause of the Trumpocracy

Donald Trump's insistent denial of reality following his loss in the 2020 US presidential election threatens to do still more damage to American democracy, even though it comes as no surprise. Like the southerners who never could get over their loss in the American Civil War, Trump has nothing left but his own mythomania.

---//---

The astonishing outburst of jubilation that broke out across the US – and in countries around the world – following Trump’s defeat was a testament to how frightened people have been by his presidency. The relief may be premature. Axios reported recently that Trump has already discussed with aides the possibility of running for president again in 2024.

This might well be a Trumpian ruse. As of now, Trump seems more focused on creating another “lost cause” myth – like the self-glorifying one concocted by unreconstructed Southerners after the US Civil War. Such incendiary mythology could prove useful to Trump in countless ways in the years ahead, including keeping him relevant and on TV. It may be a long time before the US and the world have seen the last of Donald Trump.

Which brings us to this from the Guardian on Friday:-

This is no conventional coup. Trump is paving the way for a 'virtual Confederacy'

Race is the message behind his supporters’ legal shenanigans, and a keystone for a Trumpian government in exile

Not for the first time, Donald Trump’s unhinged behaviour prompts an uncomfortable question: should we be laughing in derision or trembling with fear? Is he playing out his last days as nothing more than a sore loser pathetically kidding himself that he might yet score the winning run, even after the crowd’s gone home and the stadium is empty – or is his insistence that last week’s election was stolen an attempt to cling on to power, to stage a coup against his democratically elected successor?

The case for laughter is strong, as Trump’s allegations crumble to dust. On Thursday, a wing of the department of homeland security – part of the government that Trump still heads – declared that last week’s election “was the most secure in American history”, and that there was “no evidence” of any malpractice, still less of the mass-scale fraud that Trump has groundlessly alleged.

The result is that Trump’s lawyers have been all but laughed out of court, forced by impatient judges to admit that they don’t have any evidence, let alone proof. His courtiers continue to pretend that the emperor is fully clothed, of course, but even they are winking at the crowd. Surely Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was joking when he promised with a smile: “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.”

The inner circle are happy to let Trump, who has appeared only once in public since election day, remain hunkered down in his White House bunker, “feverishly tweeting, watching television and telephoning allies”, as the Los Angeles Times reports. They carry on telling him what he wants to hear, but they know his cause is doomed. Tellingly, even Trump’s own son-in-law, Jared Kushner, made his excuses for Saturday’s supposed council of war, sending “aides” in his place.

All that should prompt derision rather than fear. We can take the lead set by the president-elect himself, relax and let the process play out until Joe Biden is sworn in on 20 January. That’s certainly appealing, and most of the time I manage it. But every now and then, fear intrudes.

Why, for example, has Trump fired the civilian leadership of the defence department, including the defence secretary, Mark Esper, filling their posts and others in intelligence with ultra-loyalists? Esper stood up to Trump over the summer, when the president wanted to deploy the military to crush peaceful protests. Does Trump have something similar in mind, a move that would require a yes man to nod it through? Is it possible that Pompeo was not, after all, joking?

For now, I can accept that a full, tanks-in-the-streets coup is not on the cards. One Capitol Hill Republican tells me he suspects Trump sacked Esper mainly to “make him feel better”, and “to get even with the people who thwarted him”, rather than because he wants a Pentagon boss who will agree to send in the troops. Equally possible, says my source, is that Trump plans to go out with a bang, and wants pliant people in post. What kind of bang? Some talk of a total withdrawal from Afghanistan. Conversely, there’s chatter about a possible attack on Iran.

That would be huge – and Trump likes huge – but it’s not a coup. On this reading, Trump is rejecting the election result less in order to keep power than to instil in his base the sense of grievance that will bind them to him for his next act – whether that be a new media company, Trump TV, to challenge Fox News or another run for the White House in 2024.

But if that’s true, it’s hardly grounds for relief. That Trump’s attempt to defy a democratic election is comically inept or cynically motivated doesn’t alter the fact that he’s making it. No less alarming, all but a handful of Republicans have backed him. Fearing both his wrath and the hold he continues to exercise over the Republican electorate – highly relevant, given that two Senate seats are up for grabs in Georgia in January – the party’s most senior figures have acquiesced in Trump’s evidence-free claim that the Democrats rigged the election.

That matters. Most directly, it will impair the incoming president as he tries to get to grips with a pandemic that on Thursday saw a record number of new cases in the US – 159,000 in a single day – about which Trump is doing and saying precisely nothing. How can Biden lead if half the country has been primed to believe he is not the rightful president? The Republican rebuttal – that Democrats hardly welcomed Trump in 2016 – trips on one simple fact: Hillary Clinton conceded defeat right away. That is the only way a democratic system can work, with the consent of the loser.

The fear is that Trump and his followers will never give way, that he will remain the head of a “Trumpian government in exile”, as the historian Sean Wilentz puts it, antagonistic to the legitimate, elected government, armed with allies in Congress, sustained via social media and nourished by grievance and the romance of a lost cause: a new, virtual Confederacy.

The word is not wholly hyperbolic because, inevitably in America, so much of this turns on race. When Trump’s cheerleaders locate the supposed voter fraud in Philadelphia or Detroit, their listeners get the message: it’s that black cities are corrupt and, at root, that black people shouldn’t be allowed to decide who gets to be president of the United States. As Barack Obama writes in his upcoming memoir, these are “dark spirits” that have “long been lurking on the edge of the Republican party – xenophobia … paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward black and brown folks”.

So no, this won’t be a coup like we’ve seen in the movies. But nor can we just laugh it off. Trump is often ridiculous, but he’s no joke.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist