What’s an apparatchik to do when the Party will no longer afford them a place in the apparatus?
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Putin’s Cock-holster won’t abandon Miller because child abuse gets him and Discount Goebbels extremely hot.
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Do you, like me, tend to assume that Trump’s and Republicans’ attempts to rewrite the history of the American experience and response to COVID under Trump (and Fauci’s role), of the Jan. 6 insurrection, and of who actually won the 2020 presidential election are doomed to failure? Think again. An excellent op-ed in today’s NYT:
It Wasn’t a Civil War. It Was the Slaveholders’ Rebellion.
A sampling:
Rebranding rebellion is nothing new. Americans take it for granted that the war between the Confederate states and the Union was always called the Civil War, but it was not. During the war and in its aftermath, it was primarily called an “insurrection” or a “rebellion.” Its current name is a result of decades of lobbying by Confederate heritage groups and white Southerners committed to rejuvenating the South’s image and ignoring its treason and slaveholding.
As Mr. Trump and his allies try to whitewash the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, we should return to an older and far more accurate name for the Civil War. We should once again call it the Slaveholders’ Rebellion. If a country unquestioningly adopts language that obscures its bloodiest crimes to absolve their worst perpetrators, how can we expect successive generations to remember the new assaults on democracy without deploying equally forgiving language?
…
Conventions shifted only decades after the war, when white Southerners and their representatives in Congress collaborated to rewrite the history of the conflict. In 1899 one group pushed to expunge references to “rebellion” from historical and public discussion of the war. They preferred the misnomer “War Between the States,” freeing the Confederacy of the stigma of revolt. From 1905 to 1911, the campaign’s sympathizers in Congress moved to strike “War of the Rebellion” — the common name at the time — from legislation. “Civil War” became a compromise solution, mollifying Confederate nostalgics while being more acceptable to their opponents than “War Between the States.”
Other nomenclature followed. The Dewey Decimal System shifted its classification from “Rebellion, Southern” in 1876 to either the same term or “Civil War” two decades later. In 1895 the American Library Association directed its readers looking up “Rebellion” to instead search “U.S. History, Civil War.” In 1907, Congress declared a preference for “Civil War,” too. To this day, though, the U.S. Government Style Manual lists “Civil War,” “War of the Rebellion” and “War Between the States” as acceptable, a paper vestige of a hard-fought linguistic battle. One is an agreed-upon euphemism; one is accurate; the last is a lie.
I’d add that “The War of Northern Aggression” wasn’t going to fly beyond the South, of course, though many Southerners called it that (and some still do).
To elaborate upon the op-ed: The adoption of “Civil War” occurred, of course, in the period when Plessy vs. Ferguson had recently been decided (1896); when Southern states were adopting new state constitutions that laid the foundations for Jim Crow; when the “Lost Cause” mythology gained traction, along with the argument that the South had fought to defend “states’ rights”; when “The Birth of a Nation” was released (1915 – based on a novel and play published in 1905); when the KKK was founded anew (1915) and a reign of terror ensued for Blacks in the South (and beyond), prompting the Great Migration of Blacks from the South to the North; and when White Northerners were increasingly willing to accommodate the South in order to “put the past behind us and move on.” The Daughters of Confederacy were mounting statues of Confederate “heroes” everywhere (notably, Monument Ave. in Richmond, VA, lined with statues between 1890 and 1929), and the federal government was authorizing the celebration of Confederate leaders. For just one example, a new U.S. Army camp in NC (1918), soon to become a fort (1923), was named after Confederate general Braxton Bragg.
The NAACP was founded in 1909, when planning for it had been underway for four years.
Free link:
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Just got confirmation that my VA primary vote was counted. My current rep is actually quite good. Has a solid progressive voting record, doesn’t take AIPAC money, donors are mostly groups like teachers unions and so on.
He does have one red flag though - he has been in congress for 20 years. Perhaps it is time for a change. Anyway, the DNC in their infinite wisdom allowed 4 people to run against him, almost guaranteeing he will win. All 4 say they will fight Trump and not take AIPAC money, and their positions aren’t really that different. We picked one of the 4 for the primary, more to send a message than anything else. Of course we will be voting for whoever wins in November like our lives depend on it. Because they do.
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The only people surprised by the rise of DSA are the political hacks who’ve been running bait-and-switch campaigns for the DNC and Republicans for the past 50 fucking years. While DNC insiders were willing to tolerate Obama because they knew he was a good corporate democrat, voters were expecting something very different. They saw a black man and they assumed he’d be a break from the past, a true progressive. But he instantly pivoted to the right, gave the banks and auto companies giant bailouts, then asked for nothing in return. Not one prosecution. People were pissed, but they assumed he had a reason and kept expecting progressive reforms. Instead they got a moderate republican to the right of Nixon. Nixon, for you kids who don’t know, started the EPA. Imagine a Republican doing that today. So along come 2016 and people are still itching for change. But instead of listening, the DNC steamrolled Bernie and anointed Shillary, who got her ass handed to her by Trump of all people. But it tracks. Voters didn’t want more of the same bullshit, they wanted change. Biden was just a correction, and Harris was doomed from the start, especially when she started selling more of the same bullshit. fast forward to where we are and we have DSA candidates winning everywhere. No more AIPAC. No more DNC bullshit. No more corporate democrats promising more of the same. The 2026 midterms are a long overdue sequel to 2016, the first chance voters have to repeat what we were saying in 2008 and 2016. And the DNC still isn’t listening, because had they not shit all over Bernie, we’d have Medicare-for-all now. And public universities would be largely free. And on and on. The Democratic party is finished. They just don’t know it yet.
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They may not be part of the apparatus, but they are still attached to being Republican. It really is the only thing that matters to them. That attachment is more important than all else. It is similar to being in a cult, or may be we should just call it a political cult.
Their choice is one of attachment, belonging, than of rational acts. The way to think of it in the extreme is to consider them as the kind of people that would literally drink poison for their party rather than behave as rational actors.
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I wasn’t, and aren’t, disagreeing with you.
Their world is bounded by their political commitments, as are their possibilities.
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He lost the primaries. He didn’t get enough votes in the primary. He was not sidelined by a shadowy cabal called "the DNC”. He lost.
“Shillary” won 3 million more popular votes, only losing the electoral votes by about 75,000 across three critical states, including Michigan. It was the fecklessness of voters who believed stories about emails and such that contributed to this; hardly having her “ass handed to her.” It was the fecklessness of Democrats and Democratic supporters who loudly announced that their shit didn’t stink, so therefore, would not vote because “DNC, AIPAC, corporate Dems, Goldman Sachs” and a litany of loser arguments that were quickly dismissed when “Shillary” lost. These would be the same people who showed up at the Democratic Convention insisting their voices were being silenced when they were not. You lose a primary, it must be “corporate Dems”. Funny, the flipside of that losing coin are what we now call “MAGA.”
But, it all connects very well with the unofficial motto of this entire, debased and unserious country: NO LEARNING. Must be someone else’s fault.
Please proceed, governor.
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Thanks for clarifying “Slaveholders Rebellion,” and making the point that words matter. Let us listen carefully to the words uttered by those campaigning for public office.
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Of course, there’s also the question of who was financing, and hypocritically pushing, these narratives while they regularly backed candidates for whom comparable “offences” were mundane and Dear Leader.
Was there ever really a question that any Democratic presidential candidate would be as divisive, destructive or incompetent as Donnie, or W, for that matter?
[ETA: The party has to settle its internal differences; but, barring a truly outrageous outcome (thinking Fetterman for President, here,) I don’t see how it serves a Democratic electorate not to back the party’s candidate in the general election.]
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First I didn’t realize that KS has the similar way to vote on judicial elections as MO.
Here in MO judges are nominated by a nonpartisan judicial commission, and then are up for election. I seem to remember a few elections back MO Republicans wanted to do what’s on the ballot today in KS, but the voters rejected it back then. So we still have our method for state judges.
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I’m not even sure that they are all that attached to their party. Look at what has happened to the GOP over the last 30-40 years. The conservative hawks and the pro-business country-club people have been pushed aside; more and more replaced by grifters, hustlers, Christian nationalists, and short-term thinkers who do not even pretend to be interested in anything but imposing their personal fantasies on others and enriching themselves. The Republican party structure has totally been upended and turned into a personal funding machine that is controlled by Trump and not by the GOP membership.
Have Cornyn, Collins, McConnell, or Tillis pushed back or fought in any way against the rise of MAGA within their own ranks or against the restructuring of the Republican Party? No they have all chosen to close their eyes to the damage that has been done not only to the country, the constitution, the rule of law, but also to their own party.
They and other old-guard, traditional GOP members have instead tried to surf above the turbulence caused by the MAGA wave, hoping to keep their own power and their own personal connections to wealth-making opportunities (e.g., quiet insider trading, paid speaking engagements) intact until the MAGA wave recedes.
When a few of the old-guard (e.g., Cheney and Kinzinger) pushed back or condemned the actions and behaviours of the MAGA wing and/or Trump, these others equivocated and looked the other way as those who opposed MAGA were pushed out of the party and political life and out of all those juicy opportunities to garner more wealth, status, and power within the party and within the government.
They have been cowards, faithful only to their own interests. Really for all their posturing and “sober” pronunciations, the old-guard, traditional GOP members have been exposed for the most part to be willing enablers of Trump and MAGA as long as they can keep a share of the spoils.
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I legitimately want a set of those.
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