It Ain’t All Their Fault
It feels like America is truly divided. Even before the election of Donald Trump, the nation felt like two different places: the progressive trans-national vision of Barack Obama, and the protectionist, nationalist philosophy of the Republican right. And now we have the “alt-right” outflanking the already conservative Republican party. There is little room left in the middle. There are few “blue-dog” Democrats, liberal on social issues, but conservative on defense and economics. And there are almost no “moderate” Republicans. The few that look moderate now (John Kasich for example) are far more conservative than Jacob Javits or Edwin Brooke of the past, or even Mitt Romney in his Massachusetts Governor days.
Some would argue that America is essentially a “purple” country. While a look at the 2016 Presidential election map is quite stark in its red and blue contrast, an analysis of the election show state after state had incredibly narrow results. In “all Republican” Ohio, Trump received 2.8 million votes, but Clinton had 2.3 million. North Carolina, Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania: all were narrow wins. There was no “mandate” for President Trump, just a perilously close electoral win.
Others would take the same evidence and note that Clinton won only 8 counties in Ohio, while Trump won 80. The contrast was clear: the urban areas of Cleveland, Toledo, Dayton, Cincinnati, Youngstown and Akron, along with “liberal” Athens County went for Clinton: the rest were for Trump. In many of those counties Trump gained more than 70%.
The “progressives” feel that the gains of the past decades in LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, national health, education, the environment and a multitude of other issues are being lost. They also feel that the President at the helm might get the US in a war across the world.
Conservatives feel like even though they “won,” Progressives still rule. They feel that the institutions of government (the “DeepState”) are preventing the “winners” from running the country. They feel that Trump’s win should give them the right to rewrite the changes of the past decades. Instead, they feel that America is re-writing its own history, writing out the role of traditional heroes, and defiling the symbols that represent our nation.
Are we re-writing history? Today we are tearing down the monuments to the Confederacy, declaring all Confederates “supporters of slavery.” We are focusing our rear view vision on the war fought over 150 years ago. And just as the idea that the South was fighting for “states’ rights” only and not slavery is foolish, so is the idea that every Confederate was a “traitor” fighting for slavery. Like all history, it’s a whole lot more complex than that.
While slavery was always an issue for the United States, the dynamic of state versus federal power was always on the table. We struggled with that from the writing of the Constitution. Madison had to add the 10th Amendment, reserving rights to the states and the people, to try to clarify the issue, but it didn’t. The first great argument for secession was from New England, facing economic losses from Jefferson’s embargo prior to and during the War of 1812.
The next was between President Andrew Jackson and Vice President John C. Calhoun, both slaveholders, over taxation in South Carolina in the early 1830’s. Calhoun argued the concept of nullification – that a state could nullify a federal law within its jurisdiction – originally authored by Jefferson in the Kentucky Resolution. Jackson proclaimed that the union must be preserved. Calhoun ultimately resigned from the Vice Presidency, and Jackson sent Federal troops and ships to the state. A compromise was reached: the state dropped nullification, the taxes were reduced and the troops removed, but the argument of the power of states versus the federal government would continue.
So to claim that the state’s rights argument was only about slavery is far too simplistic. Had slavery not existed, there probably would not have been a Civil War, but the issue was more complicated than just slavery. And while Northern abolitionists were loud and clear about ending slavery, they truly represented a small minority of Northern thought before the war.
Prior to the Civil War, Lincoln, like Jackson, declared that the Union was inseparable. When the Civil War began, Lincoln made the war one of union versus dis-union, not slavery versus freedom. It was only after a year and a half of war that Lincoln began the process of emancipation.
So does this mean that we should maintain Confederate monuments? Whether they were fighting for states’ rights or slavery, they were fighting for dis-union. We should begin our discussion there, and determine what is right today. And we should do so as communities, not as a national showdown. We should remember that while Confederates were fighting for dis-union, most perceived the fight as protecting their homes. At the least, we should allow their cemeteries to be honored for the sacrifice they made, even for a losing cause.
And “progressives” should not make re-litigating the Civil War as the cause of the day. There are too many issues of NOW that we must contend with as we attempt to maintain the progress of the last twenty years. To allow our focus to be drawn to the alt-right distracts us from that more important cause.
This is but one issue that divides our country, and one where some feel that “progressives” are changing the nature of it. Others “hot button” examples: kneeling during the national anthem as a form of protest, or university campuses providing “safe zones” from free speech, all make “the red” side of our nation feel like the nation is changing beneath their feet. Right or wrong, it ain’t all their fault that they feel that way.
