In the neo-Confederate view, North and South went to war because they represented two distinct and irreconcilable cultures, right down to their bloodlines. White Southerners descended from freedom-loving Celts in Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Northerners--New England abolitionist in particular--came from mercantile and expansionist English stock.
This ethnography even explained how the War was fought. Like their brave and heedless forebears, Southerners hurled themselves in frontal assaults on the enemy. The North, meanwhile, deployed the industrial might and numerical superiority to grind down the South with Cromwellian efficiency. A military historian and neo-Confederate guru named Grady McWhiney put it best "Southerners lost the War because they were too Celtic and their opponents were too English."
Viewed through this prism, the War of Northern Aggression had little to do with slavery. Rather, it was a culture war in which Yankees imposed their imperialist and capitalistic will on the agrarian South, just as the English had done to the Irish and Scots--and as America did to the Indians and the Mexicans in the name of Manifest Destiny. The North's triumph, in turn, condemned the nation to centralized industrial society and all the ills that came with it. (From Tony Horwitz's 1995 book, Confederates in the Attic, pp. 68-69)
One of the people Horwitz interviews tells him that whites in the South are like the Bosnians who at the time were being ethnically cleansed.
How much of this is nonsense and how much true doesn't matter. It's the stuff of a compelling narrative that a lot of people want to believe and which becomes part of a significant American minority's common imaginary. Nothing gets the adrenaline flowing more than the threat to one's existence, and when entire groups feel threatened, and they talk among themselves to reinforce this sense of threat, and then see the Liberal big government as the source of that threat, we have a serious problem.
Another person Horwitz interviews says, "The South is a good place to look at what America used to be, and might have become if the South had won. If something's fucked up, the North did it, not us."
I think it's hard for the typical Northerner--I know it is for me--to imagine and feel the sense of threat and grievance that Southerns like this feel. And I think Horwitz points to one of the reasons when he discusses how many Southerners today have ancestors that fought in the Civil War and how few Northerners do. The sense of loss and grievance that dates back to Reconstruction has been passed down from generation to generation in a way that Northerners, especially descendants of the turn-of-the-century immigrants, find hard to fathom. Immigrants wanted badly to assimilate; they wanted to look forward, not backward.
I think my family is pretty typical. My parents and grandparents remembered little about their Irish heritage and family history; there are no stories of the old country or about the passage to America; there's no family lore or remembrance. For my family it was all about forgetting painful memories and focusing on the future. And while it frustrated me when I tried to find out more about the family history, I came to think that this attitude of "looking forward" is probably a healthier and more adaptive in a rapidly changing world than fretting too much about what has been lost from the past.
Rapid change and pluralism are the enemy of tradition, not Liberal Northerners. Liberal Northerners are simply people who have adapted better to forces that are shaping the world insofar as their cosmopolitanism enables them to embrace pluralism and insofar as they understand that you need a government big enough to regulate the forces of capital that left unchecked would destroy everything.
Southerners have made it a point of tribal pride not to forget, and in doing so have made themselves stubbornly unadaptive and as such unassimilable into the pluralistic society America has mostly become. The South has changed quite a bit since the 1970s, but it's precisely that change that has cause the the neo-Confederate backlash. The New South is the Old South homogenized into the Northern corporate culture. It's Reconstruction all over again driven by soulless Yankee corporations and traitorous scalawags out to make a buck--and uppity Blacks no longer know their "traditional" place .
Whatever the basis in fact for southern Whites' resentments, however understandable their grief and sense of loss, their obsession with the past is dysfunctional and maladaptive, and as such contributes more to our problems than offers a solution to them. To be an American means that you are part of a society composed of so many dead and dying, old-world and premodern traditions. If you're in one that's not dead yet, it's probably on life support, and it would be better to pull the plug and just move on, which if you won't your kids will--if they have a lick of sense. A brain-dead traditionalism is a zombie traditionalism, and there's nothing in it that is healthful in the way a living tradition is.
There is no benefit in preserving what has died. Remembrance, yes. Preserving, no. A living tradition is a beautiful thing--I understand the feeling of loss and the dissatisfaction with the soulless, consumerist thing that has come to replace the old ways; it's just that in America, it's very rare when you find a living tradition, where the old ways offer a compelling alternative to the soullessness of mainstream American culture. And the traditions of the neo-Confederates are neither "living" nor soulful in any wholesome sense. They are a parodic traditions born of an anger misdirected at the Liberal North out of habit and for want of a political and economic analysis that would direct their anger more productively. And whatever might have been wholesome in southern white culture will always be tainted by its defense of and dependency on chattel slavery and post-reconstruction segregationism.
I've always thought ridiculous the Lost-Cause claim that the Civil War was not about slavery--of course it was, and to think otherwise is utterly delusional. But it's interesting to understand why Lost Cause Southerners think slavery wasn't central to their secessionism. They just don't see themselves as oppressors; rather they see themselves as the victims. Blacks, whatever they may have been before the war, after the war became the victors. Allied with the arrogant Northerners, they sought to destroy everything these white Southerners held dear.
Blacks were never oppressed under slavery; it was good for them--it was civilizing. But blacks now, as they were during Reconstruction, are a part of the powerful coalition of interests which is bent on destroying the culture and traditions of white southerners. After Reconstruction Jim Crow was necessary for white survival, and now since the sixties, the extinction of white southern culture is once again serious possibility. The Civil War, like the white struggle today is undertaken for the same reasons their ancestors fought the War of Northern Aggression--to resist ethnic cleansing by the Northern oppressor in league with their black allies. The whole slavery business before the war was incidental--a minor subplot in this larger narrative of white southern cultural survival. And anyway, if Blacks were oppressed then, they're not now--they're the oppressors. And now they got one in the White House.
This sense of victimhood is pathetic and dysfunctional, but it's deeply ingrained and intensely felt. And it's political dynamite and fodder for demagogues. And this is not just a Southern thing now. The entire cultural right has been 'southernized". They all feel oppressed and threatened. And I hope I'm wrong, but I see this getting worse because I don't see yet what's going to turn it around--certainly not Yankee liberal reasonableness.
My tough-love message to the neo-Confederates and their fellow travelers in Tea-Party Movement: Yes, you're right that things are awful in Washington and in the culture in general. But stop whining about your victimhood and grow up. Everybody is hurting and you have no special claims. Learn to live in a quickly changing, ever-more-complex, globalizing world. Understand who your real enemies are and direct your energies toward defeating them. While many of them are in government, more of them are Republicans than Democrats. And while some of them are on Wall Street, they're also in Houston and Charlotte and Bentonville and country clubs throughout the South. And so instead of adopting some adolescently pure Libertarianism, accept that government has to be part of the answer, but it has to be held accountable and it starts with voting in down-to-earth, sane representatives who understand the problems and want to use the power of the government to solve them.
For two other posts on this theme see "Dying Traditions" and "Retrieval"
BTW-- Any body out there see the 24-part Korean TV series called The Grand Chef or sometimes Gourmet? It's a very interesting fictional study of the old ways in tension with modern capital. The context is Korea's culinary tradition, which, at least in the fictional sense, still lives at Unamjung, the restaurant run by the descendants of the last royal chef. And the tradition also still lives in the culinary backwaters of Korea that the show takes the viewers on plot-driven a tour of.
I found it riveting. One of the things the show dramatizes is how creative, imaginative, adaptive, and soulful the traditionalists represented by the old chef Oh, his homeless-shelter-dwelling-psychic friend Jawoon, and the true descendant and Chef Oh's adopted son, Sung Chan, are. I don't know enough about contemporary Korea to judge whether this depiction of a live tradition bears any relationship to the lived cultural reality there, but the writers want to celebrate the "old ways" in a place where they haven't yet been completely exterminated.
It's interesting for this blog because it illustrates what a living tradition is in contrast to what I've been describing for years here as a 'zombie traditionalism'. A living tradition is worth preserving, and the show is about the struggle against the enormously powerful forces that want to extinguish it. And it dramatizes the point long argued on this blog that Liberalism is not the tradition killer--unbridled capitalism is.