Excellent article this morning. I am one of those ‘60’s people who thought we had fixed everything. This November has become so consequentially important to a vast number of issues. But the pressure is building in the streets now and November is six months away.
This reads the right move and draws the wrong lesson.
Callais is not a Confederacy revival. It is the terminal node of a forty-year institutional campaign: Federalist Society, state legislative capture, Shelby County, Brnovich, now this. Roberts has been working this file since the Reagan DOJ. The cost to the right was patience. The cost to the left was everything that compounds while you are not paying attention.
The complacency was not cultural overconfidence. It was a category error. Liberals optimized for symbols. The right optimized for maps, courts, and election machinery. Symbols do not compound. Procedural control does.
Statues come down and go back up. District lines, once redrawn under a gutted VRA, do not.
The two most erroneous liberal assumptions were that everyone would play by the rules — turns out playing by the rules leaves you with a limited toolbox for opposition — and that everyone still lived in the reality-based community, and therefore shared the same views.
"One lesson to take from this abysmal moment is that no victory is permanent and politics never ends." Paul's excellent article captures the time we're in. The struggle continues, and we will stay in it.
This piece is spot on. Having just returned to Maine (home of Joshua Chamberlain, no less ) from a two month bike tour of the south I was surprised at how many markers of the confederacy I ran into Just by chance. I could not help but feel the confederate vibe all over mostly the rural south. Not so much in New Orleans or Austin. Thank you Paul for this piece.
An important piece. Looking at this from a transnational historic and geopolitical lens makes it even scarier: as the Great War of empires was nearly ready to explode and into the Interwar period these neo confederates found synergy and even alliances with right wing, antisemitic, white supremacist regimes that peaked with an outright Nazi movement in the US that simply slunk back under a rock on December 7, 1941. At the end of World War II the conservative administrations literally recruited Nazis, most obviously in Operation Paperclip, to work in our most sensitive agencies in the government.
The neo-Confederacy surge is the local variety of a larger right wing, anti-enlightenment, pro 'but mah feelin's!' fascistic resurgence globally.
If Steven Spielberg has one more film in him, I wish that he would make one that would follow the outcome of the Civil War with the North and the South becoming two different nations after the Union wins the war. I can just imagine how poverty would skyrocket in the South, people of color would be trying to sneak into the North over a wall the South would build, Mexico building a wall to protect them from Southerners from trying to get across the border, all leading to an inevitable internal war with the slaveholders and monied class being overthrown. It could end with a subtle and powerful courtroom case, with a White slaveholder being tried, and in the final moments, the camera reveals that the jury is entirely Black.
Excellent article this morning. I am one of those ‘60’s people who thought we had fixed everything. This November has become so consequentially important to a vast number of issues. But the pressure is building in the streets now and November is six months away.
This reads the right move and draws the wrong lesson.
Callais is not a Confederacy revival. It is the terminal node of a forty-year institutional campaign: Federalist Society, state legislative capture, Shelby County, Brnovich, now this. Roberts has been working this file since the Reagan DOJ. The cost to the right was patience. The cost to the left was everything that compounds while you are not paying attention.
The complacency was not cultural overconfidence. It was a category error. Liberals optimized for symbols. The right optimized for maps, courts, and election machinery. Symbols do not compound. Procedural control does.
Statues come down and go back up. District lines, once redrawn under a gutted VRA, do not.
Johan 🐌
The two most erroneous liberal assumptions were that everyone would play by the rules — turns out playing by the rules leaves you with a limited toolbox for opposition — and that everyone still lived in the reality-based community, and therefore shared the same views.
Pretty sure they’d also like to take a shot at the 1770s
"One lesson to take from this abysmal moment is that no victory is permanent and politics never ends." Paul's excellent article captures the time we're in. The struggle continues, and we will stay in it.
This piece is spot on. Having just returned to Maine (home of Joshua Chamberlain, no less ) from a two month bike tour of the south I was surprised at how many markers of the confederacy I ran into Just by chance. I could not help but feel the confederate vibe all over mostly the rural south. Not so much in New Orleans or Austin. Thank you Paul for this piece.
An important piece. Looking at this from a transnational historic and geopolitical lens makes it even scarier: as the Great War of empires was nearly ready to explode and into the Interwar period these neo confederates found synergy and even alliances with right wing, antisemitic, white supremacist regimes that peaked with an outright Nazi movement in the US that simply slunk back under a rock on December 7, 1941. At the end of World War II the conservative administrations literally recruited Nazis, most obviously in Operation Paperclip, to work in our most sensitive agencies in the government.
The neo-Confederacy surge is the local variety of a larger right wing, anti-enlightenment, pro 'but mah feelin's!' fascistic resurgence globally.
If Steven Spielberg has one more film in him, I wish that he would make one that would follow the outcome of the Civil War with the North and the South becoming two different nations after the Union wins the war. I can just imagine how poverty would skyrocket in the South, people of color would be trying to sneak into the North over a wall the South would build, Mexico building a wall to protect them from Southerners from trying to get across the border, all leading to an inevitable internal war with the slaveholders and monied class being overthrown. It could end with a subtle and powerful courtroom case, with a White slaveholder being tried, and in the final moments, the camera reveals that the jury is entirely Black.
The Dark Ages will be what they achieve.🤬