A Republic, If You Can Keep It
Jan. 6 Accountability–
It’s been said that a coup that goes unpunished is a dress rehearsal, which is why it’s so important for the truth about the Jan. 6 insurrection to come out, and those responsible to be held accountable — including Donald Trump. The pattern across the globe has been clear, but in America it’s been more complicated, with the American Civil War as the prime example.
Then, issues of individual and collective responsibility were not just shuffled aside, but eventually turned on their heads. When Jim Crow segregation reimposed a system of white supremacy run by the same landed aristocracy that controlled the slaveholding South, and took the nation to war.
After the war, Confederate President Jefferson Davis was arrested, but never stood trial. If he had, he most likely would have been prosecuted by Richard Henry Dana Jr. — author of Two Years Before The Mast — who won the most important Supreme Court case of the war, allowing for the blockade of Southern ports, without which the North almost certainly could not have won.
There were two lines of argument against trying Davis. One was that the nation needed to heal, an argument advanced by a trio of prominent unionists who joined in posting bail for Davis in May 1867. Dana made a very different argument, though with the same result. In an August 1868 letter to Attorney General W.M. Evarts, Dana warned of the danger of jury nullification. “We know that it only requires one dissentient juror to defeat the government and give Jefferson Davis and his favorers a triumph,” Dana wrote. “This possible result would be most humiliating to the Government and people of this country, and nonetheless so from the fact that it would be absurd.”
In the end, on Christmas day, 1868,
President Andrew Johnson pardoned Davis, letting him off the hook. But the biggest failed lesson of the time wasn’t that. It was the birth of the big lie known as the “Lost Cause,” which absolved not just individuals like Davis, but the entire slave-owning class and the regional culture they dominated. The failure to combat the Lost Cause should be what bothers us most today — pointing to a much bigger task than simply holding Trump accountable.
Trump’s Bigger Big Lie
Trump’s stolen election big lie grew out of the broader lie that his entire presidency was based on, the lie that the system is specifically rigged against his base — white, Christian, conservatives — particularly men, who are innocent victims of malevolent outside forces, sinister elites and dangerous minorities. The Lost Cause was likewise designed to cast white Southerners as innocent victims of similar malevolent forces. While the details may differ, the main thrust was the same: denying reality, reversing the roles of victim and perpetrator, and claiming the moral high ground.
The Great Replacement Theory, cited by the Buffalo shooter, and mentioned by Tucker Carlson more than 400 times on his primetime Fox News show, echoes the same basic lie: that the white majority is being attacked by sinister globalist (i.e., Jewish) elites using foreign brown bodies to invade and overwhelm them. Steven Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration policy, is a firm believer in the Great Replacement, as we’ve reported in the past.
Two other Trump-era big lies echo the same story. The QAnon conspiracy claims that Trump is fighting a global Satanic cabal of cannibalistic child sex traffickers, involving leaders of the Democratic Party, Hollywood elites and George Soros. It originally claimed Trump was secretly working with special counsel Robert Mueller to expose the conspiracy when Mueller was publicly investigating Trump. It was supposed to end in the mass arrests of thousands of Trump’s enemies.
The more recent panic over “critical race theory” — which has generated multiple state laws stifling the teaching of history, social studies and literature — arose in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd, and the historic wave of Black Lives Matter demonstrations it generated. Floyd’s murder vividly illustrated the
absurdity of widely-held claims that white people are now more discriminated against than Black people, and it fueled a long-overdue discussion of systemic racism — institutions, practices and assumptions that have harmful racist impacts quite apart from any individual intent. The CRT panic stands the meaning of systemic racism on its head, falsely claiming it means that all white people are racist. Hence the false claim that CRT itself is racist and anti-American.
Beliefs in all these wild fantasies are interconnected by shared assumptions of who’s good, who’s evil and who’s to be trusted as a source of information.
Basics of The Lost Cause
In his book, The Myth of the Lost Cause, Edward Bonekemper identifies seven main tenets, the first four of which are sufficient to consider here. They are best considered in pairs:
1) Slavery was a benevolent, but dying institution by 1861, so there was no need to abolish it suddenly, especially by war. 2) States’ rights, not slavery, was the cause of secession, creation of the Confederacy and thus of the Civil War.
Bonekemper refutes these with mountains of facts, but just one simple fact is enough to demolish them both: The South had always opposed states’ rights when it came to fugitive slaves and when the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act was strengthened in 1850, he notes, “the fear of being kidnapped and sold into slavery led some fifteen to twenty thousand free Northern blacks to migrate to Canada between 1850 and 1860.” There’s no way to reconcile this mass migration with slavery being benevolent, or dying, or the South being committed to the principle of states’ rights.
In short, the “Lost Cause” is a farce. But there’s more, as the next pair of tenets fails just as quickly:
3. The Confederacy had no chance of winning, but did the best it could with its limited resources.
4. Indeed, it almost won, led by Robert E. Lee, one of the greatest generals in history. Both claims are easily refuted. As Bonekemper notes, “All the Confederacy needed was a stalemate, which would confirm its existence as a separate country. The burden was on the North to defeat the Confederacy and compel the return of the eleven wayward states to the Union.” This basic reality was widely cited by Confederates as the war began, assuring themselves of ultimate success. Lee’s eagerness to invade the North, abandoning this obvious strategic advantage, is sufficient by itself to destroy his undeserved reputation. Celebrating Lee — and other Confederate generals — created a heroic narrative genre meant to silence all criticism.
The “Lost Cause” narrative was constructed in the 1870s and ’80s not simply to rewrite the South’s past to make it less painful, but to create a “usable past” that could justify and help organize what was going on there at the time — the violent, blood-soaked destruction of a fledgling multi-racial democracy — and guide the creation of a preferred future — the segregated South that perpetuated a social system materially similar to what existed under slavery.
Trump’s New Lost Cause
Like the old “Lost Cause,” Trump’s new Lost Cause is both about making a past loss less painful and creating a new politically controllable future. The same efforts that went into trying to steal the last election continue to try to steal the next, fueled by Trump’s stolen election lies. Thus, a recent New York Times story reported that “At least 357 sitting Republican legislators in [nine] closely contested battleground states have used the power of their office to discredit or try to overturn the results of the 2020 [election],” the backward-looking aspect of Trump’s Lost Cause. At the same time, it reports 52 laws passed that include restrictions on voting — the forwardlooking aspect. Some include putting more power over elections in the hands of state legislatures.
Davis’ fate had little to do with the Lost Cause, as opposed to the field general, Lee. But
Trump’s stolen election big lie puts him squarely in the middle of the new “Lost Cause.” “You’ve got to fight like hell, otherwise you won’t have a country anymore,” Trump said on Jan. 6. And that remains his rallying cry. The party base is with him. Numerous polls have found that about 7 in 10 Republican voters believe that Joe Biden wasn’t legitimately elected. But that’s only about 3 in 10 of all voters — not nearly enough to win competitive elections. So GOP politicians worried about that are trying to create some separation, even as Trump is trying to purge them from the party. But they largely embrace most, if not all of Trump’s broader lie, which severely imperils our democracy.
For example, the Washington Post recently wrote about the Republican Governors
Association’s efforts to counter what one former governor called Trump’s “personal vendetta tour,” with the Georgia governor’s race as the premier battleground, where they spent about $5 million to defend Gov. Brian Kemp from a Trump-backed challenge by former senator David Perdue. Kemp has done a great deal to cripple democracy in Georgia, adding new election restrictions after the 2020 election. And that record has helped him stave off Trump’s attacks. But it strengthens Trump’s broader big lie, even as he holds back on the narrower one.
The Hearings Ahead
The Jan. 6 Committee is about to hold six public hearings, presenting its preliminary findings.
“The hearings will tell a story that will blow the roof off the House,” Rep. Jaime Raskin said in late April. “It is a story of the most heinous and dastardly political offense ever organized by a president, and his followers and his entourage in the history of the United States. No president has ever come close to doing what happened here.”
No president other than Jefferson Davis, that is. A flood of recent stories strongly suggests that a far more detailed, far-reaching effort to overthrow the election will be revealed, with strong connections between two months of political arm-twisting and three-plus hours of physical violence. Repeated comments from Republican Rep. Liz Cheney suggest that specific criminal acts by Donald Trump will be featured as well.
But there’s been little discussion of what accountability would look like. Other democracies have put former leaders on trial without seriously damaging their systems. Following their examples shouldn’t be that hard. But America’s history with the “Lost Cause” suggests otherwise. It’s not Trump alone who belongs on trial, it’s the whole breadth of his New Lost Cause mythology — the stolen election, the Great Replacement Theory, the “Critical Race Theory” panic, the QAnon conspiracy, all of it. And the Jan. 6 committee hearings will only address one facet of that mythology. There are no plans at all to take on the whole of it. But that’s what America desperately needs, if we’re to preserve a functioning democracy — or even just the chance for one.
Republicans have only won the popular vote for president one time since 1988. But they’ve controlled the presidency almost half the time, and appointed six Supreme Court justices to the Democrat’s three. They have little prospect of winning the popular vote anytime soon. But they don’t have to. All they have to do is come close enough to win the Electoral College vote — either at the polls, or by the kind of shenanigans that Trump tried in 2020. Like the old Lost Cause, Trump’s new Lost Cause can be used to justify and help organize the destruction of a fledgling multi-racial democracy. That’s what he tried to do in 2020. And without drastic action now, it’s what Republicans are positioning themselves for in 2024 as well.
On the last day of the Constitutional convention, according to the journal of James McHenry, “A lady asked Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin, Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy – A republic replied the Doctor if you can keep it.”
That is the question.