civil war – Sheila Kennedy

Banks Being Banks…

And you thought Micah Beckwith was the most “far out” candidate on Indiana’s statewide Republican ticket, just because he wants to ban books, criminalize abortion and put gay people back in. the closet?

Jim Banks says “Hold my beer.”

I had originally planned to post about reports that Banks approach is refusing to sign a bill funding Veterans programs if unrelated culture war riders attached by the far Right are removed. Those provisions would eliminate diversity and inclusion programs and further restrict abortion nationwide. He has been quoted as saying that dropping them from a bill addressing practical matters important to veterans–a constituency Banks pretends to care about– will cause him to withhold his vote.

“If they go back to the Dem woke policies — if they fund those policies, I’ll vote against it,” Banks said.

I wasn’t in any particular hurry to highlight this bit of “just normal for Banks” posturing. After all, with Jim Banks, threats like that just mean the sun rose in the East. He’s all culture war, all the time. Just the other day, he introduced a resolution to overturn a Biden administration rule requiring that foster parenting placements not be hostile to a child’s sexual orientation.

But then I saw this article from The New Republic.

Representative Jim Banks is running to represent Indiana in the Senate, but he categorically refuses to reject an armed rebellion against the federal government.

Banks was asked four times in person by a NOTUS reporter if he opposes a rebellion, and each time failed to give a clear answer. The fourth time, he even insulted the reporter.

I don’t take you seriously enough to answer your question,” Banks said on Tuesday, following three previous attempts on Monday when he instead chose to complain about Democrats. Why has a question with a clear easy answer become such an issue? It stems from a social media post from Banks on May 30, the same night Donald Trump was convicted in his hush-money trial.

Banks’s post on X (formerly Twitter) is pinned to the top of his profile, and has a picture of the Appeal to Heaven flag without any words. That flag today is attributed to Christian nationalism and the far right. It was also a symbol of the “Stop the Steal” movement created by Trump’s followers following the 2020 election, and carried by rioters at the Capitol building on January 6, 2021. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has attracted criticism for flying the same flag outside his vacation home in New Jersey.

In one of his multiple evasive responses to the reporter’s questions, Banks referenced the upcoming election.

“We’re in unprecedented times, and November will be the result of regular people taking our country back,” Banks said to NOTUS. “And then we’ll have a reset, and then we’ll take back our government and our country from the elites and those who are trying to destroy it. So you can infer whatever you’d like from that post.”

I was previously unfamiliar with NOTUS, which bills itself as a “new Washington publication from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute.” The original article, written by the NOTUS reporter who had conducted the interview, expanded on the conversation, noting that Banks had asked him whether he was a Christian, and whether he’d ever appealed to heaven. He followed that with a rant about the Democrats “weaponizing” the law against their political opponents. (I’m pretty sure that in GOP lingo, “weaponizing” means applying the rule of law to Republicans…)

Banks adamantly refused to answer the question “Do you oppose the concept of a second civil war?”

“That’s a crazy question,” Banks said, without answering it.

And when pressed again for his answer, he didn’t respond, disappearing into an elevator.

On Tuesday, a spokesperson for Banks did not respond to emails requesting the congressman’s opinion on armed rebellion against the U.S. government. On Wednesday, the spokesperson also did not respond to text messages from NOTUS, which were sent to his confirmed cell phone number, attempting again to see if Banks would like to offer clarity. The spokesperson did not answer phone calls from NOTUS ahead of this story’s publication, either.

It’s one thing to disagree with the “biblical perspectives” of people like Beckwith and Banks. It’s more important to recognize that they do not inhabit America’s current reality–or for that matter, any reality. They are thorough MAGA theocrats, convinced that they talk to God, and that God hates the same people they do.

I’m sure mental health professionals have a diagnosis for extreme theocratic zealotry. I don’t.

But I do know that they don’t belong in public office.

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A Speech Worth Revisiting

It’s probably a sign of just how suspicious I am these days of quotations on the Internet, but when I saw a post on Daily Kos that purported to be a lengthy portion of a speech by Ulysses Grant, I checked with two separate academic sites to confirm its accuracy.

It turned out it was accurate–and prescient.

Grant might have been commenting on our current national woes when he spoke in Des Moines in 1875.

I do not bring into this assemblage politics, certainly not partisan politics, but it is a fair subject for soldiers in their deliberations to consider what may be necessary to secure the prize for which they battled in a republic like ours. Where the citizen is sovereign and the official the servant, where no power is exercised except by the will of the people, it is important that the sovereign — the people — should possess intelligence.

The free school is the promoter of that intelligence which is to preserve us as a free nation. If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s, but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other.

Now in this centennial year of our national existence, I believe it a good time to begin the work of strengthening the foundation of the house commenced by our patriotic forefathers one hundred years ago, at Concord and Lexington. Let us all labor to add all needful guarantees for the more perfect security of free thought, free speech, and free press, pure morals, unfettered religious sentiments, and of equal rights and privileges to all men, irrespective of nationality, color, or religion.

Encourage free schools, and resolve that not one dollar of money appropriated to their support, no matter how raised, shall be appropriated to the support of any sectarian school. Resolve that the State or Nation, or both combined, shall furnish to every child growing up in the land, the means of acquiring a good common-school education, unmixed with sectarian, pagan, or atheistic tenets. Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate. With these safeguards, I believe the battles which created the Army of the Tennessee will not have been fought in vain.

Grant eloquently addressed what I have called “civic literacy”–the need of a “sovereign people” to be both patriotic and informed. As is clear from the context of his words, Grant’s definition of “patriotic” is very different from the jingoism displayed by today’s MAGA Republicans. True patriotism requires an allegiance to the principles of America’s Constitution and Bill of Rights, an allegiance based upon a proper understanding of those documents and the philosophy that animated them.

Grant was very clearly aware that such allegiance and understanding comes from instruction “unmixed with sectarian, pagan or atheistic tenets”–that such religious precepts must be left to the family, the church and private schools “supported entirely by private contributions.”

An eon ago–in 1980–I was a Republican candidate for Congress. I even won a Republican primary. Despite the fact that I was pro-choice and pro-gay rights, among other things, I was considered–and considered myself– to be a conservative. Then and now, I believe the proper understanding of that label includes a commitment to conserve the values that Grant enumerated in that long-ago speech.

I continue to believe that labeling today’s GOP “conservative” is a travesty that works to normalize what is a truly frightening and very unconservative approach to politics and American governance.

True conservatism requires a commitment to uphold the individual liberties protected by the Bill of Rights: freedom of speech and press, Separation of Church and State, freedom of conscience and personal autonomy, among others.

I don’t know the proper label for the MAGA fanatics who have taken over what was once my political party. Culture warriors? White Christian Nationalists? Fascists? Today’s GOP is probably a blend of all those, together with a heavy sprinkling of people who are too civically-illiterate to understand how very unconservative–and dangerous– their party has become.

Grant eloquently defended the extension of “equal rights and privileges to all men, irrespective of nationality, color, or religion.” Today’s Republicans would call him “woke,” and angrily reject him (along with Lincoln) as “anti-American.”

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Evidently, Not All History Is Written By The Victors…

A recent article from the Washington Post challenged my belief in the old adage that history is written by the victors. (It would also appear that Faux News didn’t invent propaganda. Who knew?) Apparently, successfully resisting Reconstruction wasn’t the only tactic employed by pro-slavery Southerners.

They were also able to suppress “inconvenient” history.

As Howell Raines, the author of the essay, noted, “Until a few years ago, I was among the thousands of Southerners who never knew they had kin buried under Union Army headstones.” It appears that a regiment of 2,066 fighters and spies who came from the mountain South were chosen by Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman as his personal escort on the March to the Sea. Raines wondered how their history got erased, and found that “the explanation reaches back to Columbia University, whose pro-Confederate Dunning School of Reconstruction History at the start of the 20th century spread a false narrative of Lost Cause heroism and suffering among aristocratic plantation owners.”

As a 10-year-old I stood in the presence of Marie Bankhead Owen, who showed me and my all-White elementary-school classmates the bullet holes in Confederate battle flags carried by “our boys.” She and her husband, Thomas McAdory Owen, reigned from 1901 to 1955 as directors of the archives in a monolithic alabaster building across from the Alabama State Capitol. They made the decision not to collect the service records of an estimated 3,000 White Alabamians who enlisted in the Union Army after it occupied Huntsville, Ala., in 1862. The early loss of this crucial Tennessee River town was a stab to the heart from which the Confederacy never recovered. Neither did the writing of accurate history in Alabama.

The Owens were not alone in what was a national academic movement to play down the sins of enslavers. In the files in Montgomery, I found the century-old correspondence between Thomas Owen and Columbia University historian William Archibald Dunning about their mission to give a pro-Southern slant to the American Historical Association.

The essay documents the effort to sanitize the “War Between the States,” by claiming that Southerners had been solidly behind the Confederacy; that the war had been fought about “states’ rights,” not slavery; and–most pernicious of all–that African Americans were “scientifically proven to be a servile race” that brought down Reconstruction because they were incapable of governing.

The fact that few Americans have ever heard of the 1st Alabama Cavalry and the defiant anti-secession activist who led to its founding, Charles Christopher Sheats, documents how such historiographic trickery produced what the Mellon Foundation calls “a woefully incomplete story” of the American past. The foundation’s Monuments Program is spending $500 million to erect accurate memorials to political dissidents, women and minorities who are underrepresented in many best-selling history books.

Recent research has traced the ways in which an “alternate” Southern history became the predominant story of the Civil War.

Dunning was the son of a wealthy New Jersey industrialist who taught him that Southern plantation masters were unfairly punished during Reconstruction. The younger Dunning installed a white-supremacist curriculum at Columbia and, after 1900, started dispatching his doctoral students to set up pro-Confederate history departments at Southern universities. The most influential of these was Walter Lynwood Fleming, whose students at Vanderbilt University produced “I’ll Take My Stand,” a celebration of plantation culture written by 12 brilliant conservative “Agrarian” writers including Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate and Andrew Nelson Lytle…Fleming, who was born on an Alabama plantation, reigned as the director of graduate education at Vanderbilt and peopled Southern history departments with PhDs schooled in the pro-Confederate views he learned from Dunning at Columbia.

It turns out that there were some 100,000 Union volunteers from the South. They were, Howell tells us, “Jacksonian Democrats who hewed to Old Hickory’s 1830 dictum that the Union must be preserved.” Lost Cause historians who had been schooled by Dunning and Fleming glossed over the fact that “White volunteers from the Confederate states made up almost 5 percent of Lincoln’s army.”

Howell concludes by considering how this history was lost.

How then did the Civil War become the only conflict in which, as filmmaker Ken Burns told me, the losers got to write the history, erecting statues of Johnny Reb outside seemingly every courthouse in Alabama? Long story short, after the Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction, plantation oligarchs regained control of Southern legislatures and state universities started churning out history books that ignored Black people and poor Whites. When national historians set about writing widescreen histories of the war, they relied on these tainted histories.

The essay is lengthy, and filled with fascinating details documenting both accurate history and the dishonest machinations of those whose devotion to Confederate ideology suppressed it.

It made me wonder how often losers have become victors by simply rewriting history…

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Scary Stuff…

During Reconstruction, it was the KKK.

This time, it’s organizations like Oath Keepers and Proud Boys–but the context is uncomfortably similar. If the U.S. is currently waging a different kind of civil war, as many pundits argue, these assorted groups of violent extremists–some 1600 of them, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center–are today’s domestic terrorists.

Today’s Klan.

A raft of academic studies has confirmed that most episodes of domestic terror in the U.S. are carried out by these right-wing groups–far in excess of Islamic or left-wing groups. And–just as during Reconstruction–the destructive actions of these groups are rooted in racism. Theirs isn’t the embarrassing but less violent racism we see in the posts to social media decrying Disney’s decision to cast a Black mermaid. This is a malignant and horrifying desire to wreak physical harm and even death on the feared and hated “other.”

Even more terrifying than the proliferation of these groups is the discovery that their membership includes a large number of police and military officers.

The names of hundreds of U.S. law enforcement officers, elected officials and military members appear on the leaked membership rolls of a far-right extremist group that’s accused of playing a key role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, according to a report released Wednesday.

The Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism pored over more than 38,000 names on leaked Oath Keepers membership lists and identified more than 370 people it believes currently work in law enforcement agencies — including as police chiefs and sheriffs — and more than 100 people who are currently members of the military.

It also identified more than 80 people who were running for or served in public office as of early August. The membership information was compiled into a database published by the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets.

The data raises fresh concerns about the presence of extremists in law enforcement and the military who are tasked with enforcing laws and protecting the U.S. It’s especially problematic for public servants to be associated with extremists at a time when lies about the 2020 election are fueling threats of violence against lawmakers and institutions.

As their affiliations have emerged, a number of those identified have taken pains to minimize their connections–saying they left the organization long before, or only paid dues once and left when they realized the organization was violent/hateful/extreme. As the linked report notes, that excuse simply doesn’t hold up–the Oath Keepers have been very explicit about their “mission’ from the day they were founded.

About that founding: Oath Keepers was formed in 2009 by someone named Stewart Rhodes. It is described as a “loosely organized conspiracy theory-fueled group,” and it very deliberately recruits current and former military personnel, police and other first responders. It requires members to defend its twisted version of the Constitution “against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” and includes the federal government among those enemies, arguing that the federal government is tyrannical and intent upon depriving citizens of their civil liberties.

The article notes that more than two dozen members of the Oath Keepers — including Rhodes — have been charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attack and with the plot to keep then-President Donald Trump in power.

The Oath Keepers has grown quickly along with the wider anti-government movement and used the tools of the internet to spread their message during Barack Obama’s presidency, said Rachel Carroll Rivas, interim deputy director of research with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project….

ADL said it found the names of at least 10 people who now work as police chiefs and 11 sheriffs. All of the police chiefs and sheriffs who responded to the AP said they no longer have any ties to the group.

When asked about their connection to the group, the men identified by the ADL all twisted themselves into knots distancing themselves. “Who, me? I just wondered what they were about, but never joined/left quickly/don’t recall…”

Right. And I have some not-underwater land in Florida to sell you.

Police departments have long struggled to weed out the inevitable thugs who find the ability to carry a weapon and assert authority very attractive. The larger departments have instituted psychological testing and other mechanisms in an effort to identify and avoid employing those applicants, but they aren’t always successful–and numerous rural and smaller departments lack either the desire or the resources to exclude such individuals.

In the South during Reconstruction, the KKK could often depend upon the local Sheriff–a fellow member– to look the other way when they lynched or brutalized someone. The willingness of today’s law enforcement personnel to become members of the Klan’s “modern version” is disheartening, to put it mildly.

It’s terrifying, to put it accurately.

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Two Possibilities….

A few days ago, a clearly exasperated reader of this blog asked “the” question–the question I ask myself daily and am unable to answer. He agreed with my “diagnoses” of the myriad problems we face, but wanted to know what we can do about them. We know what the problems are–what can individuals do to solve them?

If only I had an answer! We’d both feel better.

Not only do I not have a solution to “the question,” I vacillate between two competing analyses of the problems we face. As I have previously noted, I’ve been reading a lot more history lately, in an effort to determine whether we’ve been here before, or whether the severity of America’s divisions is something unprecedented. (That’s another question to which I have no answer…).

As I used to tell my students, it depends–and it’s complicated.

Like many of the people who read this blog, I take the daily letter from historian Heather Cox Richardson, who provides helpful historic context to the issues of the day. Recently, she addressed the question of Trump’s stolen documents, and Senator Lindsey Graham’s threat that holding Trump accountable would be met with violence in the streets.

Richardson pointed out that arguments about the theft of those documents are arguments about the rule of law–not about contending political opinions. Graham’s threats about gangs taking to the streets is an authoritarian’s argument for the use of violence to overturn the rule of law. Richardson then provided valuable context, noting that resort to violence is not new to this country, citing to the Reconstruction South–a period during which “white gangs terrorized their Black neighbors and the white men who voted as they did, suppressed labor organization at the turn of the last century, and fed rising fascism in the 1930s”.

Right-wing activists have been an ever-growing threat since the 1990s. Under Trump, rightwing gangs became his troops. But as Richardson reminded us, even the incidents of domestic terrorism aren’t new.

Such gangs have always operated in the U.S., and they gain power and momentum when they engage in violence and are unchecked. After several years in which they have seemed invulnerable, we are now in a period when, as we learned on Saturday, an armed man in a truck chased Independent Utah senatorial candidate Evan McMullin with a gun after an event in April and forced the vehicle carrying McMullin and his wife into oncoming traffic. That incident echoes one from October 2020, when a bus carrying Biden staffers and volunteers through Texas was harassed by Trump supporters, some of whom appeared to be trying to force it off the road. When the terrified Biden workers called the police, officers allegedly refused to help.

What I take from Richardson and other historians–as well as the upheavals most of us personally experienced in the 1960s and 70s– is the lesson that the times we are living through are not unique. We can take some comfort in the fact that we got through those ugly episodes, and reassure ourselves that we can make it through these times as well.

Or–as a part of my brain whispers–maybe this time really is different.

Previous periods of unrest didn’t occur in the face of the existential threats posed by climate change, and new technologies that facilitate mass murder and Orwellian surveillance. Obsolescent rules weren’t bringing federal governance to a grinding halt…

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter which of these analyses is accurate. Whether we’ve been here before or we really haven’t–we need to find a way out. But the solutions available to us will ultimately depend upon understanding what is happening now, and how unprecedented (or not) our challenges are.

Choose your preferred diagnosis–but neither sparks an epiphany pointing to a cure.

The single thing that each of us can do is to vote, and work to ensure that other rational Americans do likewise. Gerrymandering and vote suppression tactics may win the day– but a truly overwhelming Blue turnout would keep the GOP from furthering its march to fascism, and would begin the long and difficult job of mending American government.

Voting Blue in November won’t be an endorsement of whatever Democrats stand for. The party certainly isn’t above criticism. It is, however, largely sane and pro-democracy.

Conservative Republican Adam Kitzinger recently made the same point.

A Blue vote is a vote for women’s reproductive autonomy, for the civil rights of LGBTQ citizens, for sensible restrictions on firearms, and for prioritizing the interests of working and middle class Americans. We can–and will– argue about the details of those basic commitments, but only if we defeat the unAmerican cult that stands firmly against them all.

This November, we must vote Blue for America.

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