In a recent newsletter, Paul Krugman succinctly described what Trump has done to the economy. Granted, his economic ignorance is only a part of the current devastation–there are also the daily assaults on the constitution and individual liberties, and the continuing restoration of the Confederacy and its out-and-proud racism and misogyny…
But a lot of people who don’t care about the American Idea or fundamental fairness do care about their bottom lines. So Krugman’s summary ought to matter. Here’s that summary:
He has imposed high tariffs, undoing the effects of 90 years of trade negotiations. His deportation policies are already creating labor shortages and supply disruptions in multiple sectors of the economy. His Big Beautiful Budget Bill, aside from being cruel, is fiscally irresponsible. Deportations will undermine Social Security and Medicare. His drastic cuts to scientific research will undermine U.S. technology, and hence long-run economic growth.
That recap was an intoduction to Krugman’s analysis of why the stock market hasn’t tanked (yet), which he attributes to faith in the promise of AI. (My jury is out on the question of whether that “promise” is really a threat…) He also points out that the market has historically been a poor predictor of longer-term economic trends.
Whatever the market’s performance means–or doesn’t–it’s impossible to read that quoted paragraph without recognizing the enormity and inevitability of decline in American prosperity unless the mindlessness and madness aren’t reversed.
I wonder whether Trump voters will find the restoration of Confederate statuary and philosophy worth the economic costs…
Note: yesterday’s “extra” post was an accident. Sorry for the assault on your inboxes!
Like many readers of this blog, I subscribe to Heather Cox Richardson’s daily “Letters from an American.” Having come through an education system notoriously light on comprehensive history, I find her daily expositions of America’s past very enlightening–especially when I learn about the details of past events that bear an uncanny resemblance to our current quandaries.
Richardson was comparing our current divisions with those that triggered the founding of the Republican Party–and the Civil War. The GOP, ironically, was formed to fight slavery and uphold the premise of the Declaration that “all men are created equal.” In the years since the Civil War, we’ve seen the parties change places–the Democrats have become the party defending human equality, while today’s GOP looks very much like the combination of racists and plutocrats that characterized the old Democratic Party.
What really struck me was the sense that we’ve returned to that age-old fight. The parties may have switched sides, but the nature of the battle remains depressingly familiar.
After providing details of the events leading up to the demise of the Whigs and the formation of a new Republican Party–a party formed to combat the notion that some humans are superior to and entitled to rule over others by virtue of their skin color– Richardson compared that era to our own.
When voters elected Lincoln president, the fledgling Republican Party turned away from a government that catered to an oligarchy trying to overturn democracy and instead reinvented the American government to create a new, active government that guaranteed to poorer men the right to be treated equally before the law, the right to a say in their government, and access to resources that had previously been monopolized by the wealthy.
The present looks much like that earlier moment when people of all different political backgrounds came together to defend the principles of the United States. In today’s moment, when someone like J.D. Vance backer billionaire Peter Thiel says, “Democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted,” and the Republicans’ Project 2025 calls for replacing democracy with Christian nationalism, it makes sense for all people who care about our history and our democratic heritage to pull together.
Richardson noted that there are some in the GOP who recognize the threat posed by a MAGA party that looks a lot like the Confederacy. She quoted Olivia Troye, who served in the Trump White House, and who is now working with Republicans for Harris. Troye has called upon Mike Pence to endorse Harris, and is quoted as saying that
“[W]hat is happening here with the Republican Party… is dangerous and extreme. And I think we need to get back to the values of…observing the rule of law, of standing with our international allies and actually providing true leadership to the world, which is something that Kamala Harris has exhibited during the Biden Administration.”
(As an aside, I’d be shocked if Pence had the spine to endorse Harris…I’m pretty sure that his one moment of integrity in refusing to go along with Trump’s coup exhausted his ability to do the right thing. I hope I’m wrong, but I think his four years of utter, embarrassing sycophancy are more consistent with his character than that one example of moral courage…)
Richardson’s comparison of that pre-civil war era with our own is apt. There are differences, of course, but the choices Americans face today certainly “rhyme” with the choices that confronted Americans then. Once again, We the People are facing a frontal challenge to the most basic premises of our founding documents–premises that we have admittedly never quite lived up to, but that we have (mostly) continued to pursue.
There’s a lot wrong with American society today, but most of it is fixable–if we elect public servants who are honorable and who–in the words of Olivia Troye–are committed to the rule of law, to standing with our international allies, and capable of providing what has been called servant leadership.
Richardson reminds us that we’ve been here before, and the good guys prevailed. If we want to preserve the country they saved–if we want to turn back the White Supremacists and plutocrats of today’s GOP–we’ll vote Blue in sufficient numbers to drive the lesson home. A Blue wave would–ideally– lead to the disintegration of MAGA and a return of the GOP to normalcy.
Or perhaps, as with the Whigs, the creation of a new, saner political party.
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…
A few days ago, I came across a Facebook post that spoke to the current frenzy about “critical race theory.” The post was actually directed at defenses of confederate statutes and the confederate flag, but what really struck me was the following litany about the contents of most history classes.
You learned about Helen Keller instead of W.E.B, DuBois You learned about the Watts and L.A. Riots, but not Tulsa or Wilmington. You learned that George Washington’s dentures were made from wood, rather than the teeth from slaves. You learned about black ghettos, but not about Black Wall Street. You learned about the New Deal, but not “red lining.” You learned about Tommie Smith’s fist in the air at the 1968 Olympics, but not that he was sent home the next day and stripped of his medals. You learned about “black crime,” but white criminals were never lumped together and discussed in terms of their race. You learned about “states rights” as the cause of the Civil War, but not that slavery was mentioned 80 times in the articles of secession. Privilege is having history rewritten so that you don’t have to acknowledge uncomfortable facts.
At the conclusion of the list was the following: “Racism is perpetuated by people who refuse to learn or acknowledge this reality. You have a choice. – Jim Golden”
I don’t know who Jim Golden is or was, but I think this list is an excellent illustration of what is at stake in the current fury over the teaching of history.
No history class can cover every aspect of America’s past. Selectivity is inevitable–but it is abundantly clear that the selection incorporated into most high school history texts and consuming the majority of class time in most of the nation’s schools has been wildly unbalanced.
How many American high school students have been taught that the Civil War was about “state’s rights”? What percentage of them were ever confronted with this statement about the genesis of the war?
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin …
The quoted paragraph is only one of several that can be found at the link–which is to an article from the Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Coates simply assembles the official statements of the “Southern Gentlemen” who led the Confederate States into secession.
Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
The only state right that was being defended was the right to own black human beings. American students have a right to know that.
Granted, a curriculum that only included the information that is currently not being taught would be as one-sided and inaccurate as the curriculum that is still predominantly in use. What is needed is a syllabus balanced between the good and bad, the beautiful and ugly– lesson plans that accurately show students where we have been, and how far we have come–lessons that would provide them with a context for deciding how far we still have to go.
Most of the people in my age cohort didn’t learn actual history–we were spoon-fed an inaccurate, Whitewashed mythology that didn’t prepare us for the shock most of us felt when we learned the less admirable elements of our past. Thanks to the work of historians and scholars, however, we now know a great deal about those less admirable elements, and revelations continue to emerge.
All the White Nationlists’ hysteria about Critical Race Theory will not succeed in obscuring the reality of America’s Original Sin. What it doesn’t obscure is the racism that prompts it.
