I saw this yesterday.
I didn’t feel like responding to it on Independence Day though.
“July 4 offers us a day to reflect on the American Revolution. Because it coincides as well with the conclusion of the battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg in 1863, it is also a time to look back on the American Civil War. The men who led the Confederate States of America fought for a much worse cause than did the Founding Fathers, yet they drew inspiration from the Founders’ battle for independence. Why did they fail?
Certainly, the Confederate leaders believed that it was at least possible to win their fight to leave the Union. Their rhetoric repeatedly invoked that struggle, and sought to claim the legacy of the Founders. …”
Oh really?
What cause was this?
In the American Revolution, it was Britain which fought to preserve the Union and to abolish slavery as a war measure to subdue the rebellion in the colonies. There was an internal divide between Patriots and Tories in the colonies. The Patriots fought for state sovereignty, independence, self government as well as “racism,” “white supremacy” and “slavery.” The Confederacy preserved the U.S. Constitution and only made minor changes and the Confederates basically fought to conserve the status quo.
How is the American Revolution good while the Confederacy is bad? Nothing changed in the transition between the United States and the Confederacy. The flag remained red, white and blue. The same blacks were enslaved on the same plantations. The same people were “racist.” White supremacy was established in the colonial era and existed before, during and after the War Between the States on both sides. The Founding Fathers upheld both slavery and white supremacy in the South. The biggest difference between the Union and the Confederacy was that the East was subtracted from our government.
If Jefferson Davis is evil and immoral for being a racist and a slave owning president, why isn’t the same true of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson? If the Confederate Battle Flag is a symbol of slavery and white supremacy, why isn’t the American flag a symbol of systemic racism? The American flag flew over all the slave ships that traveled to Africa and flew over slavery during the war and for longer than the Confederate Battle Flag ever did. The Confederates fought for the same cause as their ancestors which was the right of free White men in sovereign states to govern themselves.
The Confederate Idea was being free of the misrule of arrogant Eastern elites. It might be worth revisiting in our own times. What do you think? Would we be better off without them?
Cameron Hilditch wrote another garbage article for National Review on July the 4th.
“One of the most regrettable developments of this summer in the United States is the way in which certain commentators have tried to pit the spirit of Juneteenth against the spirit of July 4, as if the two were in tension with one another. …”
Perhaps this explains Douthat’s insight that the Trump base doesn’t have much respect for the conservative intelligentsia and sees them as worthless fops?
“Like many commentators on the far left and far right today, the Confederate secessionists of the 1860s insisted that the United States of America did not come into being as a nation on July 4, 1776. Their preferred date of birth for the Union was June 21, 1788, when the Constitution became the official framework of government for the United States. …”
Yes, that would be because the Articles of Confederation had only created a league of sovereign states which the states themselves withdrew from before each state separately ratified the Constitution. The Constitution went into effect before North Carolina and Rhode Island ratified it.
“Lincoln’s understanding of July 4 as the date of the nation’s Founding provided him with the intellectual and rhetorical springboard to justify the salvation of the Union both to his contemporaries and to posterity. …”
In other words, it allowed him to act like a dictator and conveniently ignore the Constitution and the Supreme Court and the law and use the U.S. military to decapitate elected state governments like in Missouri and place states under military occupation and puppet governments without their consent.
“But it also allowed him to throw down the anchor of July 4 further into the depths of the nation’s strife than had the Founders in 1787 and to pull up with it Americans who had been held in bondage for centuries. It matters that the United States was born of the Fourth of July not only because it really was, but because the conviction that it was cleansed this country of its most grievous sin and still propels it further up and further into an ever more perfect Union characterized by life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. …”
Where is this ever more perfect Union?
This country is now in terminal decline. We have Juneteenth though, right?
Note: Granted, it is true though that Juneteenth is the fulfillment of the legacy of Africanus the I and his plan to Africanize America. In retrospect, we can look back at the course of American history and see that everything the Confederates predicted would happen and then some has come true.
This is one of the funny aspects of the arguments over the last two days. Jefferson or Washington would have been natural confederates. They drew up language in the declaration that vilified Indians and Slaves and linked the threat of an Indian attack or a slave rebellion on a “woke” King George. Sensibly the drafters toned down elaborations on the Red and Black man but the various state level proclamations and speeches by patriots were crudely racist. The Revolution was, in many ways, a white political consciousness stirring up into defining its own boundaries. It’s Racial aspect is why the Royal appointed governors were caught off guard in so many cases.
The Confederacy lost because it had no allies with the albatross of slavery hanging over its head. When the movement for a free and independent White Ethno-State becmoes reality it will have no shoratge of allies because the United States has just about managed to alienate every nation in the world some way or another.
@ the men in blue, have hid their murders, thefts, robberies, rapes and on and on, behind the facade of them being victorious in a just war, a fight is a fight, you win, you win, you lose, so you lose, reconstruction showed what the men of the north were really about. History shows, we never stuck our nose in the business , or affairs of the people in the north, if we had been successful militarily, that wouldn’t have changed, brutality and loutism, go hand in hand with bullyism, the men in blue, have never repented of their sins against us, or expressed sorrow or shame for their evilness. We were right then as we are now.
Ben Franklin the leading publicist of the American cause, wasn’t even sure Germans were White. LOL. Seriously.
When CRT was in the beginning stages, the confederacy was 1st target because of muh slavery, now that it’s in the advanced stage, all Whites are targets. No statue or monument is safe from the cancel culture commies. Yes, the South played a major role in the American revolution. That of course gets overlooked.
Also interesting to note was that the Revolution was started by the North but finished by the South.
The Revolutionary War did last longer in the South because the Loyalist sentiment was stronger in the South. The Highland Scots of Carolinas were overwhelmingly Loyalist, for instance.
@ gideon, good thing we had more “ulster blood”, than full-blooded highlander blood.
The Governor of Virginia that Washington deposed was a highlander chieftain who fought with Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden against the Hanover King.
“started by the North but finished by the South”:
finished by the French Empire and some distractions that caused Britain to let go.
@ terry, not really, Yankees start fights, hillbillies finish them.
I’ve always said this. If the Confederates were wrong, then so were the Colonial separatists..
There is this difference:
At least the Colonial separatists were OPPOSING the great evil of Monarchism – a bourgeois struggle extending the Parliamentarian sttuggle of the English civil war that had weakened but failed to abolish it.
Whereas, in contrast, the Confederates were SUPPORTING the great evil of African slavery.
Yes I know the colonial opposition to monarchy was mostly accidental, led by a few “radicals” like Thomas Paine, while the majority of the rebels would even consider creating their own monarchy, crowning Washington the first king. Yet the colonial rebellion somehow completed what the English civil war failed to achieve. The new country, or confederation of states, was the vanguard of progress that inspired the French who were deliberately anti-monarchial and egalitarian, and the Haitians and others around the world.
Yet it was not REAL revolution, did not really turn the world upside down, but only facilitated more capitalism, and soon, global imperialism.
I’ve reconsidered monarchy and aristocracy concluding the west went wrong when it got rid of them 200 years ago. With them sometimes you get a good one and sometimes you get a bad one, but with so called “democracy” you ALWAYS get bad ones. The rubes are not up to serious thinking about how to rule a civilization and easily fall for who the psychopaths who rise to the top of such a system smooth talk them into. As far as African Slavery goes I think the “great evil” of the thing was the introduction of the invasive species “homo africanus criminalus” to the western hemisphere. Does anyone doubt that if all the blacks in America were transported to China the US would instantly be a much better place and China would be seriously hamstringed.
Unfortunately, the Confederacy did preserve the atheistic Constitution of 1787. That was the problem. I am not sure how they thought God would bless that. We need to do better this time. It must be a Christian settlement. Also, it must be clarified that we are an extension of European civilization, and our nation is for European derived people.
In hindsight, it’s hard to argue with the fact that: The South Was Right. Appeasement is impossible, and they are coming for everything.
@ jo Shelby, good sir, you have the monlker, of a truly fantastic cavalry commander.
I read an article listing the utter dearth of industrial development in the South that marveled they were able to take the war as far as they did considering the utter mismatch. Of course now things are quite reversed with much more vigorous economies in the sunbelt vs. the deindustrialized north with it’s Flint and Danville ghettos of welfare blacks crippling the north with bad voters. Of course the south was probably at it’s peak 15-20 years ago as the post modern rot is now settling in everywhere with opiods, black boyfriends, barrios, and corrupt tax cheat Hindu immigrants selling bongs at the local gas station.