The Party of Lincoln has Become the Party of the Confederacy

Hostility to the Common Good

The first sentence of the U.S. Constitution makes it clear that the people’s government is intended to promote the general welfare and common good. That provision is noticeably absent from the Confederate Constitution, and this hostility to promoting the common good has found a home in the modern Republican Party.

The goal of the Confederacy was to destroy a federal government controlled by the people. Similarly, the modern Republican Party has committed itself to the notion that government in itself is an evil that must be contained and destroyed, regardless of whether the government is one controlled by the people. From Republican members of Congress that seek to destroy successful initiatives like Medicare and Social Security to conservative jurists that take a view that the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution does not actually allow the people’s representatives in Congress to regulate interstate commerce, Trump’s Republican Party is hostile to the very notion that we can have a government of, for, and by the people.

Racism and Xenophobia are Core Principles

The Confederacy was intended to be a nation where white supremacy was made the supreme law of the land in a legally unassailable manner (thankfully the Civil War ended before a Confederate Supreme Court was ever seated — who knows what horrendous legal theories such a court would have concocted in defense of systemic racism and slavery). In addition to expressly making race-based slavery the cornerstone of the Confederacy, the country’s founding document also demonstrated an acute hostility to foreign residents. For example, the Confederate Constitution restricted the ability of foreign residents to vote at a time when permanent residents of the United States from Ireland, Germany, Italy, etc., were permitted to vote in many States.

Fast forward 150 years and we have a Republican Party headed by Donald Trump that has made itself a vehicle for channeling the political energy of white anxiety, in the process dispensing with the dog whistles of Nixon and Reagan’s day in favor of the bully pulpit of the presidency. Trump, backed by overwhelming majorities of his own party, openly compares anti-racist activists to neo-Nazi marchers, imposes religious-based travel restrictions, and advocates state-sanctioned child abuse of immigrant children. The modern Republican Party is also explicit in its desire to maintain a demographically white United States, even if this means flying in the face of two centuries of an American tradition,with few exceptions, of being a beacon to decent folks seeking a better life regardless of nationality.

The Republican Party has gone far astray from the time when it championed the first Civil Rights Act back in 1866, waged war on America’s most violent terrorist organization — the Ku Klux Klan — and made fighting Jim Crow a central part of its national platform. The racism and bigotry that once animated the Confederacy now animates the GOP.

Political Power Only for the Few

The Republican Party does not trust the people to govern their own affairs. This is has been evidenced the past few decades as the GOP pushed initiatives, large and small, that make it harder for the people to have their desires channeled into actual policy, whether it be through undemocratic supermajority requirements, the cruder method of attacking voting rights, or the subtle approach of creating a system of legalized bribery and gerrymandered districts. (Click here for a deeper dive into how these policies rob people of their voice in government.)

The Confederacy had a similar distrust in the ability of the people to govern their own affairs. The Confederacy was designed to be a country where power did not belong to the people at large, but rather to wealthy individuals and commercial interests, with power further limited by a de jure racial caste system. This hostility to public involvement in civil life is evident throughout the Confederate founding document. For example, the Confederate Constitution: made it impossible for the people’s Congressional representatives to propose constitutional amendments; implemented roadblocks to spending intended to benefit the public by requiring a 2/3 supermajority to pass spending bills in Congress, and even then appropriations had to be made to the penny; and expressly barred Congress from making investments in areas such as internal State infrastructure, education, or even the post office.

The goal and end result of a government structured to severely limit the people’s ability to determine policy is to promote and preserve concentrations of political and economic power. Wealth inequality in the Confederacy was double compared to the Union, while plantation owners, manufacturing concerns, and wealthy individuals largely determined public affairs. Meanwhile, the policies of the modern Republican Party have resulted in levels of wealthy inequality not seen since just prior to the Great Depression, all while the party works to ensure the wealthiest have the most say over public life. This has culminated in the current Administration having both the richest and most corrupt cabinet in American history.

Elevating Ideology Over Reality

Evidence and facts are meaningless to the modern Republican Party — the only thing that matters is blind devotion to ideology. Part of the GOP’s current lurch toward fighting basic tenets of the Enlightenment is the party’s decades-long attack on science and evidence-based reasoning. The most notable example of this is the GOP’s hostility to insurmountable evidence that climate change is human-caused and according regulatory measures are necessary to curb this damage. But this epidemic among the modern Republican Party also extends to issues ranging from a woman’s right to choose, to offshore oil drilling, all the way to the selection of school textbooks.

This same prioritization of ideology over reality, regardless of the real-world implications, drove the Confederacy. The Confederacy prized its hostility to the notion of government over all else, causing it to champion a rigid yet chaotic governmental structure that could be called “authoritarian anarchy” which emphasized a commitment to a romanticized idea of hyper-local governance over practical concerns like ensuring the protection of people’s rights or facilitating a strong national economy that provides opportunities for upward mobility.