Euan Hague is co-editor, with Edward H. Sebesta (who provided additional research for this article) and Heidi Beirich, of Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction (University of Texas, 2008) and is professor of geography at DePaul University.

One hundred fifty years ago, on April 9th, 1865, Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House and the Union triumphed in the Civil War. Yet the passage of a century and a half has not dimmed the passion for the Confederacy among many Americans. Just three weeks ago, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) appeared before the Supreme Court arguing for the right to put a Confederate flag on vanity license plates in Texas. Just why would someone in 2015 want a Confederate flag on their license plate? The answer is likely not a desire to overtly display one’s genealogical research skills; nor can it be simplistically understood solely as an exhibition of racism, although the power of the Confederate flag to convey white supremacist beliefs cannot be discounted.

Rather, displaying the Confederate flag in 2015 is an indicator of a complex and reactionary politics that is very much alive in America today. It is a politics that harks back to the South’s proud stand in the Civil War as a way of rallying opinion against the federal government—and against the country’s changing demographic, economic, and moral character, of which Washington is often seen as the malign author. Today’s understanding of the Confederacy by its supporters is thus neither nostalgia, nor mere heritage; rather Confederate sympathy in 2015 is a well-funded and active political movement (which, in turn, supports a lucrative Confederate memorabilia industry).


For many, the initial attraction to the history of the Confederate States comes from an interest in ancestry and history, yet for others the lure is to a narrative that, replete with recognizable symbols and characters, offers (some) Americans the opportunity to understand themselves as historically distinctive. Add to this the attractive traits of heroism and an underdog struggle against numerical odds, plus a mantra that the Confederacy in the 19th Century fought to preserve all that was good and right about the America of the Founding Fathers, and a potent imaginary political world emerges.

Quantifying the degree of sympathy and support for this neo-Confederate vision is tricky. An SCV article in 2013, for example, stated that the organization had 30,000 active and 65,000 inactive members, the latter being presumed to “share many of our same concerns and opinions.” National surveys, as they aim for a representative sample of U.S. adults, likely under-represent the extent to which the Confederacy still resonates in the South and among whites. A 2011 opinion poll conducted for CNN, for example, found that 23 percent of people were still sympathetic to the Confederacy. Although the poll is unclear on where these people lived, just 54 percent of those surveyed felt that slavery was “the main reason” for secession by the Confederate states.

In the same year, the Pew Research Center found even less support for the understanding that the Civil War was “mainly about slavery” (38 percent, with a similar number of those polled stating that it was “appropriate for public officials today to praise Confederate leaders” (36 percent). The Pew survey further discovered that people who self identify as white and “southerners” were considerably more likely to hold pro-Confederate views: only 13 percent of that demographic saw the Confederate flag as negative, compared with 30 percent having a negative view of the flag in the overall survey. More recently, in 2014, the Biloxi-Gulfport Sun Herald reported a poll that found 29 percent of Mississippians would support a new Confederacy if there was a Civil War today; 50 percent would stay loyal to the United States of America; and, 21 percent were undecided. This support for the Confederacy in Mississippi was primarily from whites, men, and Republicans, and the numbers had the Sun Herald’s political blogger “Crawdaddy,” concerned: “I know there is some anti-federal government sentiment out there, but I was surprised it was this strong. But, even more than that, I was surprised that question even has relevance in this day and age.”

So what makes this Confederate politics so attractive? To adherents, today’s Confederate ideology exposes falsehoods in mainstream accounts of U.S. history and offers to reveal “the truth,” which has supposedly been suppressed by “East Coast elites” and “liberal academics” pandering to ethnic minority pressure. According to this narrative, the Civil War was not fought over slavery but rather because the Union and President Abraham Lincoln acted without regard for the Constitution to accumulate power. Confederate sympathy offers an ideology that explains why life in America is not what one expected it to be, why Spanish is increasingly heard in towns across the country, why despite working hard one never seems to get ahead, why African Americans have recently occupied highly visible leadership positions as attorney general, secretary of state and, of course, president. It is a politics of victimization, a sentiment that political correctness and anti-discrimination laws constrain right-thinking and hard-working people, and that for 150 years America has strayed from its preordained and righteous path.

Beginning in the 1890s, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), the United Confederate Veterans and, since the start of the 20th century, the SCV have sought to keep the Confederate flame burning and flag flying. These organizations and others have promoted pro-Confederate histories, influenced school textbooks, hosted lectures and acted as tour guides, staffed and funded both public and private museums that celebrate the Confederacy, installed statues and Confederate flags along interstates, and overseen numerous other public displays of homage to the slave-holding Confederacy.

Nor is such veneration confined to the former Confederate states.

In April 2008, the SCV opened Jefferson Davis Park in Ridgefield, Washington, between Seattle and Portland, flying Confederate flags within sight of Interstate-5. Central to these efforts is a mission to recast the meaning of the Confederacy as a rebellion to save the United States, not to save slavery. This enables the Confederacy to be characterized as remaining true to America’s origins (unlike the United States since 1865, which has allegedly strayed from its foundational principles) and Confederate supporters, therefore, to be the most authentically American members of the population.

For much of the post-Civil rights era, Confederate perspectives were in retreat, or so it seemed. What happened in the 1980s, however, was the establishment of magazines, such as Southern Partisan, that published reinterpretations. of recent American history through a Confederate lens. By the 1990s, publishers like Pelican Books of Gretna, Louisiana, offered new jeremiads like The South Was Right! (which boasts on its inside cover of 120,000 copies in print) and this small but active cohort began spreading their viewpoints through websites and by hosting conferences on topics such as a state’s legal right to secede. By the 2000s, supporters were able to fund the creation of research venues such as the Abbeville Institute. In these various forums, proponents rearticulated 19th century Confederate beliefs for a post-Civil Rights audience, joining tired but persistent arguments about states’ rights to articulations of laws regarding secession and the right to nullify federal legislation. Historical revisions claimed that the culture of the Confederate states was an Anglo-Celtic one that had stood in opposition to Anglo-Saxon culture for millennia, and that the Confederate States represented “Orthodox Christianity” in opposition to Union heresy.

Central to these positions was an argument that the Confederate states followed the original intent of the Constitution in the face of Lincoln’s tyrannical abuse and expansion of federal power. This last contention justifies the reasoning that the Civil War was an illegal invasion of peaceable Confederate states by a malignant federal government. Within this logic, most, if not all, legislation passed since 1865 is by definition unconstitutional and Constitutional amendments, such as the 14th granting equal protection and citizenship to all born in the United States, were illegally enacted and coercively imposed in the aftermath of the War.

By the late 20th century, undisguised support for white supremacy was no longer politically viable; thus, arguing that your ancestors fought honorably for their homes and families against a dictatorial federal government that usurped the natural, constitutional, God-given order of things was considerably more palatable. Even so, racial differences, although rarely articulated directly, remain central to the task of rallying support for neo-Confederate organizations. Some of the SCV’s most troubling viewpoints are expressed in forums and publications intended for an internal audience, such as Southern Mercury magazine. In these venues, authors such as Frank Conner argue that 19th century African-Americans were a “childlike people” whose inferior IQs were deliberately hidden by liberal academics. In turn, Michael W. Masters, who in the 1990s contributed to the white supremacist American Renaissance and was a member of the Council of Conservative Citizens, found a new audience for his assessments in SCV venues. In one piece from 2006 Masters argues that the very basis of Western civilization is under attack by proponents of “multiculturalism” and the “tolerance of diversity” who work to engineer “envy and hatred of white people, reverse racism through affirmative action and race-based entitlements…, [and] an uncontrolled flood of culturally alien Third World immigrants.”

In more public venues, the SCV’s dog-whistle politics come into play. Casting an eye over recent events in Ferguson and elsewhere, although never explicitly stating this, SCV deputy commander-in-chief Thomas V. Strain Jr. recently decried the “young men with no guidance attacking law-abiding citizens and law enforcement officers,” officers who, when they “remedy the situation and protect the innocent … are called murderers.” The lineage of today’s events, he lamented, goes back to Reconstruction (1865-1877), a period when “our ancestors … were stripped of their arms, their voting rights, their means of supporting themselves—and in many cases their very homes” as the “central government… create[d] a form of dependency–in return for votes.”

At the start of the 21st Century, therefore, through magazines, websites, and social media, in addition to books and radio shows, people can find a political platform and language through which to articulate their pro-Confederate views. It is a language that decries the “activist judges” who imposed affirmative action “quotas,” opposes “federal overreach,” claims that “Third World immigration” is causing “Southern demographic displacement,” and it all came with an effort to reclaim the meaning of the Confederacy’s most potent symbol, the Confederate battle flag, as “a symbol of sacrifice, independence and Southern heritage,” as the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals summarized the SCV’s interpretation of the flag in the Texas license plate case.

In this way, the Confederate “heritage” movement has gone way beyond tending graves and cutting grass at Confederate cemeteries or reenacting battles. Indeed, the idea that groups like the SCV represent Confederate “heritage” is a misnomer: They are political organizations that aggressively promote their versions of the Confederacy behind a veneer of benign ancestral reverence. In 2015, the Confederate flag comes with a reactionary, anti-democratic, anti-federal politics, a politics that reverberates through social media, talk radio, and niche publishers.

Entering the world of today’s Confederate supporters means encountering an alternative history and politics (and agreeing with them; the SCV has expelled some of its more moderate members). At the core of today’s neo-Confederacy is a belief in hierarchy and inequality: Hierarchies of gender, ethnicity, religion, and sexuality, that understand some people are better than others, and therefore more deserving of making the rules of society. That these superior people are not currently in positions of power is supposedly due to nefarious (and unconstitutional) federal government practices, perhaps the most egregious of which is that every individual has one vote and that all votes are equal.

Today’s Confederate texts are replete with arguments for reinstating a poll tax, property ownership, or other restriction on voting, and rage against democracy as a failed political experiment. Other contentions include a belief that multi-ethnic states are fundamentally flawed and the only plausible solutions to their existence are either fragmentation or acceptance of apparently “natural” divisions into superiors and inferiors. Within such logic, policies like affirmative action, social security, welfare, civil rights and anti-discrimination legislation all waste taxpayer money as they fruitlessly try to disrupt society’s “natural hierarchy” of “dominant” cultural groups and individuals.

A critical development of this modern Confederate movement has been to mobilize reactionary political positions as the essence of being Southern. Within this logic, if you are proud to be from the South, you cannot be liberal and are by definition opposed to the federal government, opposed to civil rights legislation, opposed to anti-discrimination policies, opposed to federal welfare and health care policies, and instead support Constitutional originalism (which, of course, counted enslaved African Americans as three-fifths of a person). This ideology is animated through support for different structures of governance, namely a belief in the primacy of the States and localities over federal authority. If you believe that you are no longer represented by your representative government, one route to alternative governance is restructuring the state. In Europe, nationalism is on the upswing: in the United States, the model for nationalism and separatism is the Confederacy, and one way to demonstrate support for such beliefs is to wave the Confederate battle flag (or put it on your license plate).

Yet, bizarrely, as Confederate ideology seeks to undermine government authority, getting an governmental imprimatur for the Confederate flag is important to its supporters, as every success further legitimizes their argument that the Confederacy had nothing to do with white supremacy (after all, why would a USA that purports to support racial equality therefore sanction display of the Confederate flag if the meaning of the flag was racism?) The flag debate therefore cuts both ways–refusal by the state to display it proves once again that those with Confederate ancestors and sympathies are being victimized and discriminated against; yet if a state does display the flag, this demonstrates that the Confederate emblem is not racist and is, instead, indicative of regional and ancestral pride.

We have come a long way from 1865, when the federal government denied permission for Confederate soldiers to be buried in U.S. military cemeteries.

If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the SCV, then Texas would become the tenth state to allow the Confederate flag on its license plates. This will add to the political legitimation of the Confederacy that ranges from the SCV’s involvement with ROTC and the UDC’s eight annual awards given at U.S. service academies, to the U.S. president annually sending a wreath for placement at the Confederate memorial in Arlington. (Imagine the symbolism in 2009 when an African-American repeated this act of presidential veneration for the Confederate dead, the wreath lying beneath a sculpture that had been commissioned by the UDC a century before to include depictions of ‘faithful’ slaves and their masters?)

Next week the nation will mark another 150-year anniversary—the assassination of Abraham Lincoln on April 15, 1865. Yet the persistence of these neo-Confederate views in America is evidence that even this terrible event is not universally condemned. A century and a half after the Civil War ended, the struggle to define America’s past is still going on—and it is also a struggle to shape America’s future.