Dixie

According to Andrew O’Hehir at Salon, we are in “the new civil war” between the “neo-Confederacy” (Dixie and the Interior West) and the “neo-Union” (the Northeast, West Coast, Upper Midwest). “Lincoln” and “Django Unchained” have stimulated some anti-Southern articles on the Far Left:

“So even though it’s a truism of American public discourse that the Civil War never ended, it’s also literally true. We’re still reaping the whirlwind from that long-ago conflict, and now we face a new Civil War, one focused on divisive political issues of the 21st century – most notably the rights and liberties of women and LGBT people – but rooted in toxic rhetoric and ideas inherited from the 19th century. . . If you correlate the states where both same-sex marriage and same-sex civil unions have been banned and the states with the harshest restrictions on abortion, you begin to measure the breadth of the neo-Confederacy: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, the Dakotas, the Carolinas, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah. Most (but not all) are onetime Southern slave states and hotbeds of evangelical Christianity, and most (but not all) coincide with the familiar red-blue split between Republicans and Democrats. The battleground states of the moment, on these issues as on many others, are strikingly familiar: Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. All four are currently in the grip of neo-Confederate forces on a state level, and all four have enacted gay-marriage bans and abortion restrictions, even though Obama won them all in both of his election campaigns. …”

The Confederate position all along was that slavery was merely the occasion of the war, the incident which ignited the clash of civilizations between Dixie and New England over the power of the central government, and that the abolitionists had ulterior motives in agitating the slavery question:

“We warn the North, that every one of the leading Abolitionists is agitating the negro slavery-question merely as a means to attain ulterior ends, and those ends nearer home. They would not spend so much time and money for the mere sake of the negro or his master, about whom they care little. But they know that men once fairly committed to negro slavery agitation — once committed to the sweeping principle, “that man being a moral agent, accountable to God for his actions, should not have those actions controlled and directed by the will of another,” are, in effect, committed to Socialism and Communism, to the most ultra doctrines of Garrison, Goodell, Smith and Andrews — to no private property, no church, no law, no government, — to free love, free lands, free women and free churches. There is no middle ground — not an inch of ground of any sort, between the doctrines which we hold and those which Mr. Garrison holds. If slavery, either white or black, be wrong in principle or practice, then is Mr. Garrison right — then is all human government wrong. Socialism, not Abolition, is the real object of Black Republicanism. The North, not the South, the true battle-ground. … The Abolition school of Socialists like it because it is intolerable — because they consider it a transition state to a form of society without law or government. Miss Wright has the honesty to admit, that a transition has never taken place. No; and never will take place: because the expulsion of human nature is a pre-requisite to its occurrence. But we solemnly warn the North, that what she calls a transition is what every leading Abolitionist is moving heaven and earth to attain. This is their real object — negro emancipation a mere gull-trap. In the attempt to attain “transition” seas of gore may be shed, until military despotism comes in to restore peace and security.”

Yesterday’s Southern reactionaries like George Fitzhugh in the 1850s or Sen. Theodore Bilbo in the 1940s were later vindicated by history. The “transition” to socialism and communism gained steam after the war: negro equality, women’s suffrage, globalism, feminism, the War on Christmas, “LGBT rights,” etc.

In the movie “Lincoln,” the House erupts at the insane argument made by Fernando Wood that abolition would lead to negro equality. The gathering menace in the Northeast always turns out to be worse than the most dire reactionary predictions.

That’s something to consider in light of Joe Biden’s recent announcement that Obama is considering issuing an executive order relating to gun control. Yes, Obama wanted to take away your guns all along, just like he believed in gay marriage and amnesty for illegal aliens all along, and who knows what other wonders his Democratic successors have in store for us so long as this Union is preserved.

Note: SNN notices that the Tea Party is flirting with secession.