On the surface, it's just another Twitter trend/kerfuffle that I tire of: Trump is signing another culture war executive order to promote "patriotic education" and the Leftist backlash is a comparison to Hitler youth, yet another tiresome explicit reference to Trump's purported fascism.
Now I should note that I have a definite perspective; in my daily blog, I frequently embed videos Southern historian Brion McClanahan and his affiliation with the Abbeville Institute. I don't want to reduce McClanahan to a stereotype, but he's definitely a promoter of decentralized government and an opponent of cancel culture with its presentist assault on symbols of Southern tradition, including memorials, statues and the like. No, there is no attempt to justify the institution of slavery or discriminatory state or local policies after the Civil War. The issue has more to do with the tradition of independence, the disingenuous hypocritical rationale for invading the Confederacy, and the consent of the governed. Other critics of Lincolnian nationalism includes free market economist Tom DiLorenzo. It puts those of us on the liberty side in a difficult position,
We realize that slaveholding households in the South had a vested interest in an evil institution, but we knew the institution was dying, with many Northern states having dropped support for slavery in the decades since independence. Many Southern historians will point out the antislave movement had its own Southern roots, including a failed manumission attempt by the 1832 Virginia legislature. It's difficult to prove if and when slavery in the South would have collapsed but we know the Confederacy, looking for diplomatic support from anti-slavery European capitals (e.g., Britain and France), put it on the table. Sharing a long border with a slave-free North would have exacerbated the costs of maintaining slaves. Global demand for slave-free commodities would have accelerated the trend. Not to mention internal conflicts of non-slaveholding Southerners having to pay a share of taxes to protect slaveholder interests, plus free labor in the South found themselves competing against cheaper slave labor. Improving productivity in agricultural technology displaced the need for large amounts of commodity labor, and alternative business models to large plantations arose, including tenant farming; in fact, the South regained global market share of cotton within a few years of the Civil War. Is any of this "proof"? No, but slavery in Brazil died without bloodshed a generation later as slavery compliance costs proved unsustainable.
There is an absurd argument that the Civil War was over slavery. Let's be clear: the South had long standing grievances against Northern states. Yes, certainly a marginalized South felt their interests were not being represented in a nationalized union which had elected Lincoln with no Southern support. Certainly slaveholders didn't trust Lincoln, even as Lincoln sought to appease them in his inaugural address, even offering to amend the Constitution to guarantee perpetuity of slavery in the South. But there were other issues as well, e.g., as tariffs which were disproportionately collected in the South and adversely affected their own crop sales abroad were spent on primarily Northern infrastructure projects. There had been ongoing disputes over tariffs, at least since the Jackson Administration. It was clear that Lincoln in his inaugural address had zero tolerance of losing his tax revenue collections in the South. In essence, the South was the North's slave, without consent of the governed.
Where we pro-liberty people come down on the Civil War has to do with the non-aggression principle. The South, with its less diversified economy and smaller population, was in no position to threaten the North, which already had a standing military. It sought secession, not conquest. There was no attempt to conquer the North. Most of the war was based on unprovoked invasions of the South. For many of us pro-liberty types, including contemporary Lysander Spooner, removal of the Southern opposition in Congress provided an opportunity for overdue manumission reform. The South could no longer depend on Fugitive Slave Laws. Most Southerners were not in slaveholding families. They fought against a remote central government, not unlike how their ancestors fought against King George decades earlier.
In the years that followed the Civil War, the victorious Union soldiers saw numbers of monuments and the like paying tribute to their wartime sacrifices while the long-impoverished South in the aftermath faced financial and political obstacles to remembering their own war dead and veterans, and I'm not going to get into the nuances of honoring particular Southerners like Robert E. Lee; most fallible human beings have issues, particularly in the context of presentist bias. I do think the Civil War was an unnecessary tragedy, and I think there's merit in remembering the past so we don't repeat mistakes.
Part of the reason I'm revisiting this issue has to do with the attacks on monuments over this past summer of protests, including statues of Columbus, Washington and others, not to mention attacks by the DC mayor on national monuments and the like. I've particularly been interested in the discussion of military base name kerfuffle because a while back I was considering a contractor position at a facility named after a Confederate general. Personally I see national reconciliation over recognizing the contributions and character of Americans, even in the divisiveness of the Civil War. The Army insists that when it named the said bases last century, it was looking at things like leadership and character, not so much the politics of an American soldier.
Personally, I wouldn't change the names; I think their service spanned beyond the 4 years of the Civil War, and their memory shouldn't be conflated over a political dispute they weren't responsible for. Nobody is seriously arguing against a beneficial consequence of the war being abolition of slavery; the issue has to do with the means to achieve that end.
But where I differ from Trump, who threatened vetoing related defense appropriations, is that I think Congress has the right to make that decision. I did find it odd that a Lincolnian nationalist like Trump would be championing the cause of Confederate generals. The issue I have with the renaming has to do with associated costs to what benefit? Do we really need to remind people who won the Civil War? I reject the unprincipled cancel culture, the presentist distortion of a more nuanced past whose own leadership struggled, along with those of other Western powers, with the contradictions of slavery. After all, the Jefferson Administration had put an end to the international slave trade to the US.
Whether Trump was simply looking to exploit Southern sensibilities in response to politically correct attacks on Southern traditions and culture is speculative, but I think that he was vested in what he saw as the nationalist heritage of Lincolnian nationalism and sees the breakdown of law and order as an existential threat against nationalism.
At least two recent policy directions has focused on public education: his attempts to focus on reopening the economy (in particular, reopening schools in the COVID-19 crisis, which he sees as vested in the goal of economic recovery, crucial to his reelection hopes in November) and in his recent executive order promoting patriotic education.
From a policy perspective I'm opposed to federal intervention, being committed in principle to education market competition and against traditional state/local public education management and administration. I particularly oppose the government's attempt to use the classroom as an attempt to rationalize and promote Statist policies. Propaganda is not education; it serves the vested interests of the political elite. Education should provide open-ended competition for the free market of ideas, including the pluralism of views on our history. Political intervention biases relevant discussion.
