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IT WAS NEVER A CIVIL WAR  
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Michael Podhorzer
February 20, 2024
Washington Monthly
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_ The threat posed by Trump and the MAGA movement, like the
Confederate States, is not “conservative” or even “extremist”
but criminally anti-democratic. _

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Many constitutional scholars and historians make strong legal
arguments that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualifies former
President Donald Trump from holding public office again. Others argue
that if the Supreme Court upholds a Colorado high court ruling
removing Trump from the state’s primary ballot, it would compromise
the legitimacy of our democratic process. But the real question before
the Court is about the legitimacy of America itself. 

Since the January 6, 2021, insurrection, there has been speculation
about whether America might break apart as it did in 1861. Some even
fear that removing Trump from the ballot will ignite a new civil war.
But when we describe what happened in the 19th century and what we
fear coming now as a “Civil War,” we undermine the legitimacy of
the American nation. We put the secessionists then_—_and the MAGA
movement now_—_on an equal footing with the legitimate American
government. By doing so, we not only mislabel the threats that Trump
and MAGA represent, but also underestimate their dangers.

The original designation of the military engagement from 1861 through
1865 was the “War of Rebellion
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Union’s perspective; the Confederate States understood themselves to
be _seceding_ to form an independent “slaveholding republic.”
They called themselves “rebels.” It was not a civil war in which
combatants fought to control one nation. 

The leaders of what I call the Red Nation
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has 10 of the 11 Confederate states at its core, consistently reveal
that they do not recognize the legitimacy of the United States. (See
the Appendix
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my post on “The Two Nations of America
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more on how I define Red Nation.) They continue to be in the same
relationship with America today as the Confederate states were before
the War of Rebellion—unwilling to accept the legitimacy of the
federal government, even if, in most periods, they have acquiesced to
its superior force.

When the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, it was obvious why
Section 3 was included. When a nation cannot disqualify from public
office those who have sought to destroy it, it casts doubt on its own
legitimacy. That is especially true of the unrepentant Trump. Even
Confederate generals admitted they lost by swearing allegiance to the
United States. Trump still insists that he didn’t lose. Meanwhile,
most Republicans dodge whether President Joe Biden won the election
legitimately by grudgingly acknowledging that Biden _is _president.
The MAGA faction is not “conservative,” and even calling it
“extremist” misses the point dangerously. Those advocating for
conservative and even extreme policies should be welcome in a
democratic polity. But those acting in ways that reject legitimately
constituted authority are neither conservative nor extreme_. They are
criminal__. _Thus, if we hope to be a single America, then we must
acknowledge that those who claim that the 2020 election was stolen,
decry the prosecution of Trump as a crime, call those convicted for
their January 6 crimes “political hostages,” and claim that the
Rio Grande is Texas’s to defend and not the federal government’s,
do not recognize the legitimacy of the United States. They, like their
Confederate ancestors, are not patriots. 

Are we one nation or two? The answer has never been self-evident. In
“The Words that Remade America
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in _The Atlantic_, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gary Wills observed,
“Up to the Civil War, ‘the United States’ was invariably a
plural noun: ‘The United States are a free government.’ After
Gettysburg, it became a singular: ‘The United States is a free
government.’” Willis argued that this rhetorical shift reflected a
shift in the “lived reality of the American tradition” that “the
nation preceded the states” instead of the other way around. But
this tradition wasn’t universally embraced, then or now. “The
United States” remained
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plural noun in the South for decades. 

When the Constitution was ratified in 1788, the free states saw it as
most of us do today—enshrining a government for a unified nation. To
the enslaving states, however, the Constitution did not create a
single nation. Rather as Texas Governor Gregg Abbott and two dozen
other Red States say, it is merely a “compact” among the states.
Due to the gravity of threats from abroad (Britain, France, Spain) and
at home (Native Americans and enslaved people), the enslaving states
agreed to a mutual defense pact (the Constitution) only insofar as
they were confident that it protected their “peculiar
institution.” 

At Appomattox, Virginia, in 1865, the Confederates did not surrender
so much as acknowledge that their best hope to preserve their “way
of life” was not on the battlefield where they were badly outmatched
but in a campaign of terror against Reconstruction. Once the South had
made Reconstruction too costly to continue, it enacted Jim Crow
Constitutions and updated its forced labor economy. This is a
well-told story, for example, in Heather Cox Richardson’s _How the
South Won the Civil War_. 

Our devotion to an “America” that strives to be a “government of
the people, by the people, for the people” has never been accepted
by the Confederate faction, which has always been (and remains)
committed to theocracy. We believe that the warrant for government is
“the consent of the governed”; they believe its legitimacy is
God-given. 

Consider Germany, which is rightly credited for taking responsibility
for the Holocaust. Last summer, I visited Berlin and saw how robust
these efforts have been. For example, the sidewalks in residential
neighborhoods have been broken up by _Stolpersteine—_stumble
blocks_—_which call attention to the homes the Nazis stole from Jews
and, where known, the fate of those Jews. But it’s not as if there
aren’t similar landmarks commemorating our past, including
the Legacy Museum/Lynching Memorial
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Montgomery, Alabama, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights
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the National Museum of African American History and Culture
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No, the real difference is exactly the difference between
conceptualizing today’s toxic politics as “civil war” or
“polarization” instead of a rebellion. In Germany, the idea that
there would be monuments or streets named after Adolf Hitler or his
generals is unthinkable. No popular culture there valorizes those who
fought for the Führer or waxes nostalgic for a lost way of life.
There’s no bawdy comedy, _The Dukes of Bavaria_.

Contrast that with the rapid incorporation of Lost Cause mythology
into American culture. By 1915, _The Birth of a Nation_
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the White House. _Gone with the Wind_ remains the highest-grossing
film of all time and ranks sixth on the American Film Institute’s
list of the 100 best American movies. Even today, 150 years after
Confederates waged war on the United States to preserve their ability
to buy, sell, rape, and torture human beings, it remains controversial
to remove statues of Confederate generals. We continue to sanitize
America’s enslaved labor camps by calling them “plantations.”
Plenty of people still have weddings there. 

You can think of MAGA as a fascist movement or as the “legitimate”
expression of a theocratic Red Nation that is in a cold war with the
Blue Nation, or both. (In the 21st century, the Red Nation has been
making inroads in the purple states.) Either way, the MAGA movement is
an enemy of liberal democracy and has taken over the Republican Party.
Its and MAGA’s continued success in building its preferred version
of America depends on the political class’s stubborn refusal to call
out the Republican Party for what it has become. 

No matter how many times the Confederate Faction signals that it does
not accept the legitimacy of the American project, we refuse to
believe them. We reflexively reinterpret attacks against America as
mere disagreements or empty rhetoric aimed at their MAGA base, even as
our attackers lack no clarity about their own intentions.

_Michael Podhorzer is the former political director of the AFL-CIO and
founder of the Analyst Institute, the Research Collaborative and the
Defend Democracy Project. Read his Substack
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at @mike_podhorzer [[link removed]]_

_The Washington Monthly [[link removed]] was
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it hasn’t; who’s a fraud and who isn’t; which ideas ought to be
banished from the nation’s capital and which ones deserve to be
championed._

* MAGA
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* Civil War
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* 14th amendment
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* History
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