Tea at Trianon: Why Does the Left Really Despise the Confederacy?

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Why Does the Left Really Despise the Confederacy?

Because the South was not the only place in America where people were enslaved. The coal miners of Pennsylvania and the factory workers of New York and New England were little better than slaves, well into the twentieth century. And sometimes they were worse off than actual slaves. From the Abbeville Blog:

Farah, like many others, wants to use the latest controversy to smear the current Democratic Party, which is not to say that it doesn’t deserve a good pasting. But many on the Republican side of the spectrum want to show that it was Democrats who seceded (i.e. committed treason), perpetuated slavery, and started the war, then created the KKK to end Reconstitution, so they are responsible, not Republicans. As Farah writes:

You see, Jefferson Davis, the only president of the Confederacy, was a Democrat. In fact, for 50 years after the War Between the States, the white South was dominated almost entirely by the Democratic Party. White Democrats ran the South during the war, through the Jim Crow days of segregation and right up until the early 1960s. Not a single Democrat in that era ever suggested destroying statues of Confederate heroes, taking down Confederate flags or toppling monuments memorializing the Confederacy.
Aside from the fact that the parties were different in those days, it’s not historically accurate to say all supporters of the Confederacy were Democrats. Some were but many high officials had been Whigs, Unionists, and Constitutional Unionists.

Furthermore, within the Confederacy itself there were no political parties, for they sought an end to party factions and political strife. After the war, most white Southerners were most certainly Democrats, as it was the only real political game in town because very few were inclined to join the Party of Lincoln.

But, as Farah admits, his theory does not explain everything. So let me throw in my own two cents: The Left hates the Confederacy, and the South, because of what it represents. No, I’m not talking about slavery, and neither are they, but Southern principles of government – those hated Jeffersonian ideals the Leftists wish would wither on the vine.

The Jeffersonian South represented, and has always represented, decentralization, states’ rights and federalism, and an economic program not centered on favoritism and plunder. From Jefferson’s election in 1800, over the ensuing six decades the nation was governed, for the most part, by Jeffersonian values, seen by most Americans as the ideological carrier of the Revolution.

But by 1860-61, the more Hamiltonian-minded North, with a federal government led by Lincoln, was headed the other way and sought a transformation of the country into a National Union. Lincoln wanted to impose upon the entire country the vision first espoused by Hamilton and later by Clay – a system of high protective tariffs, federal programs for internal improvements, and a national bank, polices that would have plundered and bankrupted the South, along with a government in Washington that had no respect for the rights of the States or the Constitution as originally written. (Read more.)