A Library Book to a Knife Fight: On Heather Cox Richardson's "How the South Won the Civil War"

Heather Cox Richardson | How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America | Oxford University Press | 2020 | 272 Pages

Donald Trump leaves office in disgrace after being impeached for inciting a riot in which at least five people died and the Confederate flag was carried into the center of American government for the first time in history. Whatever we do or don’t know about Trump, what of the political party that made him their standard-bearer and enabled and defended him, almost unanimously and until the disastrous end?  After all, quite apart from the impeachment vote, nearly 140 members of that party in the House of Representatives voted against certifying the Electoral College victory of Joe Biden, despite roughly 60 court cases that utterly failed to prove election fraud, not to mention the certification of the results by every state, including states controlled by conservative Republicans.

In other words, a huge phalanx of Republicans perpetrated a Big Lie about an election that was, by all reasonable accounts (including from officials in their own party), free and fair. And, equally troubling, millions of voters have accepted that lie, and some of them acted violently as a result. Egged on by a president who will do anything to retain power, they wanted to “stop the steal.” We all have watched the bloody result. 

A question inevitably presents itself: Is Trump’s assault on truth an innovation?  If not, when did the Republican assault on truth begin? 

Historian Heather Cox Richardson, in How the South Won the Civil War, provides a telling anecdote. Early in the administration of Ronald Reagan in 1981, the new president proposed massive tax cuts that, he said, would increase productivity and investment and thereby pay for themselves—a piece of economic and mathematical idiocy (to which many Republicans still adhere). Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, was told by the staff at the Office of Management and Budget that the agency’s computer simulations conclusively demonstrated that the proposed massive tax cuts would do nothing but balloon the deficit—the exact opposite of what Reagan was saying.

So Stockman simply reprogrammed the agency’s computers to say what the President wanted, and the tax cuts were enacted. The deficit did, in fact, balloon, and the rich got richer.   

That was forty years ago.

But today’s Republicans do more than assault truth and help their constituents gobble up an even larger share of the pie, according to Richardson. There is, she finds, a great deal of eerie continuity between today’s Republican party and pre-Civil War slave holders, who did their best—and succeeded for quite a long time—in imposing minority rule on the nation, until finally stopped, at least temporarily, in America’s bloodiest war, during which more people died as a percentage of the population than in any other conflict. Trumpism is not an aberration, Richardson convincingly demonstrates. It is, rather, a continuation of a never-ending fight against democratic inclusion.

The image of a Trump supporter parading the confederate flag in the halls of Congress signifies far more than support for one lying, losing president. It signifies that Trump supporters were seeking a return of minority rule and were willing to resort to violence to get it, just as antebellum slave-holders were willing to secede from the Union to defend their political and economic system. Minority rule by oligarchs, Richardson convincingly argues, is an American tradition, and its perpetrators have sought and achieved power in America by divorcing image from reality.

Richardson argues that, whether before the Civil War or in the current age, oligarchs believe, above all, in hierarchy and that democratic inclusion is destructive. They obtain and maintain power through imagery—first the image of the independent yeoman farmer, and later, the image of the Western cowboy (think Ronald Reagan on his ranch). Oligarchs believe that educated, wealthy, connected men, and only such men, can create wealth and progress. Democracy, they believe, is a perversion of the American promise of liberty—or at least, the promise of liberty for themselves.

In reality, the wealth and power of the oligarchs depends on, and, in many cases, derives from the backbreaking work of people they regard as inferior as well as government policies and programs (whether the Constitution’s three-fifths clause for slaves, giving the South outsize power in Congress, or gigantic water reclamation projects in the West), yet oligarchs pretend that they want nothing more than for government to leave them alone. It’s a powerful message based on a relatable image—the independent, fearless man: First farmer, then cowboy. One might add “tycoon” to the list (even if in reality that tycoon went repeatedly bankrupt).

Richardson is particularly adept at describing the ways in which both sets of American oligarchs, the nineteenth and twentieth/twenty-first century versions, use narrative, myth, and symbol rather than rational argument to win power. And she pulls no punches in describing the result, from the degradation of slaves, immigrants, and women to the hoodwinking and exploitation of the working and middle classes. Her analysis of twentieth century politics, especially from the 1960s forward, is especially sharp. Goldwater, Nixon, Milton Friedman, and Reagan all fit quite neatly into her analysis. “Movement Conservatives”—initially a fringe group—took over the Republican party and inflamed middle and working class voters by exploiting issues such as law and order and abortion. We are living with the result.   

But it’s the parallels Richardson draws between the modern period and the antebellum period that is especially original and noteworthy. Modern Republicans, it turns out, have been humming an old tune. The rich convince the working class that it’s the federal government and minorities that keep them down. If you hand us the reins of power, they say, we will see that the government gets out of your way and doesn’t give away any of your money or your jobs to those people, and you too can make it in America. Thus it’s no accident, or anything new, that Trump challenged the vote in cities like Detroit and Atlanta, or that the current Republican party was willing to put up with Trump for so long in exchange for more tax cuts and conservative judges, who will, long after Trump is gone, fan the flames of the culture war and—more importantly--be hostile to business or environmental regulations.

Inevitably, a work of such sweep, making broad comparisons between historical eras, will lightly skip over some events and concepts. There is little analysis here of the Populist movement at the end of the nineteenth century, which did, at least initially, offer a powerful rebuke to the oligarchs. And at the end of her analysis, Richardson says that fascism is “the modern form of hierarchy,” but offers little analysis or illustration. But such gaps do not detract from the overall strength of her most important insights. The book is well-written, well-argued, and frighteningly timely as America tries to dig itself out from the abyss of the Trump era. And her work is an implicit warning to modern Democrats, who must learn that politics depends on symbolic narratives as much or more than on rational discourse. Anthony Weiner, the disgraced former Democratic Congressman, once said that the problem with Democrats is that they bring a library book to a knife fight. Richardson has shown us what kind of knife oligarchs have used. They’ve been using it for a long, long time.