I don't think this is displaced anger

[redbird]

I'm getting more and more annoyed at the people who have, post-election, been saying (on LJ and elsewhere) variations on "We should have let the South go."

Not because there are people in the North who voted for Bush and people in the South who voted for Kerry.

Because what they're saying, in the heat of their anger, is that winning this election would have been worth the continuation of slavery. No.

Yes, the Bush administration scares me. But you don't win human freedom by sacrificing millions of innocent people for the sake of your own liberty. Not by sacrificing blacks. Not by sacrificing women. Not by sacrificing Jews or atheists or pagans. Not by sacrificing queers.

If you think a cause is worth suffering or dying for, feel free to take that risk: with your own life, not someone else's.

Comments

[kightp.livejournal.com]

As someone whose roots are in the south, I agree with you, and not just for the reason stated. The South is no more a monolith than The West or The Northeast, politically or culturally. Those who read too much into all those red and blue maps are making the same kind of mistake GWB makes when he talks about having a mandate ...

I'll be glad when the hyperbole cools down on all fronts and we can get on with the business of working for progressive change.

[screaminghippo.livejournal.com]

Apologies if this is overly pedantic or missing the point, but I feel compelled to point out that GWB is not making a mistake when he talks about having a mandate. He is deliberately distorting the truth and knows exactly what he's doing (or at least Karl Rove knows exactly what he's doing). He hopes that if he says it enough the press and the country will start believing (or at least repeating it). Given the evidence of the last 4 year, there is no reason to think this won't be effective.
We can expect the hyperbole to cool down on the left - and that will be a good thing - the more Liberals start talking about how better to communicate with people that think differently than we do instead of disparaging them the better.
We can't expect the hyperbole to cool down on the right because it is integral to their political strategy.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Apologies if this is overly pedantic or missing the point, but I feel compelled to point out that GWB is not making a mistake when he talks about having a mandate. He is deliberately distorting the truth and knows exactly what he's doing ...

In my opinion, that's precisely the mistake he's making.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

But it seems to me that to get truly angry at such sentiments, you need to assume that we fought the Civil War to end slavery. And we didn't. The issue of slavery is what threatened to tear the Union apart, and its ending a happy side effect, but that's not why we went to war.

To assume (and act) otherwise is to do the same kind of rationalization we're doing now in Iraq (and have done in the past) -- we fought the war for an ideal, for their own good, to liberate those other poor people who needed our help. I hope it's obvious that this kind of thinking is very, very dangerous, though also seductive.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Actually, what I wish is that Lincoln had said to the Confederacy, "Look -- we're really being jerked around by these abolitionists here, so, well, throw us a bone. I mean, c'mon, you know that this whole slavery thing isn't working out so well for you anyway, it's economically marginal, and most of you are really morally uncomfortable with it anyway -- you WANT to end it, so, well, if you make your Confederacy a slave-free zone, we'll just let you go and stop interfering with you."

I don't think it would have worked, but that's the scenario I kind of wish for. . .

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

People are saying some pretty bizarre things out of anger and frustration.

I hadn't heard the comment "We should have let the South go", myself, but saying so I think misses any number of points.

For example, I could quite reasonably claim that if the Confederacy had won its independence there would have been no Holocaust, because without American help Imperial Germany would likely have won the Great War, and Hitler never would have had any chance at power in a Germany whose prewar socio-political order remained intact. (For bonus points we can imagine that a victorious Imperial Germany marches east and intervenes decisively against the Bolsheviks, which takes care of Stalin and the Gulag.)

I can also reasonably claim that a fragmented North America would have emerged from the War of 1861-65, and that whatever role the successor states to the former United States had in world affairs, they might not be particularly more influential than, say, Brazil or Argentina.

(Interestingly, Brazil's present-day race problem is often considered to be much less of a strict black-white issue than that of the US, despite the fact that emancipation didn't happen in Brazil until 1888. But I digress.)

In any case, while these can make fine alternate history stories--though I notice that few if any of the "Southern nationalist" alternate history writers are particularly fond of the idea of North America becoming as much of a global backwater as South America--it's impossible to tell exactly what would have happened.

To apply all this to the outcome of a single election at the beginning of the 21st century seems a bit overblown to me. It seems much more likely that the United States as people know it now wouldn't bear much resemblance to whatever replaced it.

(As another aside, all you really need to do is to postulate that Ann Richards runs a better re-election campaign in '94. Then you probably don't get W. as President in '00. You might get Jeb instead, though.)

Then again, as I said, a lot of people are saying a lot of wacky things.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

If the South had been left to "go" peaceably - or, if it had won the war - it wouldn't have "gone" anywhere. It would still have been right there. Lincoln himself pointed this out: "We cannot physically separate."

This is relevant because of what would have happened next. The North, freed from dependence on Southern political views, would have repealed the Fugitive Slave Laws and become much more anti-slavery than it was already.

And the South would have begun hemorrhaging slaves. It already was, actually: the Dred Scott Decision was a desperate attempt to stem this tide. But it would have gotten much, much stronger. And there's nothing the CSA government could have done to stop it effectively. (Even the Berlin Wall didn't entirely stop the hemorrhaging of East Germans, and the CSA couldn't have built a 2000-mile Berlin Wall.)

[liv]

If you think a cause is worth suffering or dying for, feel free to take that risk: with your own life, not someone else's.
Yes. Absolutely. This principle applies in many situations and it's really good to spell it out clearly.

I am shamefully ignorant of the American Civil War, so I can't contribute usefully to discussion of possible alternate histories. But does it seem likely to you that, left to their own devices, the so-called 'red states' would restore slavery and / or racial segregation today? Cos a lot of people are also talking about, not going back in history to change the outcome of the Civil War, but dividing the country as it now is. Aside from the geographical impracticalities, would this also amount to a total betrayal of all the black people in the other half of the country?

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Methinks you're reacting a bit too literally to the anger and frustration.

B

[klingonlandlady.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about this a bit. One thing that has already been said: We didn't fight the civil war to free the slaves, we fought the war to keep that territory under our control.

The other part about this: Ever since states that wanted to leave were subdued by force, the states rights that were set up in the Constitution (you know, EVERYTHING else that was not specifically named in the constitution as a federal prerogative?) have been being eroded. We've been losing just about all local self-determination, in favor of letting Washington make decisions for everyone.

That amounts to rule by the majority, which is nice when it ends slavery, but what are we going to do if it means the majority (or some republican-ruled congress) gets to decide there will be bibles in all the schools, abortion is illegal, and gays can't marry anywhere? If there were more states rights, we might have to move to a state we liked better- but with everything determined by a strong central government, there is noplace else to go.

I'm not saying restore slavery, but a little more self-determination and everyone might not take the national contests as though they are fighting for their way of life against evil opposition.