For years, long-time (now ex-) Republican strategist Rick Wilson has decried what he has called “the madness of King Donald.” As if to bear him out, in 2019 then-President Trump claimed power to do “whatever” he might wish, and promptly anointed himself “The Chosen One.”
About 12 years ago (six years before Trump was, under dubious circumstances, elected), I enjoyed the late Tony Horwitz’s 1998 instant classic bestseller Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. The title refers to portraits of rebel troops he drew and displayed in his boyhood bedroom. And to his trove of toy soldiers- likewise all Confederate. As to his all-grey, no-blue array, he claimed he simply tended to favor the underdog; for the nonce, I gave him the benefit of the doubt.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have. He grew up in Washington, DC. After nine years as a foreign correspondent, followed by travels from the South Pacific to the USA’s Deep South to pursue subject matter, he died in the District (from cardiac arrest) roughly 19 months before ‘Unfinished’ fighters hauled Confederate battle flags into our Capitol with the express intent of overthrowing our vote-legitimized governance.
That is, of destroying our nation by warring on those who wish (and believe) the War to be done. In the late professor/author Charles Reagan Wilson’s 1980 masterwork Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (cited in Colin Woodard’s acclaimed 2011 study American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America), a Deep Southern theologian associates the federal government with Revelation’s seven-headed/ten-horned “beast.” Needless to say, he did not divine the word at Appomattox as final- nor do many self-righteous rebels today.
Moving forward, Wilson sees House Republicans are “not going to try to [constructively] govern ...they’re going to set up a big culture war for 2024.” Trouble is, that could bode a shooting one.
Early in Confederates in the Attic, Horwitz visits a massive graveyard for Union prisoners in Salisbury, NC. Its director is a twice-wounded Vietnam vet named Abe Stice. “In school I remember learning that the Civil War ended a long time ago,” Stice recalls- then adds “Folks here don’t always see it that way. They still think it’s half-time.”
Not so long ago, Republicans pegged themselves the party of Abraham “Malice Toward None” Lincoln (also known as, in sharp contrast with Trump, “Honest Abe”). These days, as if to don the mantle of Grumpy Old Party, the GOP spreads ceaseless deceit epitomized by smears of Dems as cannibals who burn fetuses for “clean energy.”
The bottom line: the red side calls 1/6 “legitimate political discourse.” By that standard, Civil War II (or resuming the original) would seem to loom at or near the top of their agenda. Since a house, attic, or Rotunda divided cannot stand, we may do well to expect the worst.