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I am consistently flabbergasted by the extent to which modern American conservatives have managed to convince themselves that they have no continuity with the Confederacy.
Conservatives very often (and justifiably) criticize 21st-century progressives for the way in which they deny that they have anything in common with past figures who believed now-unpopular ideas (eugenics being a major one, as well as deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill) based on progressive premises. In fact progressives have done a spectacular job of convincing themselves that it was actually conservatives who primarily championed those policies! Well, American conservatives have done their darndedest to attempt the same sleight of hand with the Civil War. “It was Democrats who supported slavery! John Wilkes Booth was a Democrat, and he assassinated the great Republican Abe Lincoln because, like all Democrats even today, he was racist against black people and hated America.” This is utterly risible.
This is why it’s so clear that “the Red Tribe” was never anything more than a fictional projection of Scott Siskind’s ultra-bubble. Why anyone would take it seriously, let alone self-identify with it and derive personal validation from it is utterly beyond me. Apparently nobody even within this supposed “tribe” has any idea what actually comprises it, nor where it descends from historically and ancestrally!
The Cavaliers were an elite faction in the South, and certainly their political interests drove secession. But who do you think actually fought and died for the South? Do you think the millions of Southern boys who killed and died for the Confederacy were all direct descendants of the small number of pro-monarchy aristocrats who fled Britain during the English Civil War? No! There simply were not enough of those people to make up an army. The bulk of the Southern army was precisely the Scots-Irish poor whites who make up the majority of the Southern and lower-Midwestern population today.
If you believe that these men were duped into fighting for a Cavalier planter class who looked down on them and saw them as disposable, this is a perfectly respectable position, but if a “tribe” means anything, ancestral descent must necessarily have some bearing on it, and the core Republican constituency today is undeniably descended from the men who fought for the Confederacy.
Of course a substantial segment of modern American conservatism is descended in both cultural and ethnic ways from Dixie, but it’s also true that esoteric urban “blue tribe” conservatism such as that largely discussed on this board doesn’t really have all that much to do with it, descending primary from largely unrelated ideological movements. And to some, albeit a lesser, extent, the same is true for Donald Trump’s own worldview.
Oh absolutely, I agree that the ideology of, say, Curtis Yarvin has no genealogical continuity with Dixie. I’ve spent as much time on this site fighting with and distancing myself from heartland Christian conservatives as I have bashing progressivism.
However, I just think it’s simply untrue to posit some schism between Dixie conservatives and Appalachian conservatives, and especially untrue to suggest that the modern “core Red tribe” is in some sense built on a rejection/repudiation of the Confederacy. No, John Wilkes Booth would not be a Kamala Harris voter today. No, “the Democrats” of 2024 are not “the party of slavery”. No, Trump voter in Georgia, you are not the descendant (ancestrally or ideologically) of noble abolitionists who fought against “racism”.
I'm a trump voter. I grew up being taught that the abolitionists were the heroes of that particular story. I grew up cheering for the Union when reading about the history of that conflict, while also granting honor to the defeated southerners. I was born in the north, if that matters. I grew up thinking Lincoln was one of the best presidents the country ever had, a view I still hold even after learning of the greater complexities of his administration. I have a fair degree of borderer ancestry, but the Irish fought in large numbers on both sides.
In what way am I descended, ideologically or genealogically, from the Confederacy?
Where do you believe he would have come down on the subject of eugenics?
So, this is very important. The whole thing I’m drawing attention to is to the extent that “Red Tribe” refers to any actually-existing culture, that culture is very much still centered in the parts of the country whose cultural and ancestral folkways lie in Dixie. For such people, seeing themselves as opponents of the Confederacy and the Southern culture which underpinned it is a rejection of their own ancestors. And that’s fine! I also reject their ancestors, and I believe their ancestors’ culture is worth rejecting. But to actually try and pin that culture on 21st-century Democratic voters is a different story entirely.
Now, I’m also wary of assigning to you views which you yourself personally do not hold. Again, though, if we’re talking about “the Red Tribe” as a real political coalition, surely among its ideological commitments (at least pre-Trump) would be things like a strong suspicion of the federal government, hostility toward Catholicism and non-Anglo-Irish immigration, and a valorization of small-town rural Protestant communities. Whereas the Union, especially the actual membership of the Union army, contained a massive number of Catholic Irish and German immigrants, and was far more urbanized than the South.
While some of these trends are changing - for example, the GOP becoming more comfortable with Catholic Latinos - it’s still an accurate assessment of the core of culturally-conservative Americans in the South and Midwest. Do you disagree with this characterization?
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