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Notes -
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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