Thread by @TheDevilHistory

The Right Wing & #Confederate Monuments: A thread. The fierce public clash over the nature & legacy of these monuments in 2019 underscores why so many right wingers embrace Confederate iconography. 1/
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For many on the Right, the Confederacy embodied conservatism's core tenant that privilege for the ruling minority rests on the subjugation of the powerless majority. In other words: rights for me, but not for thee. 2/

The Confederate experiment was the logical end-point for 19th-century conservatives: an independent nation that unequivocally protected racial slavery, because slavery was
the practical application of the white supremacy on which that nation was founded. 3/

As the Mississippi Secession Ordinance made clear: "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery...a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization." During secession, the reactionaries said the quiet parts out loud. 4/ avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/c…

Contemporary conservatives like the southern journalist J.D.B. DeBow emphasized the Confederacy’s reactionary bona-fides when he wrote that, “we are not revolutionists...We are upholding the true doctrines of the ...Constitution. We are conservative.” 5/
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Because conservatism emphasizes that the rights of a "natural" ruling class must always trump (heh) the rights of the marginalized—because the marginalized aren't "fit" to rule—the Confederacy's legacy appeals to modern right-wingers who feel besieged by the new equality. 6/

Which brings us back to Confederate Monuments. These statues aren't really monuments to the Confederacy, per say. Rather, they're monuments to the Herrenvolk Democracy (a government dominated by a ruling ethnic group) that the Confederacy embodied. 7/

Reactionary whites erected most Confederate Monuments after the Civil War. They erected them as symbols of Jim Crow segregation in the 1900s, & then as icons of "massive resistance" to black Civil Rights in the 1950s & 1960s. 8/
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Confederate monuments act as a collective thread of white supremacy that connects the legacy of the proslavery Confederacy to the segregation & lynching of Jim Crow, the fire hoses of the Civil Rights backlash, & the modern era of white nationalism, 8chan, & the Trump-led GOP. 9/

When today's reactionaries protest the removal of Confederate monuments, what they're really protesting is the rights of marginalized groups to have a voice in the collective story of American history. 10/

The modern Right's targets—people of color, women, the LGBTQ community—are the same groups over whom the ruling white power structure has traditionally lorded. The Right views the expansion of rights for others as an implicit attack on their right to rule OVER those others. 11/

Thus, in the Right's eyes, tearing down Confederate monuments might as well be tearing down the white supremacist, patriarchal, &, above all else, UNEQUAL vision of society for which they stand. 12/

As Frederick Douglass said in 1857, "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." It seems like the reactionaries are gaining ground, but their vitriol speaks to the precarious state of their cultural power. Tear it down. End.
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