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23 Jul, 8 tweets, 3 min read
No better way of telling the world who you really are than to go all “They’re coming for our heroes!!” over the removal of a statue of *Nathan Bedford Forrest*
It can be difficult to assess historical figures who are revered for certain important achievements even though there are also deeply problematic aspects about them.

But that’s absolutely not what we’re looking at here. This guy is famous solely as a symbol of white supremacy.
Nathan Bedford Forrest is famous not in spite, but solely because he was a traitor, war criminal, and the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. He was the embodiment of white supremacist violence when he was alive, and has been a symbol of continued white supremacy ever since.
When a statue of Forrest was erected in the year 2000 (!), in Selma (!), in reaction to the election of a black mayor, no one - not the neo-Confederates behind this nor the people protesting it - was under the illusion that this was anything but a celebration of white supremacy.
More context on the Selma case here, from @SethCotlar
What this prominent Republican elected official is doing here is the equivalent of protesting the removal of a statue of a Wehrmacht general who was infamous for being an anti-Semite, massacring Soviet soldiers, and founding a neo-Nazi terror organization after the war.
That, by the way, is not something that would be considered acceptable by any of Germany’s democratic parties.
Alas, it’s not a position that gets you in trouble in today’s Republican Party. As a matter of fact, it’s fully in line with the GOP’s core mission: To uphold white Christian elite hegemony and prevent America from ever becoming a truly multiracial democracy.

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More from @tzimmer_history

Thomas Zimmer Profile picture
24 Jul
I really appreciate this deeply personal column by @perrybaconjr on life inside a political “bubble.”

I wholeheartedly agree that not all “bubbles” are the same, and not all are bad. Let me add a few thoughts:
I live in much more of a bubble than @perrybaconjr. According to this NYT interactive, 92 percent of the people in my neighborhood are Democrats. I’ll tell you why I’m fine with that. nytimes.com/interactive/20…
I have a personal red line for my private life: If you don’t think this country should be a democracy in which all people are equal and count equally regardless of race, gender, or religion, I’d rather not hang out with you.
Read 13 tweets
Thomas Zimmer Profile picture
21 Jul
Exactly right. These biases hamper the ability of most civic institutions to recognize, acknowledge, and react adequately to the GOP’s anti-democratic radicalization.

These problems are most visible in the mainstream media’s continued failing to handle the rightwing threat.
More and more journalists and analysts - including some who work for mainstream media institutions - see this clearly, of course, and use their platforms to alert the public to the problem, demand change, and suggest a better way forward, as @ThePlumLineGS does here:
But we’re still being fed a steady diet of the “both sides squabbling as always” kind of obscuring nonsense that @EricKleefeld rightfully criticizes here:
Read 10 tweets
Thomas Zimmer Profile picture
20 Jul
I struggle with the “nihilism” framing. It may well capture what’s driving some Republican officials. But it tends to obscure the nature of the reactionary political project that animates most people on the American Right: They aren’t motivated just by the prospect of power.
Here is a long thread on why we should start from the assumption that Republicans are true believers in what they do, convinced to be justified in preventing multiracial pluralism - the downfall of “real” (read: white Christian patriarchal) America - by whatever means necessary:
I also think that focusing on opportunism and lust for power is not only inadequate analytically, it also benefits shameless cynics like Mitch McConnell, at least in terms of media coverage: Better to be seen as a devious, nihilistic genius than a reactionary white nationalist.
Read 5 tweets
Thomas Zimmer Profile picture
16 Jul
I have somewhat ambivalent feelings about the use of the term “fascism” to describe the American Right. It’s complicated.

But this - the racist demagoguery, the idea of the racialized Other as a diseased threat, the desire to keep the nation “pure” - is pretty fascist.
I reflected a little bit on the “Is it fascism?” question here, with links to a great piece by @lionel_trolling and an excellent episode of the @KnowYrEnemyPod podcast, both providing insightful, nuanced explorations of the fascism debate:
I’ll also link to this thread in which I reflected on – and rejected – an argument advanced by some scholars of Nazism that today’s American Far Right can’t be “fascist” because fascism was a phenomenon exclusive to Europe’s interwar period:
Read 14 tweets
Thomas Zimmer Profile picture
15 Jul
Here’s the thing: Many scholars and observers saw this clearly and spent the entire Trump era trying to get America’s civic and political institutions to acknowledge the threat and act accordingly - while constantly being derided by the Very Serious Pundit class as “alarmists.”
When it comes to the authoritarian threat to democracy - and the anti-democratic radicalization amongst conservatives in general - the “alarmists” have been right every step of the way. A lot of self-proclaimed Very Serious People should really grapple with that fact in earnest.
The issue is that those who actively worked to obscure the threat to democracy with their anti-alarmism - whether or not they fully understood that’s what they were doing - are still shaping the political discourse going forward. And few have engaged in sincere introspection.
Read 18 tweets
Thomas Zimmer Profile picture
15 Jul
This really applies to all the rightwing moral panics. Political correctness, cancel culture, wokeness: Much of the anxiety that fuels these reactionary crusades stems from the fact that white people - white men, in particular - face a little more scrutiny today than in the past.
#metoo is another excellent example for this dynamic: As soon as traditionally marginalized groups gain enough power and enough of a platform to make their demands for respect and accountability heard, certain white people / men start bemoaning “persecution.”
Important to note that it’s really just the *threat* of scrutiny, the *potential* of being held to account that is enough to cause the next round of reactionary panic. In practice, the power structures that have traditionally defined American life have unfortunately held up fine.
Read 22 tweets

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