Thread by @tzimmer_history

Why the Right Has a Problem with Juneteenth
 
Reactionaries who oppose #Juneteenth insist they have a right to define the nation’s story and identity. They are the political, ideological, and spiritual descendants of the Confederacy - and they dominate today’s Republican Party.

Many Republicans who voted for the Juneteenth bill in 2021 are all in on demonizing anything that questions a white nationalist understanding of America’s past or present, and few people who identify as conservative are in favor of teaching Juneteenth in schools. 2/

Rightwingers assume that “the Left” elevated Juneteenth to the status of a national holiday purely to humiliate America, divide the country by race, and as GOP Rep. Matt Rosendale put it, convince people “that our country is evil” in order to destroy America from within. 3/

What is striking about these reactions is that rightwingers, instead of adopting the posture of liberators, are presenting themselves as if they were suffering under the yoke of hostile occupiers – a vanquished people forced to endure the shame of celebrating its own defeat. 4/

In many ways, they sound a lot like West German conservatives who despised the idea of celebrating May 8, 1945 – the day Nazi Germany unconditionally surrendered to the Allies – as a “Day of Liberation” through much of the post-war period. 5/

When chancellor Willy Brandt embraced the idea of May 8 as a day of liberation in 1970, many Germans saw this as an outlandish provocation, as part of what they perceived as a disgraceful, unpatriotic denigration pushed by the “radical” leader of the West-German Left. 6/

Establishing the idea of a “day of liberation” was important as a political project and a catalyst for a shift in Germany’s perspective on its past: It stated that Nazi Germany’s defeat was something to be celebrated, that Germans had gotten liberated from themselves. 7/

More generally, by the 1990s, a mainstream consensus had formed around centering not the defeat of 1945, not the concern for national honor, but the victims of Nazi terror and genocide and the responsibilities that follow from acknowledging Germany’s crimes. 8/

There are a lot of similarities between the way West-German conservatives used to rail against the “ignominy” of declaring May 8 a Day of Liberation while emphasizing the perspective of Nazi victims and the U.S. Right’s furor over “the Left” installing “humiliation rituals.” 9/

The idea of Juneteenth being established as a national holiday to disgrace the nation could have been transported straight from the West German 1970s - same as the pervasive perception among conservatives of being on the defensive against a rapidly advancing leftwing agenda. 10/

There is also the idea that a celebratory national story is an essential part of the nation’s fabric, that once “the Left” is able to inject doubt and self-criticism, that fabric is destined to tear. 11/

Finally, on either side of the Atlantic, these symbolic struggles over the past played out against the background of a general “liberalization” and a widespread fear among conservatives to be losing political and cultural hegemony to “the Left.” 12/

Germany’s conservatives at least had a point, regardless of where one stands on their reactionary political project: Germany *was* defeated in 1945. The Allies didn’t liberate Germany – they liberated Germany’s victims. 13/

Juneteenth, on the other hand, was the result of the United States – the country conservatives claim to love! – *winning* the most destructive war in its history, defeating a traitorous rebellion. Why are conservatives acting like they are told to celebrate their own defeat? 14/

The answer is that, in a very profound way, that is exactly what is happening. Today’s Republicans are not the successors to the Confederacy in any legal sense. But they stand in the tradition of those who took up arms against their country in 1861. 15/

Since the founding, two incompatible ideas of how to define the nation have shaped the American project. From the beginning, some believed that America was to be a place where all people were created equal. 16/

For much of the nation’s history, however, a very different conception of “America” dominated, an ethno-religious nationalism that envisioned a land where property-owning white Christian men had a right to be at the top and shape society and culture in their image. 17/

From these opposing forms of nationalism sprung two very different, fundamentally incompatible ideas of democracy and freedom. The egalitarian vision demanded, at least in theory, a truly democratic order that would balance the needs and demands of all people. 18/

The white nationalist vision, on the other hand, set narrow boundaries to how much democracy, and for whom, was permissible. It revolved around the principle of white male freedom: The freedom to impose a reactionary “natural” order on others. 19/

This idea of “freedom” as the power to curtail the freedom of others has been the ideology invoked by white settlers, apologists of slavery, and opponents of civil rights as justification for their quest to dominate. 20/

On the level of the political project of defending white freedom, there is a direct line from those who fought for the right to enslave others in the name of “freedom” to today’s reactionaries who believe the world works best if it is dominated by wealthy white men. 21/

Symbolic conflicts over the past and how to commemorate it, over the stories we tell and the history we teach are part of a larger struggle over who gets to define national identity in a way that either stabilizes or questions the status quo and the existing order. 22/

Juneteenth stands in stark tension with the kind of purely celebratory reading of America’s past and present the Right prefers and wants to mandate for the country. It doesn’t lend itself easily to a celebration of white heroism in ending slavery. 23/

It centers the celebration of Black freedom and the struggles to establish a Black voice and perspective in the collective imaginary of the nation, elevates the stories of those who have traditionally been marginalized in the dominant white mainstream tale of U.S. history. 24/

Republicans are currently conducting a witch hunt against “unpatriotic” ideas and are using the power of the state to outlaw dissent, restrict critical debate, and punish anyone who dares to question the righteousness of past, present, or future white reactionary rule. 25/

The bipartisan vote in Congress to make Juneteenth a federal holiday notwithstanding, Republicans are currently using the power of the state to punish anyone who dares to question the righteousness of past, present, or future white reactionary rule. 26/

That approach to the nation’s history and identity is closer to what the German Far Right believes than to anything that is considered acceptable from a party that champions democracy as an idea and a political project. 27/

If you demand “patriotism” and define it as the glorification of a mythical past that serves as basis and justification for white nationalist rule in the present, you are not a (small-d) democrat. Not in Germany, not in America, not anywhere.
 
More here: thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/why-the-righ…