1/x Former confederates not only killed Reconstruction but set about telling a story about how the multi-racial coalitions that governed much of the South between 1866 and 1880 had been a complete disaster and utter failure. It was important to tell that story for two reasons:
2/x First, telling that story helped justify the ruthlessness with which they re-established a Whites-only government. Second, it served as a warning to future generations never to repeat the multi-racial experiment again. And the story worked extraordinarily well.
3/x Like any and every president who preceded him, Obama had his flaws and his failures. However, Trump’s entire narrative has been to tell a modern confederate story of the Obama years, not just in order to erase his legacy but also as a warning never to repeat the same mistake.
4/4 We should be clear that what we saw deployed in 2016 was a neo-confederate retelling of 2008-2016. So it’s more than a little ironic that folks who label themselves free thinkers have internalized and are repeating such a goddamned old and tired story.
5/x one thing more: for anyone who thinks it’s impossible to put a confederate frame around 2008-2016, it may help to bear the following in mind. During Reconstruction we had blacks serving in Congress who had literally been slaves before the war.
6/x Imagine for a moment the intelligence, will power, ambition it must have taken to go from slavery to Congress in a single lifetime. And yet so powerful is the confederate narrative that their accomplishments were wiped away for generations and generations.
7/x So, I, for one, do not take for granted the story we will tell about 2008-16. The confederate story (both the historical and present day version) is one of the most powerful social narrative this country has ever devised - almost as powerful as the narrative of the founding
8/8 Once 08-16 is filtered through the confederate narrative, they’ll be unrecognizable in the same way that post-bellum black legislators who worked to rebuild the south would have been bewildered to see that those years were taught to future generations as an abject failure.
