The Road To Appomattix

“There is no clear or meaningful difference between insurgency and civil war, or between national terrorism and civil war for that matter. - Anthony H. Cordesman, Center for Strategic and International Studies

From one lens, it looks like we might be on the road to Appomattox. Certainly, Joe Biden’s agenda for America is nothing, if not a tentative smile, a sigh of relief blowing through the democracy that we fought to preserve 160 years ago. It is the same America that used its resources 82 years ago to help save Europe from its own “son of perdition” and the bloody aftermath of his cursed secession from civilization. On November 8th, 2022, we’ll know whether the 118th Congress of America is to be ruled by Republicans, and whether we have lost this most defining war of our country’s history to a mindless Band of Lunatics and to the interests that finance their rebellion.

In August 19, 1862, Horace Greely, founder and editor of the New York Tribune, wrote a famous letter to Abraham Lincoln, entitled: “Prayer of the Twenty Millions” urging Lincoln to commit to making the Civil War entirely devoted to ending slavery. With the Emancipation Proclamation already written and sitting on his desk, Lincoln responded to Greeley three days later with a letter saying:

“I have not meant to leave any one in doubt… I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.”

http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/greeley.htm

Lincoln’s call to Civil War was intended to save the United States from secession and from the end of democratic governance. One wonders if the premise of the recent attempted insurrection and the current civil war being fought in Congress and at the ballot box is not the same as it was 160 years ago during the Civil War. The eleven states that seceded from the Union and formed the main part of the Confederacy were: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina. This Anschluss of confederate states looks remarkably familiar. It is premised upon the same principles as the Republican led states now initiating voter suppression tactics to silence democracy. These are America’s backward states. They were then, and they are now. These states, for the most part, are led by useful idiots who are either unqualified, uneducated, or thoroughly corrupt. These states are managed by the ideological legatees of the Confederacy.

“If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell” - General of the Union Army, Philip Henry Sheridan, 1866

This current threat to American Democracy – to the union – is being conducted by the Republican Party of Mitch McConnell – of Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Mitt Romney, and yes, Liz Cheney. Donald Trump is merely its cartoonish masthead. But what ideas underlie this movement to overthrow Congress and replace American democracy with authoritarian rule?

The current Republican Party is strenuously opposed to raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour and insistent that, requiring monopolistic corporations to pay its employees a livable wage, would impinge upon their ability to maximize corporate shareholder profit. The GOP has established an almost religious zeal to place corporate profits above human capital. As Mitt Romney declared in 2011 after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, “Corporations are people, my friend”. In the richest country in human history, those who labor in factories or service industries at starvation wages in order to produce goods sold throughout the world, work to sustain the wealth of the extravagantly rich. These corporations are the cotton plantations of 19th Century America.

The current Republican Party is also opposed to reasonable corporate taxation, preferring a regressive approach where the poor pay a larger percent to run the country than the wealthy. How is this not the same economic parasitism that Sothern Planters used to justify the preservation of their own profits 160 years ago? This is how slavery worked then, and this is how it works now.

Joe Biden is mounting a “March to the Sea” to save the Union from the depredations of the party of business, the Corporate Republican Party. In this battle, he will: reinstitute the victories of the Civil Rights Era; the reinstatement of judicial independence; the regulation of American’s financial and corporate sectors; and balance the scales of income inequality.

We must bear in mind that this civil war is not about the idiocy of Fox News commentary, the ravings of conspiracy theorists, or the purported “chimes of freedom” rallying cries of the gun lobby. This civil war is being fought for precisely the same reason Lincoln fought his: to save the union – to preserve our unique American democracy that can be a model of civil society for the world to emulate.
"The past is dead; let it bury its dead, its hopes and its aspirations; before you lies the future--a future full of golden promise." - Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America