Making America the Confederacy Again

To understand the new vision for America that Trump and the Republican Party are establishing in 2025, it's important to realize that it's nothing new. It's not groundbreaking, or innovative, or forward-looking. 

It's basically just the Confederacy 2.0. 

Of course Trump isn't trying to preserve a slave empire, but slavery isn't the only thing that the Confederate States of America was about. It was also about states' rights and distrust of centralized authority, and it was deeply committed to fundamentalist Christianity and toxic notions of freedom and individualism.

These ideas have been around a long time, and they represent a deep sickness in this country. This sickness has been passed from generation to generation through pulpit and parents, occasionally clearing up in some lines, but always finding new hosts to prey upon. It's been around since the very beginning, clear back to the colonial days. 

It reared its head during the 1780s when this country's first government was weakly organized under the Articles of Confederation. It was the central issue that caused the long struggle of the constitutional convention in 1787. The calling card was "states' rights." Of course, states' rights has always meant the right to discriminate indiscriminately. It meant that in 1787 and it means that today. 

This American sickness was at the forefront of countless political fights and struggles throughout the 1790s. Even when those fights began to fade and the country entered the period of history known as the Era of Good Feelings, the sickness was still there incubating, particularly in the South. 

The secession of the South and its formation of the Confederacy was nothing more than an attempt to revert back to the 1780s and the Articles of Confederation - a collection of mostly autonomous states with a weak central government and endless protections for the wealthy and powerful.  

And that's what the South of the Civil War era was. It was a land where the majority lived at subsistence, and a select few, with money and land, had all the advantages. They didn't even have to go fight in the war - for every 20 slaves on a farm, one man was exempt from the draft. A large plantation with dozens of slaves could earn exemptions for every son and foreman.

This is the America that Trump is taking us back to. This is what your friends and family and neighbors voted for. They voted to make America the Confederacy again. Plantation owners have been replaced with billionaires, and dirt farmers have been replaced by a coalition of blue collar workers and their upper middle class bosses. But the growing gap between the haves and the have nots is the same as in the 1860s. The sick fundamentalist Christian beliefs are identical, too, and so is the toxic notion of freedom and individuality - a notion that says my freedoms are more important than your freedoms. In the 1860s, the fear-mongering was about an intrusive federal government that was bound and determined to upend the southern way of life. Today, it's about immigrants and trans people killing your wives and eating your dogs. In the Confederacy, there were even those that wanted to expand across all of central and South America. Today, it's Canada and Greenland. 

The America that is being established is nothing new. In fact, it's as old as America itself. It's a new flare up of an old disease. The question is whether it will finally kill the country for good.