The other day I responded to a friend's Facebook post about the election with a comment using the term "neo-Confederate." One of his friends, a stranger to me, objected to the tone. Not knowing him at all I could only guess why he would find this characterization of today's Republican Party objectionable: Not "nice"? Calculated to shut down discussion? I chose not to engage with a stranger on a friend's page. But I do think it is worth my time to explain why I think it is an accurate characterization.
1) Since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder 570 US 2 (2013) Republican leadership has instituted voter suppression rules of various types in many states. Georgia, for example, insists that the voter's name on the rolls be consistent with every other place it is listed. This rule is designed to exclude people with names the average Anglo Saxon finds "unusual. My stepchildren, for example, have a Portuguese surname. It is two words and doesn't begin with a capital letter. I can't tell you how many incorrect variations I have seen on official forms because the computer (or the clerk) insists on inserting a capital letter or deleting a space, or even deleting the second part of their name! By far the silliest of these misunderstandings transforms the surname to Da.
North Dakota now insists on street addresses, which excludes rural residents who use PO boxes, the majority of whom are Native. Alabama first introduced an ID requirement for voting, then closed DMV offices in majority-Black counties in order to increase the difficulty of obtaining that ID. All these subterfuges to reduce the presence of people of color on Election Day mirror the 8-box laws, and spurious "literacy" tests, and poll taxes that the original Confederates used to retake political power after the Civil War and the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution. Should their advocates be insulted to be called neo-Confederate? They want to disfranchise African Americans, just like the ex-Confederates of the late 19th century.
2) Apropos those Reconstruction Amendments, the President has now announced a campaign against the 14th Amendment's explicit statement that people born here are citizens. That Amendment was originally put in place to nullify a Supreme Court decision almost universally regarded as its worst: Dred Scott v. Sandford 60 US 393 (1857). In Dred Scott the Court specified a class of people -- those of African descent -- with "no rights that a white man was bound to respect." That is exactly how immigrants and their children would be treated if we were to abolish birthright citizenship. CBP and ICE are already acting as if due process doesn't apply to non-citizens who live in this country, arresting them and holding them without court orders or indictments. Now the Republican Party wants to treat people who are born here the same way. South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham described the Constitutional right to citizenship as a "policy." Actually, he called it an "absurd policy." The 14th Amendment is a Constitutional protection that the original Confederates tried to prevent when it was first introduced. What better description of its current opponents could there be than neo-Confederate? They, too, believe in a group -- immigrants from countries outside Europe -- with no rights that a white man is bound to respect.
3) And then there is their worship of the regalia and "heritage" of the Confederacy. Why would people who fly the white supremacist banner of the Confederacy object to being called neo-Confederate? Why would people who insist on public monuments to Confederate leaders (originally erected not to commemorate that past, but to emblematize disfranchisement and Jim Crow) be uncomfortable with that characterization.
I chose not to have this argument on Facebook. But I definitely wanted to articulate and clarify my thinking on this. I don't like to throw around inflammatory phrases in lieu of making a case. I also like to be clear and accurate. "Neo-Confederate" is both when it comes to describing the Republican Party of 2018.
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