Denise Oliver-Velez asked me to put this long comment in a diary. Here it is with just a tiny bit of expansion.
Let's start with this accurate perception:
An interdisciplinary team examines the mainstreaming of the New Dixie movement, whose calls range from full secession to the racist exaltation of “Celtic” Americans and whose advocates can be found far north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
A National Movement Cloaked in Pseudo-Traditional Symbols
Contrary to most analysis, what I see is a new reactionary movement drawing members from earlier movements and cloaking itself in yet another pseudo-historical narrative and in this case a pseudo-geographical reference.
Instead of being more popular in the South, it seems to be popular across the nation with a certain socio-economic and cultural group that might be more heavily Scotch-Irish in identity but certainly include as lot of mutts of the English, German, and even French Cajun and French Huguenot identities. I say "mutts" because few ancestries in the previously multicultural US of the 1950s through 1990s have escaped the melting pot.
Far north of the Mason-Dixon line, far west of the Mississippi River, and far northwest of the junction of the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri. And not necessarily identified directly with SPLC "neo-Confederate" groups like the League of the South. It is, in fact, an echoing theme within the establishment of the Republican Party. Rick Perry is just the spokesperson.
Half-truthing History
The little dodge in the "Civil War was not about slavery" is the fact that until the Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln never sought an immediate end to slavery thinkng that a political settlement negotiated with the Confederacy was still possible. Lincoln did not go to war over slavery.
But the states that wrote the Secession Ordinances and created the Confederate States of America sure the hell did. But it was not the preservation of the slavery within their own states that sent them to war. It was the prospect that some time in the future there would be more free states than slave states and the free states would have the political power to end slavery over the South's objections. The Civil War was in fact a pre-emptive war by Southern states aimed at preserving and through conquest of other territory if successful extending slavery. The only settlement that would have kept them in the Union in 1861 was the guarantee of a majority of slave states in the the US no matter how far the frontier expanded.
The Eternal Frontier As a Source of Social Control by Elites
Which gets to the second point. The mechanism for stealing land from indigenous people and stealing labor from enslaved people, and exploit labor of free people is to construct a frontier war zone. That creates the need for alliances within that war zone. Those alliances for the first part of US history involved exploited white free labor allied with establishment internally in enforcing slavery through militias and varying alliances of indigenous peoples with the white establishment sucessively destroying the power and allowing the seizure of land of other indigenous peoples. (Sider, Gerald M. Living Indian Histories: Lumbee and Tuscarora People in North Carolina, describes how this frontier dynamic was constructed in Virginia and Carolina in the 17th century as part of his context on the fate of Southern piedmont tribes.)
That frontier ended in the Southern slave states by 1860. That frontier ended altogether symbolically with the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. The American Century extension of that frontier dynamic ended yet again with the collapse of the Soviet Union. And the efforts to revitalize that frontier after 9/11 threatens to end with US witdrawal from Afghanistan.
When that frontier disappears, so does the excuse for establishment social control during wartime. The competition for scarce jobs will intensify (without government spending) if the US ceases being the most expensive military in the world.
Notice who is in the military outside the officer corps. Minorities and potential neo-Confederate recruits.
Schismatic Conservatism and the Emergence of New Recombinations
Next point. While this is a movement that it a rearrangement of members from pre-existing movements (inluding the Tea Party, John Birch Society, and KKK, to put some ideological ancestry into it), these folks are of the opinion that those former movement (and their symbols) are spent and that the Confederate battle flag and attacks on "multiculturalism" are their new successful rallying points. But the prominence they are getting shows that some well-to-do backers are trying to create the illusion of numbers by hiring a bunch of promotional grifters. There is the hand of some part of the establishment, even the Southern good-ole-boy establishment, up the skirt of some of these sockpuppets. And they have the alliance with the more polite guardians of Southern history and the Confederate flag, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, some local groups of re-enactors, possibly even the dear ladies of the UDC. But those Southern legitimizers are now just window-dressing; it is a national movement, not a Southern regional one. And as best I can tell is a marginal movement even in the South; anti-abortion Pentecostal and Baptist religious right way outnumber them. And even in the South you are more likely to encounter a bumber sticker that says "Yankee by birth; Rebel by the grace of God." among the generic Confederate flags and gun racks than outrigh Neo-Confederate propaganda.
Let me say this clearly again. This is a national group with national aspirations and exists even in the most fortified bastions of progressivism. Look for it and you will see it. Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, definitely LA, Chicago, and even abolitionist Boston. (Would be nice of someone to push Scott Brown on this question. What does he think of Confederate flags on the back of New Hampshire pickup trucks.) When it no longer has traction outside the South, the promoters will drop it and pick some other marketing gimmick.
Hard Times Create New Cottage Industries
Next point. The extended economic recession has put lots of people under financial stress. All sorts of cottage industries have sprung up, all marketing through the internet, seeking what scare funds still remain in the economy. A lot of the neo-Confederate nonsense is cottage industry marketing and trash talk to provoke additional purchases through tavern conversations over beers. "Did you see....." "Did you hear about that..." It seeks to push all sorts of psychological buttons.
Arming for the Race War
Next point. The NRA effing loves these guys. Write your own analysis. It does write itself.
The 150-Year-Old Grieving and Political Manipulation
Next point. There are memorials because the Confederate States of America recruited and then conscripted men to become cannon fodder for the planters' war. The phrase "rich man's war; poor man's fight" originated in the US Civil War and more likely from a Confederate white farm laborer than any one else. Their families remembered them except when it was too painful. In my family there were stories about the Yankee raids at the end of the war in the Carolinas and noting who were veterans of the Civil War. No one mentioned my ancestor who was captured and died in "Hellmira", the Elmira NY prisoner of war camp. A lot of those memorials or gravestones acknowledge service in the CSA Army or CSA Cavalry or CSA Navy. Not a few have been provided by the US Department of War as a courtesy, generally replacement markers from during the 1920s and 1930s.
The rest of the memorials are the work of grandstanding politicians of one ilk or another. The first were the monuments on court house squares ordered from Northern stone works during the "binding up of the wounds" period from the 1876 Compromise to the showing of "A Birth of a Nation". More than one of those Southern court house statues is of a US Army soldier, and I understand there are few Confederates lurking on the greens of rural county court houses in the North.
Desegregation and the Birth of the Populist White People's Confederacy
The Depression and World War II were rough on the Southern establishment. Government started to bring prosperity that started to undo the careful balances of segregationist social control. Then the textile workers started to organize, some even forming desegregated locals. And then the industrial unions won major victories in World War II by extorting them with threats of disruption to war production. The shortages after the war in the sudden return of white soldiers from the War stabilized things. And then came Harry Truman.
The heyday for the rebirth of waving the Confederate flag began the moment after Harry S. Truman desegregaged the US armed forces. The separate but equal forces could no longer act as a check on the power of the other in times of racial conflict. They had to work together. And in working together, at some point they had to trust each other and see each other's competence. And that in itself threatened the entire Southern ideology. That threat spawned the Dixiecrats, Strom Thurmond their figurehead.
In 1954, the Supreme Court ordered desegration of schools. The Congress also added "Under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance. And in South Carolina, James Byrnes embarked on a construction program of new schools, upgrading white schools and turning former (mostly WPA-era) schools as black schools to replace the frame shacks and log schools common in many rural counties. In the process, many of the new white schools were named for Robert E. Lee, Wade Hampton (two of them), even Strom Thurmond. Oh yes, the Confederate flag started flying over all public buildings as a third flag after the state flag. That included schools. What was merely historical became political.
At my Confederate-themed high school built in 1960 and named for Wade Hampton, the terrorist who restored white "home rule", the Confederate flag was a school spirit symbol and the guy in the red cape an gray hat, the mascot general, was no different from the many guys in tiger, bear, wolf, yellow jacket, or badger suits who wander the sidelines on football nights. Jim DeMint, a decade behind me and going to the paradox of a desegregated high school named for a slaveowning white terrorist, seems to had a different and more ideological experience. Despite three years of a growing civil rights movement, in the fall of 1964, graduates of this school were still so clueless of racial politics that our senior prank was to lock the Confederate flag to the flagpole on the eve of the football game with the biggest football rival. Had our nickname been the Vikings, likely we would have locked a flag with a horned helmet on it to the flagpole. (And yes it was high school stupid.)
Southern governors then scrambled to keep separate-but-equal moving slowly toward equal to try to ensure its survival. They advocated diversification of industry, went raiding Northern and Midwestern manufacturers for new plants and relocation of headquarters, and poured money into higher education and technical community colleges in order to attract them. They subsidized arts and other cultural developments so that wives of managers and executives wouldn't think they were trapped in a nest of barbarians, and they developed recreation lakes (through the Corps of Engineers) and encouraged the development of beach, mountain, and golf resorts. And they peddled historical sites, including all those romantic plantation houses that reeked with that Victor Fleming "Gone With the Wind" decadent elegance. The National Park Service developed interpretive exhibits at most of the major Civil War battlefields in preparation for the Centennial of the Civil War. And for a while, the Confederate flag in popular media culture, including Life magazine and National Geographic, was just another tourist souvenir.
In 1964, the Voting Rights Act passed, the White Citizens Councils recruited freshmen at college campuses with a mailing that included a Columbia University psychologist's argument on the genetic inferiority of Negroes. There is one of the antecedents of the this New Dixie movement. In 1965, Strom Thurmond crossed over to the Republican Party and started encouraging segregationist Democrats to follow him. Strangely, few did. The Republcan Party in the South was built through the electoral defeat of segregationist Democrats.
The National Conspiracy to Keep the South a Racist Enclave and the Progressive Southern Protest
In the 1970s, the South was said by the national media to be making progress. Southern governors were hiring young black men and women as aides. I remember when Rep. James Clyburn was Gov. McNair's envoy to local offices of state agencies in the early 1970s. Even Strom Thurmond hired a black staffer. (Smile at the innocence of politics in those days.) The "Welcome to...., home of the Ku Klux Klan" signs began to come down. Lester Maddox, of all people, even shut down the Ludowici speed trap. Court-ordered school desegregation and school busing was continuing apace thanks to the hard work of lots of what at the time were called "people of good will". The race problems were in places like Southie in Boston. Or in the case from St. Louis trying to overturn court-ordered cross-district desegregation. People were for the most part allowing their attitudes of humanity to follow what they were being compelled to do, or so it seemed.
The story of Southern attitudes has been manipulated from the Carter years ownward to build and ensure the power of the people backing these movements and isolating the progressive impulses of Southerners. What never has been adequately explained to non-Southerners is how the political operatives allied with the Reagan campaign and angry over Nixon's forced resignation decided that they were in a political and cultural war and should therefore play to win, not to compromise in the common good. How political operatives within the Republican Party and the Southern Baptist Convention engineered a takeover of that organization to provide religious legitimacy to conservative Republican ideology, take over the communications, PR, and book publishing arms of the denomination, enforce ideological constrants on the denomination's colleges and universities, and use local churches as the basis for political campaigns. Local Baptist congregations severed ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, major Baptist universities became independent private universities, congregations split, and neighbors fell out with each other as a result of this coup in 1978. The religious right always was political right-wingers before it was in any way religious. Heck, billionaire Pat Robertson is the son of a segregationist Democratic Senator from Virginia; Ralph Reed was his go-fer and protege. Jerry Falwell was a political segregationist to stood in alliance with George C. Wallace in the "stand in the schoolhouse door" days. Yet another manipulation of tradition in order to claim legitimacy. Legitimacy for Southern Baptists to shun and excommunicate Jimmy Carter for "liberalism". The same folks who contributed to Carter's victory in 1976 because he was a openly proud Southern Baptist. It took a heavily organized campaign and an internal coup within a religious denomination to have that happen. Because of the resistance of "people of good will".
In the Moral Monday movement in Southern states you are seeing the Southerners (especially native white Southerners like myself) stand up and tell the neo-Confederates that this is not what it means to be from this conflicted region called the South. Call this the resurgence of the "people of good will" if you want. Call it a Kum Bah Yah illusion. But we are still here. And we still vote, even if others are tired and discouraged and swayed by well-funded media campaigns. And we are beginning to be on this.
In North Carolina, we understand how a hardcore segregationist millionaire and broadcast station owner named A. J. Fletcher used his media and his son-in-law Jesse Helms to goose the Republican Party of North Carolina into being the reactionary force against progressive thinking and racial progress in North Carolina. We understand how a younger son of a millionaire named Art Pope worked first to try to establish the Libertarian Party in North Carolina and later to inject libertarian ideas and defenses into a beginning-to-sputter Republican Party. We understand how the Koch brothers partnered with Art Pope in 2010 an 2012 to buy several state governments, the key Southern one being North Carolina and how they targeted the most progressive states they could to take down.
By the way, we also understand how taking a party establishment for granted led to the corruption that was its undoing.
It is the folks outside the South who need to understand who is pushing the neo-Confederate movement in their states and more importantly what economic forces are behind it. And it shows the anxiety that now the Koch's money won't deliver the permanent political control that rich white people seek. Because, we in the South are beginning to dump them.
The Confederate flag-wavers are just the side show, the shock troops, the media bait, and the popular spokepeople (as in "shucks, gee whiz, I'm just a common ordinary guy who doesn't know much but..." and then gets the heads nodding.) You've seen "Joe the Plumber's" shtick and Sarah Palin's; it's much the same audience but likely aimed for a younger demographic.
Not all of the money is coming from those internet-advertised cottage industry enterprises. Not all of those YouTubes are devoid of professional media strategy.
It is not paranoia to find out and expose who very much wants to see these folks dominate news cycles. It is informing a potential gullible public of an ongoing scam.
The Hook
Because the fear of being exploited is this simple old-fashioned political formula: You don't even have your whiteness to protect you anymore in this new normal economy, you powerless fool.
The emotional reaction of anger, resentment, and false envy that this message produces is the sucker punch motivator that drives this macho-driven movement.