Confederacy Reborn

Trump is more than a Faustian committed to Making America Great Again. He aims to reconnect the US with its own history.

Contrary to what many seem to believe, it just may be that Donald Trump is not so much the man who personifies what is Faustian, but in the first place the resurgence of the old American South, the Confederacy. Trump’s fight to drain the swamp and Make America Great Again can be interpreted as symbolic for an act of revenge by the Confederacy against the North. A long overdue revenge for the hardship imposed on the South by a victorious North in 1865.

Although Trump is from the North, as are his American-born ancestors, he has a predilection for marriage partners from places with a strong and deeply rooted historical consciousness. This is in itself quite significant since, to say the least, historical consciousness is less pronounced in the North than in the rest of the Americas, Europe and the rest of the world. Moreover, Trump lives in the South, surrounded by people hailing from Latin America. He even appointed one of them to Secretary of State, the first Latino ever in that position.

In other words, there are strong indications that Trump has closer ties—certainly on a cultural and intellectual level—with the South than any president since 1865, with the exception of Jimmy Carter, Yet like most presidents, he surrounded himself with Northerners. Although Bush I and Bush II were seemingly Texans, they were in fact no more than transplanted Northerners.

The South is the only part of the United States with a quintessential European feel. This is because it has lost a war, during which it suffered widespread destruction, followed by a foreign occupation. Indeed, at some point in their history, often still vividly present in collective memory, most European nations have had similar experiences. This shared fundamental historical experience makes that Europeans tend to feel very much at home in what once was the Confederacy.

That part of the modern US has also proven surprisingly impervious to various influences emanating from the Northeast, which has been the cultural center of the US since the second half of the 19^th century. If there was any competition in the cultural field, it tended to come from the West Coast, such as in the case of the movie industry. Additionally, there were also contributions from the Great Lakes (Chicago), but not from the South.

Since essentially, the major American contribution to world culture has been in the field of (popular) music, dwarfing any and all of its contributions in other fields such as literature, fine arts, architecture, cinema and so on.

Few people pause to reflect on the fact that modern music in the US and the US empire such as it took shape from 1898 onward, was essentially Southern, or Confederate, if you will. In the 1910s, Jazz and Dixieland took the world by storm, followed by Swing and since the 1950s by Rock and Roll, while Country and Western and Appalachian music also gained great numbers of enthusiasts worldwide. Thus, for more than a century the world has come to embrace music styles from the Southern US. It is crucial to understand that these various music styles were essentially multi-ethnic, in the sense that they emerged from a musical landscape where whites, blacks, native Americans and all the various race mixtures learned and borrowed from each other. It is not an exaggeration to state that American musical styles have been the mainstay of the US “soft power” for more than a century now.

When the South seceded in 1861 it was, on account of its population of nine million in the top ten of European and European successor states. Russia was number one (75 million), while the remainder of the US shared the fifth position with Italy, since both had about 20 million people. Although some 40% of the Confederate population were slaves, it is undeniable that, like in other typical American slave societies such as Cuba, Brazil, Santo Domingo, Haiti and Venezuela, miscegenation was widespread. Actually, in all of Latin America miscegenation was the norm, to the point that until the 1880s even in Buenos Aires, most elite families racially mixed. Whitening there only began with the advent of millions of white European and Levantine settlers.

Actually, regarding the physical aspect of its people, the Confederacy had more in common with the racially mixed and intricately layered societies (according to racial criteria) in Latin America. Of course, like in Latin America and everywhere else, racism was part of life. Yet it was not of the rigid kind so often found in the 20^th century, or of the kind hiding behind apparent anti-racism. Racism in multi-ethnic societies is more general and less ideologically rigid, for the simple reason that race mixture in multiracial societies tends to be rather common.

Therefore, the War Between the States, commonly known as “Civil War,” was also a cultural war between a multi-ethnic country and a mostly white, extended sort of “New England,” or “New Britain.”

It may also be useful to bear in mind that before 1865 the Southern states boasted a highly sophisticated literary and intellectual culture, which was at least as refined, if not more so, than much that could be found in the North. This is what Vernon L. Parrington demonstrated with his solidly researched and elegantly argued classic Main Currents of American Thought (1927).

This is another important characteristic shared with Latin America where at the same time as in Raleigh, Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans, cultural life in Caracas, Santiago de Chile and Bogota was at least as sophisticated.

Essentially therefore, apart of course from the language, the Confederacy had more in common with what is now known as Latin America (a term invented by a courtier of French Emperor Napoleon III) than with the Northern US.

According to this logic, the subjection and absorption of the Confederacy after its defeat in 1865 was only a first step in a continental expansion of Northern culture and values, which essentially is unmitigated Anglo-Saxon culture with the historical frame of reference left out (because it was to be decidedly not connected with the British Isles, but “American”). The conquest of the South was followed by the Caribbean and Central America, Northern South America, and the rest of the continent till today.

Currently, as evidenced by the electoral success and policies of President Javier Milei, even Argentina now seems to wish to be part of the US empire.

Besides reconnecting with the history and traditions of the old Confederacy, Trump also seems to tie in to a now often forgotten element of the Northern US cultural frame of reference, namely the Frontier. Before the end of the 19^th century, the US, now under Northern cultural dominance, reached a crucial psychological milestone, when the Frontier, regarded as the very essence of American (Northern) culture and Weltanschauung, ceased to exist. It was historian Frederick Jackson Turner who in 1893 pointed this out in a speech to the American Historical Association.

Now that the dividing line between civilization and barbarism had vanished, where was the US to direct its energies? In other words, in accordance with its Faustian spirit, the US needed the Frontier and now had to find something else to replace it. Central America and Cuba (as well as other Spanish colonial possessions such as the Philippines) seemed quite attractive as the new frontier. Without further ado America (actually the North, at least it was the North that dominated the US) gave its traditional frontier a more modern colonial meaning, joining the select group of traditional European colonial powers.

Originally American traditions have since been obscured by a new Northeastern intellectual elite that has come to dominate education, academia, civil service, politics and big business. Its most distinguishable feature is a paternalistic, condescending kind of racism hiding behind a screen of political correctness and human kindness. In other words, ordinary racism dressed in apparently anti-racist terminology and phrases.

The North today is evidently not what it was immediately after the War Between the States. In the course of the 20^th century the North, centered around New York City, has opened its doors to huddled masses that included so many Jewish settlers from Eastern Europe that after three generations their descendants have managed to gain the upper hand in all areas of human endeavor, constituting a new American elite.

As a result of a significant change brought about by mass immigration, the US brand of colonialism soon began to operate under radically different criteria, that were quite unlike those of the traditional European colonial powers.

If anything distinguishes this new American elite and its world view, it is a more pernicious and sinister kind of racism, or rather ethnic exclusivism, hiding behind a smoke screen of allegedly humanist and beneficial values. Actually, it is just misanthropy disguised as philanthropy, finding its supreme expression in outfits such as the ACLU and ADL. The vacuity of its false anti-racist and anti-discrimination discourse and the tenacity of its underlying racism has recently been uncovered by Matt Walsh (Am I a Racist?). To the extent it has become a kind of official, state-sponsored ideology, especially under the Obama and Biden administrations, it is also that of the Deep State. Thus it could become a kind of Holy Trinity of Lunacy, composed of Woke, LGBTQ and the belief in anthropogenic climate change.

Since he returned to power, Trump has been begun carrying out three important actions. In the first place he is bringing the Confederacy, its culture and its values back into the US mainstream. Secondly, he has reinstated the frontier as a fundamental American value, by focusing not so much on consolidating and extending the US empire, as on defining or reinstating the space frontier. Thirdly, and this may be the most important action in the long term, Trump is trying to reconcile the US with its own history and in doing so, making it like all the other nations in the world, where history is an essential element of culture.

If only for this, the US deserves a warm welcome!