Michael Podhorzer is a political analyst who has worked for the AFL-CIO. His is a widely respected voice thanks to the depth of his knowledge and wisdom. He maintains here that the MAGA movement is more aligned with the Confederacy than most people realize. He posted this piece soon after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states could not remove Trump from their ballots even though he participated in an insurrection.

I am posting it in part. Open the link to read it all.

Podhorzer writes:

Note: A version of this piece was published at The Washington Monthly.  

The Supreme Court rejected Colorado’s decision to keep Trump off the ballot. Ahead of the ruling, many constitutional scholars and historians made strong legal arguments that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualifies Trump from holding public office again. Others argued that if the Supreme Court upheld a Colorado high court ruling it would compromise the legitimacy of our democratic process. 

Here, I want to use this episode to show how the debate itself was really about the legitimacy of America itself. 

Since the January 6, 2021, insurrection, there has been speculation about whether America might break apart as it did in 1861. Some even fear that removing Trump from the ballot will ignite a new civil war. But when we describe what happened in the 19th century and what we fear coming now as a “Civil War,” we undermine the legitimacy of the American nation. We put the secessionists then—and the MAGA movement now—on an equal footing with the legitimate American government. By doing so, we not only mislabel the threats that Trump and MAGA represent, but also underestimate their dangers.

The original designation of the military engagement from 1861 through 1865 was the “War of Rebellion.” This wasn’t just the Union’s perspective; the Confederate States understood themselves to be seceding to form an independent “slaveholding republic.” They called themselves “rebels.” It was not a civil war in which combatants fought to control one nation. 

The leaders of what I call the Red Nation, which has 10 of the 11 Confederate states at its core, consistently reveal that they do not recognize the legitimacy of the United States. (See the Appendix of my post on “The Two Nations of America” for more on how I define Red Nation.) They continue to be in the same relationship with America today as the Confederate states were before the War of Rebellion—unwilling to acceptthe legitimacy of the federal government, even if, in most periods, they have acquiesced to its superior force.

When the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, it was obvious why Section 3 was included. When a nation cannot disqualify from public office those who have sought to destroy it, it casts doubt on its own legitimacy. That is especially true of the unrepentant Trump. Even Confederate generals admitted they lost by swearing allegiance to the United States. Trump still insists that he didn’t lose. Meanwhile, most Republicans dodge whether President Joe Biden won the election legitimately by grudgingly acknowledging that Biden is president. 

The MAGA faction is not “conservative,” and even calling it “extremist” misses the point dangerously. Those advocating for conservative and even extreme policies should be welcome in a democratic polity. But those acting in ways that reject legitimately constituted authority are neither conservative nor extreme. They are criminal. Thus, if we hope to be a single America, then we must acknowledge that those who claim that the 2020 election was stolen, decry the prosecution of Trump as a crime, call those convicted for their January 6 crimes “political hostages,” and claim that the Rio Grande is Texas’s to defend and not the federal government’s, do not recognize the legitimacy of the United States. They, like their Confederate ancestors, are not patriots. 

When the Constitution was ratified in 1788, the free states saw it as most of us do today—enshrining a government for a unified nation. To the enslaving states, however, the Constitution did not create a single nation. Rather, as Texas Governor Gregg Abbott and two dozen other Red States say, it is merely a “compact” among the states. Due to the gravity of threats from abroad (Britain, France, Spain) and at home (Native Americans and enslaved people), the enslaving states agreed to a mutual defense pact (the Constitution) only insofar as they were confident that it protected their “peculiar institution.” 

At Appomattox, Virginia, in 1865, the Confederates did not surrender so much as acknowledge that their best hope to preserve their “way of life” was not on the battlefield where they were badly outmatched but in a campaign of terror against Reconstruction. Once the South had made Reconstruction too costly to continue, it enacted Jim Crow Constitutions and updated its forced labor economy. This is a well-told story, for example, in Heather Cox Richardson’s How the South Won the Civil War. 

Our devotion to an “America” that strives to be a “government of the people, by the people, for the people” has never been accepted by the Confederate faction, which has always been (and remains) committed to theocracy. We believe that the warrant for government is “the consent of the governed”; they believe its legitimacy is God-given….

Cutting the Branches, Leaving the Roots

Consider Germany, which is rightly credited for taking responsibility for the Holocaust. Last summer, I visited Berlin and saw how robust these efforts have been. For example, the sidewalks in residential neighborhoods have been broken up by Stolpersteine—stumble blocks—which call attention to the homes the Nazis stole from Jews and, where known, the fate of those Jews. But it’s not as if there aren’t similar landmarks commemorating our past, including the Legacy Museum/Lynching Memorialin Montgomery, Alabama, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. 

No, the real difference is exactly the difference between conceptualizing today’s toxic politics as “civil war” or “polarization” instead of a rebellion. In Germany, the idea that there would be monuments or streets named after Adolf Hitler or his generals is unthinkable. No popular culture there valorizes those who fought for the Führer or waxes nostalgic for a lost way of life. There’s no bawdy comedy, The Dukes of Bavaria…

Please open the link to read this provocative article in full.