Red MAGA hats are actually the new Red Shirts, and their defenders the new Confederate revisionists

[niyad]

Red MAGA hats are actually the new Red Shirts, and their defenders the new Confederate revisionists


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Proud Boys wearing MAGA hats in Portland, OR
Proud Boys at a 2017 rally in Portland proudly wore their MAGA hats while provoking brawls on the city's streets.



No, those red “Make America Great Again” ballcaps really aren’t the new white hoods. More precisely: They’re the new red shirts. Americans recall the terror of the Ku Klux Klan’s white hoods far better than they do the terror of the post-Civil War Red Shirts and the various vigilante “rifle clubs” formed by ex-Confederates determined to block black people from political franchise. In large part, that’s because even though the Klan was the first iteration of this phenomena in the immediate postwar years, it had a revival in 1915 whose effects remain with us even today. It’s a more potent symbol of racial bigotry in the popular imagination because it is fresher in our memories. However, as historical antecedents go, the Red Shirts were actually much closer in their essential nature to the out-front hatemongers who happily don their red MAGA ballcaps in the age of Donald Trump.

For starters, it’s important to remember that the Klan’s white hoods were about, among other things, hiding the faces of their members from public view. The whole point of the costumes, in the first place, was to frighten superstitious ex-slaves by pretending to be ghosts, a supernatural threat. They call themselves “the Invisible Empire” because they consider it more ominous and dark, not to mention that it conveniently shields the wearer from public consequences. The Red Shirts, in contrast, were unbothered by such considerations. They boldly wore their eye-catching symbols without any facial coverings, nor any attempt to do so. Their entire modus operandi involved being as public and flagrant as possible, in large part to reinforce the indisputable embrace of their political violence by the larger mainstream body politic of white people in the postwar South.

But today’s MAGA-hatted thugs bear an even more important resemblance to the Red Shirts in the role they play in the cultural currents of American politics. What they are about, even beyond intimidating vulnerable minorities, is inverting reality on its head in the style we’ve all come to expect from modern projection-fueled conservatives: making, as historian Stephen Budiansky puts it, “a victim of the bullies and a bully of the victim.”

The bright blood-red shirts worn by the white Southerners determined to prevent “Negro rule” were, in fact, a specific reference to what is now well-known trope: “Waving the bloody shirt.”
Puck magazine cover ridiculing Rep. John Sherman An 1878 cartoon lampoons a Republican congressman for “waving the bloody shirt” of slavery and postwar violence. It’s a phrase that’s still used today to describe unseemly demagoguery that blames a whole population for the violent acts of a few. Yet, as Budiansky explains in his remarkable history of the failure of Reconstruction, The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War (2008), the phrase indeed was a remarkable inversion of reality, one that opened the doors for a century of white-supremacist rule.

. . . .

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/2/6/1832592/-Red-MAGA-hats-are-actually-the-new-Red-Shirts-and-their-defenders-the-new-Confederate-revisionists?detail=emaildkre

[sagesnow]

1. Interesting Red Shirt history I'd never heard of

Will put it on my book list. Thanks,

[niyad]

2. you are most welcome. I keep thinking about the asshole pukes wearing red shirts that read, "better

red than Dem". (I remember when those same assholes used to say "better dead than red" ohhhh, how times change. sadly, morons continue to be morons.)