The New Lost Cause

[Celerity]

Republicans are holding up the January 6 insurrection—an effort to overthrow the American government—as the high-water mark of patriotism.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/donald-trumps-new-lost-cause-centers-january-6/620407/



One of my favorite things about covering political rallies is that they typically start with a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. For anyone above school age, occasions to recite the pledge with a large group of people are irregular, and the ritual serves as a good reminder of what politics is about at its best, no matter how divisive what follows might be.

The pledge at a rally for the Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin in Virginia on Wednesday night was different. At the beginning of the event, which Steve Bannon hosted and Donald Trump phoned into, an emcee called an attendee up onstage and announced, “She’s carrying an American flag that was carried at the peaceful rally with Donald J. Trump on January 6.” Attendees then said the pledge while facing the flag. (Youngkin didn’t attend, and later tepidly criticized the moment.)

This is a bizarre subversion. The pledge affirms allegiance to the republic, indivisible and offering justice to all. This flag was carried at a rally that became an attack on the Constitution itself: an attempt to overthrow the government, divide the country, and effect extrajudicial punishment. Elevating this banner to a revered relic captures the troubling transformation of the events of January 6 into a myth—a New Lost Cause. This mythology has many of the trappings of its neo-Confederate predecessor, which Trump also employed for political gain: a martyr cult, claims of anti-liberty political persecution, and veneration of artifacts.

Most of all, the New Lost Cause, like the old one, seeks to convert a shameful catastrophe into a celebration of the valor and honor of the culprits and portray those who attacked the country as the true patriots. But lost causes have a pernicious tendency to be less lost than we might hope. Just as neo-Confederate revisionism shaped racial violence and oppression after the war, Trump’s New Lost Cause poses a continuing peril to the hope of “one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

snip

[Silent3]

1. Personally, I find the pledge creepy

Especially since it's expressly to the flag first, and "to the Republic, for which it stands" secondarily.

And I definitely do not care for the "under God" version.

[Solly Mack]

2. K&R

[Kid Berwyn]

3. Why do they hate America?

They should leave.

[Hortensis]

4. If it did signal a shift to a now-sacred "lost cause" that'd be good,

not wonderful as the author points out, but we can't expect 40 million patriotic victims of Democratic election theft to just stop caring about their democracy.

Maddow's show last night pointed out a few indicators that some insurrectionists may be feeling at least a bit on the ropes. John Eastman is now claiming his memo didn't advocate subverting the election at all, "that'd be crazy." Of course all legal problems will go away once they take over, but until then...