McDonnell should forget "Confederate History Month"
Ed Kilgore of The New Republic doesn't like Virginia Gov. McDonnell's proclamation of "Confederate History Month."
I don't, either. With due respect to Lee and Jackson and all the other honorable men who fought for the Lost Cause despite, rather than because of, its treasonous and racist rationale, Ulysses S. Grant was right when he conceded, in defending such men, that the cause in which they fought was one of the worst in which good men have ever spilled their blood. Despite the desire of the Confederacy's contemporary defenders to suggest otherwise, slavery and the Confederacy are so inextricably intertwined that one simply cannot honestly consider one in isolation from the other.
The cause of Federalism doesn't need the historical albatross of the Confederacy hanging around its neck- especially because, as one historian has pointed out, states' rights was not only the cause which gave the Confederacy birth, but the disease it died from. Any serious study of the political history of the Confederacy quickly reveals what a totally unworkable system of government its version of decentralization yielded- and what a genius Jefferson Davis was to have kept it running long enough to have lost a war its own inefficiency denied it any real chance of ever having won.
HT: Real Clear Politics
I don't, either. With due respect to Lee and Jackson and all the other honorable men who fought for the Lost Cause despite, rather than because of, its treasonous and racist rationale, Ulysses S. Grant was right when he conceded, in defending such men, that the cause in which they fought was one of the worst in which good men have ever spilled their blood. Despite the desire of the Confederacy's contemporary defenders to suggest otherwise, slavery and the Confederacy are so inextricably intertwined that one simply cannot honestly consider one in isolation from the other.
The cause of Federalism doesn't need the historical albatross of the Confederacy hanging around its neck- especially because, as one historian has pointed out, states' rights was not only the cause which gave the Confederacy birth, but the disease it died from. Any serious study of the political history of the Confederacy quickly reveals what a totally unworkable system of government its version of decentralization yielded- and what a genius Jefferson Davis was to have kept it running long enough to have lost a war its own inefficiency denied it any real chance of ever having won.
HT: Real Clear Politics
Comments