Scrapping the Confederate Flag Is a Threat to a Huge Swath of the Right-Wing Movement
Ed Sebesta discusses his life's work, researching and challenging the neo-Confederates.
By Max Blumenthal / AlterNet
One essential element of America's hard-right coalition that is consistently underacknowledged by media outsiders and downplayed by movement insiders is the neo-Confederate faction of Stars-and-Bars enthusiasts who revere Jefferson Davis, revile Abraham Lincoln and believe they are still battling Reconstruction in the form of liberal federal government policies. Leading neo-Confederate organizations like the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) insist their activities are merely historical in nature, and reject any implication that they are engaged in a long-term political campaign. But as the white supremacist terrorist Dylann Roof recently demonstrated, neo-Confederacy often uses heritage as a mask for racial hate ...
They’re in the system. They’re not loners out in pickup trucks. The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History is written by a leading neo-Confederate and it’s been a New York Times bestseller. I was looking at the “Politically Incorrect” titles and about half or more are written by neo-Confederates. So they’re about shaping mainstream consciousness in the conservative movement.
They’re also able to shape a reactionary fortress within the country. I did some mathematics and found that if you have 25% of the country in this reactionary fortress, what that means is to get any issue to pass in Congress, you have to get two-thirds support in the rest of the country. To get a judge confirmed in the Senate, you need about eight-ninths of the rest of the country. To get a constitutional amendment passed, you need 100 percent support in the rest of the country or you have to hope to pick up a couple votes in former Confederate states. That was how the 19th amendment was ratified — they did manage to pick up a few former Confederate states. The Equal Rights Amendment was not so lucky. After her celebration in defeating the ERA, Phyllis Schlafly was interviewed by the Southern Partisan. She bragged that 10 of the 15 states against it were from the South ...
The main group behind this movement is the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV). Their journal is promoting issues and ideas you wouldn’t believe. One of the books they’re promoting in the latest issue of their newsletter is a book by a writer named Frank Conner who argues that Jewish northern intellectuals are the South’s deadliest enemy — that civil rights is really a Jewish conspiracy and that blacks have lower IQs ...
http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/why-scrapping-confederate-flag-existential-threat-huge-swathe-right-wing
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