Two of Bush's cabinet nominees have supported the Southern Confederacy, despite its associations with slavery, writes Martin Kettle Guardian Friday January 12, 2001 To most outsiders, and of course to many Americans too, it seems barely believable that any modern, serious politician in the United States should express a hankering, however obliquely and conditional, for the ideals of the southern confederacy. Yet incredibly that is the situation which the US senate now faces as it prepares to conduct confirmation hearings for two of George W Bush's cabinet nominees - John Ashcroft of Missouri, the would-be attorney-general, and Gale Norton of Colorado, who has been nominated as interior secretary - both of whom have publicly praised the pro-slavery confederacy. We are not talking youthful indiscretion here. Mr Ashcroft's praise was offered only two years ago in an extensive interview with a magazine called Southern Partisan. In the course of the interview, Ashcroft said it was important to defend "southern patriots" like Jefferson Davis and Robert E Lee. "Traditionalists must do more. I've got to do more. We've all got to speak up in this respect, or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honour to some perverted agenda," Ashcroft said. To many people, the meaning of such words is difficult to misunderstand. Preserving slavery, Ashcroft is implying, is not a perverted agenda. Ashcroft is not a fool. He knew well enough that the Southern Partisan thinks of itself as part of the so-called "neo-confederate moverment". In his interview he praised the magazine for helping "to set the record straight". Yet the magazine's views include a 1996 defence of slave owners for "encouraging strong slave families" and a 1990 claim that the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke was "a populist spokesperson for a recapturing of the American ideal". Gale Norton's public praise for the confederacy came in 1996, when she told a conservative group in a speech in Denver "We lost too much" when the south was defeated in the civil war of 1861-5. In her speech, given when she was Colorado attorney general, Norton did not offer support for slavery. But she did extol the confederacy during her speech supporting states' rights. "We certainly had bad facts in that case where we were defending state sovereignty by defending slavery," Norton told the Independence Institute. "But we lost too much. We lost the idea that the states were to stand against the federal government having too much power over our lives." As Norton's remarks make clear, the issue for many modern conservatives is the issue of states' rights, which was also the issue which drove the confederate states into rebellion in 1861. Ashcroft would probably claim that this was all that he was supporting, too, though the tone of his remarks is more equivocal on slavery than Norton's. Both Ashcroft and Norton live in the modern world. They are perfectly well aware that in the eyes of almost all black Americans - and probably of most white Americans too - to praise the confederacy is at some level to condone the phenomenon most intimately associated with the war between the states: black slavery. The modern world indisputably has an honoured place for what Americans call states' rights. Britain has carried out a series of devolutionary reforms. The European Union embraces the doctrine of "subsidiarity" in which decisions should be made at the closest possible level to the people who are directly affected by them. Transparency, the reinvention of civil society, and the importance of regional and city self-government are all concepts that are close to the hearts of those on the progressive left as well as those on the traditional anti-centralising right. Federalism, in the true meaning of the term, remains in vogue both in the US and outside it, perfectly properly. Yet only the genuinely perverse can seriously believe that to extol the confederacy, even in defence of states' rights today, is not also at some level to give some legitimacy to slavery. Unfair? I don't think so. Maybe some people still cling to the view that it is possible to honour the confederate rebellion in the modern world without also honouring the one thing which truly animated the southern states before 1865. But such a piece of sophistry is not seriously sustainable. The confederacy equals slavery. There's no getting away from it. A lot of white people in the states which once made up the confederacy now understand this equation. Many others, of course, still do not. But history is against these reactionaries. When even the South Carolina legislature can vote to remove the confederate flag from the top of the state capitol building, then the times are a changing. This week in Mississippi, deepest south of the deep south, they voted to hold a referendum on removing the confederate emblem from the state flag, of which it currently occupies about a quarter. Gradually, the south is rising above confederate nostalgia. It is taking time, but it is happening, even if gradually. More and more people recognise that confederacy commemoration is simply not as important for modern America as racial equality. Unfortunately, two of those who don't get it are on the verge of joining the Bush administration. _______________________________________________ Crashlist website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
