By Michael P. Riccards

The great historian Roy Franklin Nichols in 1949 won the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Disruption of American Democracy, in which he argued that the American Civil War was a product of underlying social and economic forces manipulated by vote-hungry politicians who accentuated the tensions in the Union that led to the breakdown of the republic.

It is all too obvious that the United States of America has been for several decades a nation in decline, largely due to the breakdown of the two-party system and our over-extended foreign policy ambitions.

Democrats, once the proud working person’s party, have said goodbye to the attitudes of Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal and embraced and manipulated various forms of ethnic and group politics while heavily financed by those groups, Hollywood and dissident segments of Wall Street. FDR would not recognize them, as they docilely insist on renominating a man who is so obviously troubled by mental lapses and a vice president whose only attractive assets are her gender and race.

But the opposite party, the Grand Old Party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, has been taken over by an anti-constitutional coup led by a real estate con man and television barker. His first term was a disaster, and so he denounced his loss in 2020 as a fraud. That expression was not unheard of. Most recently Hillary Clinton used the same pejorative term in 2016. The problem with such loose rhetoric is that it undermines the very essence of democracy.

So Donald Trump, who is as mentally challenged as Joe Biden, is going to run again, and the Republican party will probably re-nominate a man impeached twice and under indictment on 93 counts of legal violations from giving money to a prostitute to tax evasion to using his office to void a free election.  And as those cases multiply, he grows stronger in the Republican pre-convention world of confusion, deceit and totalitarianism. His honesty has promised that his four-year term will bring a reign of terror toward federal agencies, and he has insisted that the Constitution should be laid aside. The ignorant con man from Manhattan has probably not read the revered document. He is exactly what the Founding Fathers feared most—a demagogue with strong popular appeal.

Now to challenge him is a motley assorted collection of Republican politicians and opportunists. The governor of Florida is a sour Trumpite who has attacked everything in sight and remarked that the corrupt former president was not being Trumpite enough. He has insisted on waging war on the freedom to read, on decent and honorable school boards and county prosecutors, and he celebrated a brutal assault on Mickey Mouse since Disneyland is seen as pro-gay.

Another opponent is Chris Christie, a former federal attorney who in his second term as governor of New Jersey went crazy and was allegedly accused of blocking traffic coming into the state to teach the Democratic mayor a lesson by closing the bridge from New York City in order to show he could play hardball politics. The mayor stayed home, and the commuters suffered. In Jersey, you don’t disrupt the traffic flow, and he was investigated and disgraced.  So he ran for president, then coached Trump in his flawless (?) debate performances.  Now he is a beacon of self-righteous calling Trump a “liar.”

Then there is the celebrated, yet strange woman from South Carolina who has conveniently forgotten the American history she seeks to make.  She addressed a public meeting in sturdy New Hampshire and two-thirds into it she suddenly pleaded ignorance about the causes of the brutal Civil War. This is from a politician who wished to embrace the mantle of the Great Emancipator. 

She went into a Daffy Duck routine when asked what caused the Civil War. She ended up talking vaguely about the role of government and individual liberty. She did not mention the liberty of four million Black slaves or the war her own state started at Fort Sumter.  What happened to the sacrifices of the war at Vicksburg, Antietam and Gettysburg? She is not a great leader like Republican General Dwight Eisenhower. She is not even like the worldly Richard Nixon nor the thoughtful Mitt Romney. She is a simple, attractive woman who is too stupid to be president. She is jumping over the low bar that Trump set, while not criticizing Trump except for failing to complete the horrors of his first term agenda.

I do not think intelligence is the issue. Surely, she is no Rhodes scholar like Bill Clinton, but it is not her poor historiography that is apparent; it is plain harsh opportunism. She is trimming her sails, hoping she can scrape the bottom of the barrel to reach into Trump’s pit without alienating him or his followers, just enough for her to be president.

I come from a respectable Republican family, Italian Catholics who voted in 1960 for Nixon over Catholic Kennedy. But this is not pop’s GOP. Mom voted for Nixon because she feared JFK would lead us to war, and she was right. His battle with Khrushchev and Castro almost incinerated the planet.

Ms. Haley, let me give you the sentiments of Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, who candidly admitted and proudly said that slavery was the main cause of the war. Confederate President Jefferson Davis of Mississippi made a career out of racism and Black bondage. Most significantly, Abraham Lincoln, in his magnificent second inaugural address, noted that somehow the blood bath he was presiding over was due to slavery. 

But after the war, after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, after the passage of the 13th,14^th and 15th amendments, the Confederate survivors insisted on beatifying Robert E. Lee, who had taken once an oath as a US cadet to defend the Constitution and became the epitome of what became “The Lost Cause.”

Their ancestors did not want to lose the war, admit how quickly the slaves left their so-called happy homes, and then tell their children that they had really fought to keep slavery as their “peculiar institution.” They now did battle, often heroic, for something called “The Lost Cause” against “The War of Northern Aggression.”  Gone was the honesty of Stephens and Davis. Now the Confederate veterans and the Daughters of the Confederacy turned a war for base slavery into a Sir Walter Scott novel of fine estates, happy slaves and mint juleps. They celebrated their treason, so they could reinstitute Jim Crow statutes, which stayed on the law books until the 1960s and are still embedded in certain segments of the GOP even today.

Now Nikki is no celebrated alternative to Trump. She is an incredibly limited opportunist running against one of the most immoral candidates in American politics. She can parade the “Lost Cause” rhetoric in South Carolina, which started the war, but not in rugged New Hampshire. Their boys died at Gettysburg and Antietam, as their letters home which James McPherson has printed show and they tell us they understood the Civil War during it better than she does a century later.  We cannot stop the GOP from its suicide mission; it is too far along in our decadent republic, but can we please remember the sacrifices of New Hampshire clerks, young male teachers and  farm boys who saved what Lincoln in Trenton, New Jersey, insisted was “an almost chosen people.”

Michael P. Riccards, a former college president, is the author of 30 books, including a two-volume history of the presidency, The Ferocious Engine of Democracy, and a play about Abraham Lincoln.

Categories: Jandoli Institute, Michael Riccards, Politics