^^ add Georgia to Biden and North Carolina and Alaska to Trump = 306 to 232

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Those Confederate flags you have seen at rallies of Trump militia boys ? You have thought them mere performance, a fringe historical fart in the face of us all ? Wrong. They were, in fact, precisely the message being sent by those who brandished them.

We have been living in the afterburn of a Trump Confederacy, nothing less or other.

This is apparent now, as I imagine it wasn’t before. Yes, half of Trump is mere venality — grift and corruption, self-dealing, gangster fraud. But we can’t let the criminality distract us from the politics going on beside. As we watch Trump work to prevent the incoming of our next President, who won a clear and convincing 306 to 232 win last Tuesday, we are seeing what was always there, a rebellion that mirrors the first Confederacy put up 160 years ago.

Yes, the Trump Confederacy speaks different issues than the rebels of 1860. The first Confederacy formed to defend slavery against a nation that wanted it gone and Southern political; power broken. The Trump Confederacy wants much more than that. It wants LGBTQ rights repealed. It rejects the right of women to control their bodies. It wants immigration stopped. It wants the welfare state abolished. It wants fossil fuel sat any cost. It rejects public health. It fears the future the nation augurs. It wants the future to belong entirely to it.

It wants a strong man leader, a caudillo, who tells Congress to go shit in its hat. It wants foreign nations to command its elections if that’s what it takes to rule.

Like the first Confederacy, it views the Constitution as a license to destroy. To prevent which, it will, in the meantime, dishonor the Constitution and violate it at will.

I call it “the Trump Confederacy,” but truth is that he is only its destruction guru. This second Confederacy would be nothing without the millions of adults who shout for it, who demand it, who follow Trump’s rebellious mouth. They are the ones who flesh it out, who make those Confederate battle flags something more dangerous than nostalgia cloth.

These millions of voters concentrate, perhaps not surprisingly, in the States that in 1860 went into rebellion and in the Plains States which, up to 1860, were politically allied with the South. The map I’ve posted shows it. It is, with a couple of exceptions (Virginia and Georgia, now blue) a familiar voting map in American history. It recalls not only that of 1860 but that of 1896 through 1908, when a racist, religiously zealous, rural Democratic party, led often by William Jennings Bryan, challenged the post-Civil War, industrial, immigrant-friendly North and Upper West.

Political and social history does not die in stable America, and universal suffrage guarantees that every family’s history is preserved to vote and vote again. Thus we have to fight a Civil war all over, against a second Confederacy of rebels hell bent on tearing the future of our nation apart. No, it won’t be a killing war — not yet anyway — but a war of powers it will be, and already is. Make no mistake : Trump likely will leave the White House, but he will never admit defeat — because as Confederate leader he isn’t defeated, just lost a battle. He will now beat the drum of rebellion — even sedition — from outside, safe in the angry bosoms of his millions, all the way until 2024, when he, or one of his enablers will seek the Presidency again, this time against a Democratic administration which will have won very few legislative successes, opposed at every turn, fair or foul, by the minions of rebellion. For if you thought that Mitch McConnell’s stonewalling of President Obama was abominable, you ain’t see nothing yet., What is coming will be war — even religious war — by every other means. And let us not overlook the deadly role being played here by right-wing media — rebellion media — which will say anything (has said shit for years, even decades) in order to seduce attention and thus win advertising dollars.

In his First Inaugural address, President Lincoln spoke to the South thus : “we are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies.” Echoing those words, doubtless on purpose, Joe Biden said “our opponents are not our enemies. we are not enemies.” I think he has as much chance of convincing the Trump Confederates of that as Lincoln had of stopping secession and war.

In all this, much of the Republican party bears the chiefest blame. The Trump rebellion would be a cosplay sideshow if not for the mendacity and cynicism of so many Republican electeds, who care nothing for our democracy and, indeed, depend for their votes upon its enemies; upon a grievance constituency of rebels. Many of these Republicans were just re-elected, some by large margins (I’m thinking of you, Lindsay Graham,). They have burned their bridges to the nation and stand now on the opposite shore of sedition and reaction. Disgusting it was to see two Georgia Senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, call for their State’s Republican Secretary to resign, all because he insisted that his oversight of Georgia’s vote was honest and fair. By this depraved act Loeffler and Perdue have rendered themselves unfit ever to hold an office of trust in our nation; but in the Trump Confederacy, where mendacity is truth and sedition is patriotic, they rise to the top of the slag hill.

—- Mike Freedberg / Here and Sphere