Time to A(woke) Up: Part 2 — The Folly of Confederacy Shaming
Maximalist cultural battles don't win hearts. They lose states.
The Larger Arc We Don't Talk About
Before we ever fought the Civil War, before there was a Union or a Confederacy, there was the original American project: arrive on a continent already inhabited, kill or displace most of the people living here, and take their land. That's not hyperbole — it's the historical record. Entire nations were wiped out. Those who survived were driven to remote, barren reservations — a scattering of "nowhere" across a land they once owned.
We live in a country built on genocide and theft. That's not up for debate. And yet, most Americans — even the most self-righteous among us — still feel proud of the country as a whole. We don't walk around thinking our existence is morally illegitimate because of those crimes.
Seen in that light, picking endlessly at the South over the Confederacy — with its history of slavery — looks like a very selective moral campaign. If the nation as a whole can live with its founding atrocities, then the South should not be singled out forever as uniquely unworthy.
The Red Confederacy
Every one of the 11 former Confederate states is Republican red in presidential politics today:
Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.
Not most — all. That's been true for decades, with only brief exceptions like Virginia's Obama-era streak or Georgia's narrow 2020 blip.
Is it a coincidence that the "wall of shame" in our national historical narrative has the Confederacy front and center — and that every one of those states is now red? Or did decades of moral condemnation harden a defensive identity that made these states unwinnable?
Because people don't like being told their state's very existence is forever tainted. They close ranks. They tune out your message on everything else — healthcare, wages, education — because they've decided you think you are morally superior to them.
That's why Confederacy shaming is not just harmless political theater — it's actively counterproductive.
Even the Founding Fathers Were Complicated
The moral complexity around slavery didn't start with the Confederacy — it began with our revered Founders. Of the first twelve U.S. presidents, ten owned slaves. Washington owned 300. Jefferson owned 600+ over his lifetime, even while writing "all men are created equal."
So if we can still revere Washington and Jefferson despite their slaveholding — and we do — then maybe the South deserves the same nuanced view of its complicated past.
Slavery in the Wider World
When the American colonies began to legalize and expand slavery in the 1600s, it wasn't some uniquely American sin. Almost every major European power practiced slavery at the time — in their colonies and sometimes at home.
Britain ran the largest transatlantic slave network, feeding its Caribbean sugar empire.
France enforced slavery in its Caribbean territories under the Code Noir.
Spain and Portugal relied heavily on enslaved African and Indigenous labor throughout the Americas.
The Netherlands, Denmark, and even Sweden ran smaller but still brutal colonial slave systems.
By the time the U.S. abolished slavery in 1865, most of Europe had already ended it — Britain in 1833, France in 1848, Denmark in 1848, the Netherlands in 1863. We were later than some, but not by centuries, and the Civil War brought it to a decisive close.
And here's what's often forgotten: for nearly a century after Appomattox (end of the Civil War), the South wasn't Republican red at all. It was the Solid South — reliably Democratic in presidential elections, with Democrats controlling statehouses and congressional delegations.
Slavery's end didn't create the red wall. A century of political and cultural antagonism did. The Civil War ended slavery. Wokeness helped lock in the modern map.
Identity Is Not Forever Trash
It's not possible for people in the South to feel they "also helped build the country" if they are constantly told their heritage is a moral stain. Statues of local figures — many of them Confederate officers — aren't viewed by most Southerners as monuments to slavery, but as symbols of their community's endurance and sacrifice.
When national elites call those figures "scum," they don't just condemn the long-dead — they insult the living. And once you've branded yourself as hostile to their identity, you've lost your chance to persuade them on anything else.
The Victor's Privilege
History is written by the winners — and the winners choose which sins to spotlight. The Confederacy had real chances to win, especially early in the war. The North didn't win because they were morally right; they won through superior industrial capacity, population, and the military advantage gained by freeing and enlisting enslaved people.
Had the Confederacy somehow won, slavery would almost certainly have ended eventually, as it did in other nations. And if they'd won, they'd be the ones writing history, and the North's own sins would be magnified in the telling.
But because the Union won, it's Southern sins that get the eternal spotlight. That's victor's privilege — and while it's understandable, it's politically toxic when wielded against your own citizens 160 years later. Even all the carpetbagging and military occupation after the war didn't create the political alienation we see today — that took more than 100 years of modern cultural antagonism.
The Russian Difference: Conquest Without Genocide
Russia's history of territorial expansion tells a different story than America's. They absorbed vast territories with dozens of indigenous groups — and yet, unlike the United States, most of those groups still exist in their ancestral lands. They were Russified through language and migration, but they weren't annihilated or driven to remote reservations. Many still speak their original languages in addition to Russian.
That's why, if the Russian state ever collapsed, you could see many new countries appear as they were 1000 or more years ago — hundreds of ethnic groups reasserting themselves in their traditional territories. Here, that can't happen. We eradicated most of our indigenous nations and confined survivors to scattered reservations far from their homelands.
This isn't to glorify Russian imperialism, and this is bit of an oversimplification because they did some of what the US did too — the Tatars of Crimea are one tragic exception — but in general this is what happened. Yet we reserve our harshest historical judgment for the former states of the Confederacy. While slavery among European countries was common during that time, Russia managed to absorb a whole continent much larger than the US without wiping out the indigenous population, and in fact preserved it almost completely. What the US did was the aberration.
Very little acceptance of this past shame exists. In liberal California, they whine about loss of tax revenue from gambling on Indian reservations; not exactly reparations but at least something that was given to the remaining Indian tribes.
Every Statue Removal Creates a Million Enemies
The statue wars perfectly illustrate how moral theater becomes political suicide. When Charlottesville removed its Robert E. Lee statue, when the Army renamed Fort Bragg to Fort Liberty, when schools across the South dropped Confederate names — each action was celebrated as a moral victory by coastal elites who don't live there.
But what actually happened? Millions of Americans who revered Robert E. Lee as a hero suddenly saw their own communities under attack. Every statue removal became a Fox News story. Every building renaming became a fundraising email. Every corporate virtue signal about Confederate symbols became evidence that "they" think they are superior to "us."
The people making these decisions thought they were striking blows against racism. What they actually did was create Republican voters by the millions. They turned abstract historical debates into personal affronts. They took people who might have been persuaded on healthcare or education and told them their heritage was trash.
This is how you lose states. Not through policy debates, but through cultural warfare that forces people to choose sides on identity rather than issues.
Conclusion: If You Want to Win, Stop Picking the Wrong Battles
Confederacy shaming might feel righteous, but in practice it's a losing game. It trades sustainable political power for short-term moral theater.
If the goal is a healthier, more united country, then practical compromises and cultural humility will get you further than maximalist moral crusades. History should inform us, not chain us to permanent division.
You don't have to rewrite the past. But if you want to win the future, stop turning history into a weapon against your own citizens.
The sins of the South were the same sins that every European country committed in those days, while the atrocities against the indigenous people were without parallel anywhere in the world at that time.
Civil rights legislation didn't cause these former Confederate states to turn red — it's this Confederacy shaming that helped create the current political divide.
If you feel the need to shame those states for the past, they need to get in line behind the whole country for what we did to the indigenous population.