Hanson’s Strange “Blue Confederacy”

Victor Davis Hanson can’t help himself. Just when you think he might have turned the corner, Hanson decided the South and the Confederacy probably should be expunged from American history or at the very least attached to his political enemies.

You see, to Hanson, the Straussians, and their neoconservative cousins, the South represents everything bad in American history.

They establish a straw man–the evil South–and then create a false dichotomy between the “righteous cause” North and the “lost cause” South all while ignoring the fact that their glorious North shared the same racial attitudes (and in the case of Jim Crow invented it) as the South.

They live in a fairy tale world of good John Browns, Abe Lincolns, and William Shermans who saved the South from itself.

Self described conservatives like Hanson and Allen Guelzo are worse than the left. They want to “conserve” 19th century liberalism and repackage it as “conservatism’ without realizing that they are conceding the field to the modern Jacobins.

They would do well in Louis Philippe’s court. If you don’t get the reference, he supported the French Revolution only to be guillotined like his cousin, the king.

Hanson provides cover for the progressive left even if he believes he is attacking them.

No one would have confused any of the Republicans for “conservatives” in 1861.

And the evils we face in America today are the direct result of the North winning the War: extreme centralization, entrenched corruption, crony capitalism, woke liberalism, and an unwritten constitution.

I discuss Hanson and his strange “blue confederacy” on episode 553 of The Brion McClanahan Show.