“Neo-Confederate” Nikole Hannah-Jones

Nikole Hannah-Jones is clearly a “neo-Confederate.” Why? Because she had the audacity to claim that the War wasn’t fought to end slavery.

Gasp!

You can almost hear the head of every righteous cause mythologist exploding.

How dare this faux historian/journalist claim that the War was not about slavery. And she not only said it, she TRIPLED DOWN on the assertion, meaning she really believes it.

Good. I have been arguing since last year that Nikole Hannah-Jones makes “conservatives” uncomfortable because if she is correct about the “idea” of America, then their entire identity is tied to 19th century leftism, meaning they aren’t really conservative.

They don’t want to hear it, but it’s true.

Lincoln wasn’t a conservative. Neither was Seward, Sumner, Stevens, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Julia Ward Howe, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, U.S. Grant, or anyone else they want to label as “conservative.”

It’s an embarrassment.

The same is true for Martin Luther King. But you see, politics trumps intelligence and truth. This is why American conservatives have abandoned Calhoun and embraced King. We might as well be singing the Soviet national anthem and voting for crazy Bernie Sanders.

We’ll get there eventually.

Hannah-Jones didn’t say anything most Americans would not have agreed with just a couple of decades ago, but now to merely suggest that our glorious boys in blue did not fight to free slaves, establish women’s suffrage, embrace LGTBQ+ equity, end world hunger, provide free medial care, spread liberty and democracy across the globe, and stamp out white supremacy wherever it exists makes you a “neo-Confederate.”

If America was founded on the “proposition” that “all men are created equal,” then Hannah-Jones is correct to question the commitment to that proposition.

Yet, if America wasn’t “founded” on that “idea”–and it wasn’t–then we can move along and start discussing the real issue that has plagued the United States since 1789: unconstitutional federal power.

That problem underlies every issue in American history, from executive overreach to massive spending to the culture war. No one in Washington D.C. should be talking about gay marriage, abortion, stimulus checks, gun control, the death penalty, or free college tuition.

These are purely State issues and should have remained so.

But once you consolidate and create a “majoritarian democracy” that has unlimited power, every issue must fall under the federal head, and thus we get the very monster the majority of the founding generation feared.

The Constitution would not have been ratified had the founding generation believed they were getting a central government with the ability to negate State laws with an elected king able to rule by decree.

We can thank Straussian “conservative heroes” like Lincoln for that.

I discuss Hannah-Jones and her War revelation on episode 640 of The Brion McClanahan Show.