Saturday, October 29, 2011
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
How To Frame Yourself: A Framing Memo For Occupy Wall Street | Common Dreams
How To Frame Yourself: A Framing Memo For Occupy Wall Street | Common Dreams
Published on Wednesday, October 19, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
How To Frame Yourself: A Framing Memo For Occupy Wall Street
by George Lakoff
I was asked weeks ago by some in the Occupy Wall Street movement to make suggestions for how to frame the movement. I have hesitated so far, because I think the movement should be framing itself. It’s a general principle: Unless you frame yourself, others will frame you — the media, your enemies, your competitors, your well-meaning friends. I have so far hesitated to offer suggestions. But the movement appears to maturing and entering a critical time when small framing errors could have large negative consequences. So I thought it might be helpful to accept the invitation and start a discussion of how the movement might think about framing itself.
About framing: It’s normal. Everybody engages in it all the time. Frames are just structures of thought that we use every day. All words in all languages are defined in terms of frame-circuits in the brain. But, ultimately, framing is about ideas, about how we see the world, which determines how we act.
In politics, frames are part of competing moral systems that are used in political discourse and in charting political action. In short, framing is a moral enterprise: it says what the character of a movement is. All politics is moral. Political figures and movements always make policy recommendations claiming they are the right things to do. No political figure ever says, do what I say because it’s wrong! Or because it doesn’t matter! Some moral principles or other lie behind every political policy agenda.
Two Moral Framing Systems in Politics
Conservatives have figured out their moral basis and you see it on Wall Street: It includes: The primacy of self-interest. Individual responsibility, but not social responsibility. Hierarchical authority based on wealth or other forms of power. A moral hierarchy of who is “deserving,” defined by success. And the highest principle is the primacy of this moral system itself, which goes beyond Wall Street and the economy to other arenas: family life, social life, religion, foreign policy, and especially government. Conservative “democracy” is seen as a system of governance and elections that fits this model.
Though OWS concerns go well beyond financial issues, your target is right: the application of these principles in Wall Street is central, since that is where the money comes from for elections, for media, and for right-wing policy-making institutions of all sorts on all issues.
The alternative view of democracy is progressive: Democracy starts with citizens caring about one another and acting responsibly on that sense of care, taking responsibility both for oneself and for one’s family, community, country, people in general, and the planet. The role of government is to protect and empower all citizens equally via The Public: public infrastructure, laws and enforcement, health, education, scientific research, protection, public lands, transportation, resources, art and culture, trade policies, safety nets, and on and on. Nobody makes it one their own. If you got wealthy, you depended on The Public, and you have a responsibility to contribute significantly to The Public so that others can benefit in the future. Moreover, the wealthy depend on those who work, and who deserve a fair return for their contribution to our national life. Corporations exist to make life better for most people. Their reason for existing is as public as it is private.
A disproportionate distribution of wealth robs most citizens of access to the resources controlled by the wealthy. Immense wealth is a thief. It takes resources from the rest of the population — the best places to live, the best food, the best educations, the best health facilities, access to the best in nature and culture, the best professionals, and on and on. Resources are limited, and great wealth greatly limits access to resources for most people.
It appears to me that OWS has a progressive moral vision and view of democracy, and that what it is protesting is the disastrous effects that have come from operating with a conservative moral, economic, and political worldview. I see OWS as primarily a moral movement, seeking economic and political changes to carry out that moral movement — whatever those particular changes might be.
A Moral Focus for Occupy Wall Street
I think it is a good thing that the occupation movement is not making specific policy demands. If it did, the movement would become about those demands. If the demands were not met, the movement would be seen as having failed.
It seems to me that the OWS movement is moral in nature, that occupiers want the country to change its moral focus. It is easy to find useful policies; hundreds have been suggested. It is harder to find a moral focus and stick to it. If the movement is to frame itself, it should be on the basis of its moral focus, not a particular agenda or list of policy demands. If the moral focus of America changes, new people will be elected and the policies will follow. Without a change of moral focus, the conservative worldview that has brought us to the present disastrous and dangerous moment will continue to prevail.
We Love America. We’re Here to Fix It
I see OWS as a patriotic movement, based on a deep and abiding love of country — a patriotism that it is not just about the self-interests of individuals, but about what the country is and is to be. Do Americans care about other citizens, or mainly just about themselves? That’s what love of America is about. I therefore think it is important to be positive, to be clear about loving America, seeing it in need of fixing, and not just being willing to fix it, but being willing to take to the streets to fix it. A populist movement starts with the people seeing that they are all in the same boat and being ready to come together to fix the leaks.
Publicize the Public
Tell the truth about The Public, that nobody makes it purely on their own without The Public, that is, without public infrastructure, the justice system, health, education, scientific research, protections of all sorts, public lands, transportation, resources, art and culture, trade policies, safety nets, … That is a truth to be told day after day. It is an idea that must take hold in public discourse. It must go beyond what I and others have written about it and beyond what Elizabeth Warren has said in her famous video. The Public is not opposed to The Private. The Public is what makes The Private possible. And it is what makes freedom possible. Wall Street exists only through public support. It has a moral obligation to direct itself to public needs.
All OWS approaches to policy follow from such a moral focus. Here are a handful examples.
Democracy should be about the 99%
Money directs our politics. In a democracy, that must end. We need publicly supported elections, however that is to be arranged.
Strong Wages Make a Strong America
Middle-class wages have not gone up significantly in 30 years, and there is conservative pressure to lower them. But when most people get more money, they spend it and spur the economy, making the economy and the country stronger, as well as making their individual lives better. This truth needs to be central to public economic discourse.
Global Citizenship
America has been a moral beacon to the world. It can function as such only if it sets an example of what a nation should be.
Do we have to spend more on the military that all other nations combined? Do we really need hundreds of military bases abroad?
Nature
We are part of nature. Nature makes us, and all that we love, possible. Yet we are destroying Nature through global warming and other forms of ecological destruction, like fracking and deep-water drilling.
At a global scale, nature is systemic: its effects are neither local nor linear. Global warming is causing the ferocity of the monster storms, tornados, floods, blizzards, heat waves, and fires that have devastated huge areas of our country. The hotter the atmosphere, the more evaporated water and the more energy going into storms, tornados, and blizzards. Global warming cannot be shown to cause any particular storm, but when a storm system forms, global warming will ramp up the power of the storm and the amount of water it carries. In winter, evaporated water from the overly heated Pacific will go into the atmosphere, blow northeast over the arctic, and fall as record snows.
We depend on nature – on clean air, water, food, and a livable climate. And we find beauty and grandeur in nature, and a sense of awe that makes life worth living. A love of country requires a love of nature. And a fair and thriving economy requires the preservation of nature as we have known it.
Summary
OWS is a moral and patriotic movement. It sees Democracy as flowing from citizens caring about one another as well as themselves, and acting with both personal and social responsibility. Democratic governance is about The Public, and the liberty that The Public provides for a thriving Private Sphere. From such a democracy flows fairness, which is incompatible with a hugely disproportionate distribution of wealth. And from the sense of care implicit in such a democracy flows a commitment to the preservation of nature.
From what I have seen of most members of OWS, your individual concerns all flow from one moral focus.
Elections
The Tea Party solidified the power of the conservative worldview via elections. OWS will have no long-term effect unless it too brings its moral focus to the 2012 elections. Insist on supporting candidates that have your overall moral views, no matter what the local issues are.
A Warning
This movement could be destroyed by negativity, by calls for revenge, by chaos, or by having nothing positive to say. Be positive about all things and state the moral basis of all suggestions. Positive and moral in calling for debt relief. Positive and moral in upholding laws, as they apply to finances. Positive and moral in calling for fairness in acquiring needed revenue. Positive and moral in calling for clean elections. To be effective, your movement must be seen by all of the 99% as positive and moral. To get positive press, you must stress the positive and the moral.
Remember: The Tea Party sees itself as stressing only individual responsibility. The Occupation Movement is stressing both individual and social responsibility.
I believe, and I think you believe, that most Americans care about their fellow citizens as well as themselves. Let’s find out! Shout your moral and patriotic views out loud, regularly. Put them on your signs. Repeat them to the media. Tweet them. And tell everyone you know to do the same. You have to use your own language with your own framing and you have to repeat it over and over for the ideas to sink in.
Occupy elections: voter registration drives, town hall meetings, talk radio airtime, party organizations, nomination campaigns, election campaigns, and voting booths.
Above all: Frame yourselves before others frame you.
George Lakoff is the author of Moral Politics, Don't Think of an Elephant!, Whose Freedom?, and Thinking Points (with the Rockridge Institute staff). He is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, and a founding senior fellow at the Rockridge Institute.
Published on Wednesday, October 19, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
How To Frame Yourself: A Framing Memo For Occupy Wall Street
by George Lakoff
I was asked weeks ago by some in the Occupy Wall Street movement to make suggestions for how to frame the movement. I have hesitated so far, because I think the movement should be framing itself. It’s a general principle: Unless you frame yourself, others will frame you — the media, your enemies, your competitors, your well-meaning friends. I have so far hesitated to offer suggestions. But the movement appears to maturing and entering a critical time when small framing errors could have large negative consequences. So I thought it might be helpful to accept the invitation and start a discussion of how the movement might think about framing itself.
About framing: It’s normal. Everybody engages in it all the time. Frames are just structures of thought that we use every day. All words in all languages are defined in terms of frame-circuits in the brain. But, ultimately, framing is about ideas, about how we see the world, which determines how we act.
In politics, frames are part of competing moral systems that are used in political discourse and in charting political action. In short, framing is a moral enterprise: it says what the character of a movement is. All politics is moral. Political figures and movements always make policy recommendations claiming they are the right things to do. No political figure ever says, do what I say because it’s wrong! Or because it doesn’t matter! Some moral principles or other lie behind every political policy agenda.
Two Moral Framing Systems in Politics
Conservatives have figured out their moral basis and you see it on Wall Street: It includes: The primacy of self-interest. Individual responsibility, but not social responsibility. Hierarchical authority based on wealth or other forms of power. A moral hierarchy of who is “deserving,” defined by success. And the highest principle is the primacy of this moral system itself, which goes beyond Wall Street and the economy to other arenas: family life, social life, religion, foreign policy, and especially government. Conservative “democracy” is seen as a system of governance and elections that fits this model.
Though OWS concerns go well beyond financial issues, your target is right: the application of these principles in Wall Street is central, since that is where the money comes from for elections, for media, and for right-wing policy-making institutions of all sorts on all issues.
The alternative view of democracy is progressive: Democracy starts with citizens caring about one another and acting responsibly on that sense of care, taking responsibility both for oneself and for one’s family, community, country, people in general, and the planet. The role of government is to protect and empower all citizens equally via The Public: public infrastructure, laws and enforcement, health, education, scientific research, protection, public lands, transportation, resources, art and culture, trade policies, safety nets, and on and on. Nobody makes it one their own. If you got wealthy, you depended on The Public, and you have a responsibility to contribute significantly to The Public so that others can benefit in the future. Moreover, the wealthy depend on those who work, and who deserve a fair return for their contribution to our national life. Corporations exist to make life better for most people. Their reason for existing is as public as it is private.
A disproportionate distribution of wealth robs most citizens of access to the resources controlled by the wealthy. Immense wealth is a thief. It takes resources from the rest of the population — the best places to live, the best food, the best educations, the best health facilities, access to the best in nature and culture, the best professionals, and on and on. Resources are limited, and great wealth greatly limits access to resources for most people.
It appears to me that OWS has a progressive moral vision and view of democracy, and that what it is protesting is the disastrous effects that have come from operating with a conservative moral, economic, and political worldview. I see OWS as primarily a moral movement, seeking economic and political changes to carry out that moral movement — whatever those particular changes might be.
A Moral Focus for Occupy Wall Street
I think it is a good thing that the occupation movement is not making specific policy demands. If it did, the movement would become about those demands. If the demands were not met, the movement would be seen as having failed.
It seems to me that the OWS movement is moral in nature, that occupiers want the country to change its moral focus. It is easy to find useful policies; hundreds have been suggested. It is harder to find a moral focus and stick to it. If the movement is to frame itself, it should be on the basis of its moral focus, not a particular agenda or list of policy demands. If the moral focus of America changes, new people will be elected and the policies will follow. Without a change of moral focus, the conservative worldview that has brought us to the present disastrous and dangerous moment will continue to prevail.
We Love America. We’re Here to Fix It
I see OWS as a patriotic movement, based on a deep and abiding love of country — a patriotism that it is not just about the self-interests of individuals, but about what the country is and is to be. Do Americans care about other citizens, or mainly just about themselves? That’s what love of America is about. I therefore think it is important to be positive, to be clear about loving America, seeing it in need of fixing, and not just being willing to fix it, but being willing to take to the streets to fix it. A populist movement starts with the people seeing that they are all in the same boat and being ready to come together to fix the leaks.
Publicize the Public
Tell the truth about The Public, that nobody makes it purely on their own without The Public, that is, without public infrastructure, the justice system, health, education, scientific research, protections of all sorts, public lands, transportation, resources, art and culture, trade policies, safety nets, … That is a truth to be told day after day. It is an idea that must take hold in public discourse. It must go beyond what I and others have written about it and beyond what Elizabeth Warren has said in her famous video. The Public is not opposed to The Private. The Public is what makes The Private possible. And it is what makes freedom possible. Wall Street exists only through public support. It has a moral obligation to direct itself to public needs.
All OWS approaches to policy follow from such a moral focus. Here are a handful examples.
Democracy should be about the 99%
Money directs our politics. In a democracy, that must end. We need publicly supported elections, however that is to be arranged.
Strong Wages Make a Strong America
Middle-class wages have not gone up significantly in 30 years, and there is conservative pressure to lower them. But when most people get more money, they spend it and spur the economy, making the economy and the country stronger, as well as making their individual lives better. This truth needs to be central to public economic discourse.
Global Citizenship
America has been a moral beacon to the world. It can function as such only if it sets an example of what a nation should be.
Do we have to spend more on the military that all other nations combined? Do we really need hundreds of military bases abroad?
Nature
We are part of nature. Nature makes us, and all that we love, possible. Yet we are destroying Nature through global warming and other forms of ecological destruction, like fracking and deep-water drilling.
At a global scale, nature is systemic: its effects are neither local nor linear. Global warming is causing the ferocity of the monster storms, tornados, floods, blizzards, heat waves, and fires that have devastated huge areas of our country. The hotter the atmosphere, the more evaporated water and the more energy going into storms, tornados, and blizzards. Global warming cannot be shown to cause any particular storm, but when a storm system forms, global warming will ramp up the power of the storm and the amount of water it carries. In winter, evaporated water from the overly heated Pacific will go into the atmosphere, blow northeast over the arctic, and fall as record snows.
We depend on nature – on clean air, water, food, and a livable climate. And we find beauty and grandeur in nature, and a sense of awe that makes life worth living. A love of country requires a love of nature. And a fair and thriving economy requires the preservation of nature as we have known it.
Summary
OWS is a moral and patriotic movement. It sees Democracy as flowing from citizens caring about one another as well as themselves, and acting with both personal and social responsibility. Democratic governance is about The Public, and the liberty that The Public provides for a thriving Private Sphere. From such a democracy flows fairness, which is incompatible with a hugely disproportionate distribution of wealth. And from the sense of care implicit in such a democracy flows a commitment to the preservation of nature.
From what I have seen of most members of OWS, your individual concerns all flow from one moral focus.
Elections
The Tea Party solidified the power of the conservative worldview via elections. OWS will have no long-term effect unless it too brings its moral focus to the 2012 elections. Insist on supporting candidates that have your overall moral views, no matter what the local issues are.
A Warning
This movement could be destroyed by negativity, by calls for revenge, by chaos, or by having nothing positive to say. Be positive about all things and state the moral basis of all suggestions. Positive and moral in calling for debt relief. Positive and moral in upholding laws, as they apply to finances. Positive and moral in calling for fairness in acquiring needed revenue. Positive and moral in calling for clean elections. To be effective, your movement must be seen by all of the 99% as positive and moral. To get positive press, you must stress the positive and the moral.
Remember: The Tea Party sees itself as stressing only individual responsibility. The Occupation Movement is stressing both individual and social responsibility.
I believe, and I think you believe, that most Americans care about their fellow citizens as well as themselves. Let’s find out! Shout your moral and patriotic views out loud, regularly. Put them on your signs. Repeat them to the media. Tweet them. And tell everyone you know to do the same. You have to use your own language with your own framing and you have to repeat it over and over for the ideas to sink in.
Occupy elections: voter registration drives, town hall meetings, talk radio airtime, party organizations, nomination campaigns, election campaigns, and voting booths.
Above all: Frame yourselves before others frame you.
George Lakoff is the author of Moral Politics, Don't Think of an Elephant!, Whose Freedom?, and Thinking Points (with the Rockridge Institute staff). He is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, and a founding senior fellow at the Rockridge Institute.
Monday, October 17, 2011
Friday, October 14, 2011
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Monday, October 3, 2011
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Saturday, June 25, 2011
U.S. History Civil War to Present
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details.php?seriesid=1906978276
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Monday, April 25, 2011
Rachel Maddow video: Why a Michigan high school is ground zero for US politics
Why a Michigan high school is ground zero for US politics
Rachel Maddow takes a look at one of the effects of the emergency financial manager law, particularly on a remarkable Detroit high school that faces possible closure.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
A Conflict's Acoustic Shadows - NYTimes.com
A Conflict's Acoustic Shadows - NYTimes.com
A Conflict’s Acoustic Shadows
By KEN BURNS
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
Tags:
Henrik Drescher
Walpole, N.H.
More than once during the Civil War, newspapers reported a strange phenomenon. From only a few miles away, a battle sometimes made no sound — despite the flash and smoke of cannon and the fact that more distant observers could hear it clearly.
These eerie silences were called “acoustic shadows.”
Tuesday, the 150th anniversary of the first engagement of the Civil War, the Confederacy’s attack on Fort Sumter, we ask again whether in our supposedly post-racial, globalized, 21st-century world those now seemingly distant battles of the mid-19th century still have any relevance. But it is clear that the further we get from those four horrible years in our national existence — when, paradoxically, in order to become one we tore ourselves in two — the more central and defining that war becomes.
In our less civil society of this moment we are reminded of the full consequences of our failure to compromise in that moment.
In our smug insistence that race is no longer a factor in our society, we are continually brought up short by the old code words and disguised prejudice of a tribalism beneath the thin surface of our “civilized” selves.
And in our dialectically preoccupied media culture, where everything is pigeonholed into categories — red state/blue state, black/white, North/South, young/old, gay/straight — we are confronted again with more nuanced realities and the complicated leadership of that hero of all American heroes, Abraham Lincoln. He was at once an infuriatingly pragmatic politician, tardy on the issue of slavery, and at the same time a transcendent figure — poetic, resonant, appealing to better angels we 21st-century Americans still find painfully hard to invoke.
The acoustic shadows of the Civil War remind us that the more it recedes, the more important it becomes. Its lessons are as fresh today as they were for those young men who were simply trying to survive its daily horrors.
And horrors there were: 620,000 Americans, more than 2 percent of our population, died of gunshot and disease, starvation and massacre in places like Shiloh and Antietam and Cold Harbor, Fort Pillow and Fort Wagner and Palmito Ranch, Andersonville and Chickamauga and Ford’s Theater.
Yet in the years immediately after the South’s surrender at Appomattox we conspired to cloak the Civil War in bloodless, gallant myth, obscuring its causes and its great ennobling outcome — the survival of the union and the freeing of four million Americans and their descendants from bondage. We struggled, in our addiction to the idea of American exceptionalism, to rewrite our history to emphasize the gallantry of the war’s top-down heroes, while ignoring the equally important bottom-up stories of privates and slaves. We changed the irredeemable, as the historian David Blight argues, into positive, inspiring stories.
The result has been to blur the reality that slavery was at the heart of the matter, ignore the baser realities of the brutal fighting, romanticize our own home-grown terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan, and distort the consequences of the Civil War that still intrude on our national life.
The centennial of the Civil War in 1961 was for many of us a wholly unsatisfying experience. It preferred, as the nation reluctantly embraced a new, long-deferred civil rights movement, to excavate only the dry dates and facts and events of that past; we were drawn back then, it seemed, more to regiments and battle flags, Minié balls and Gatling guns, sentimentality and nostalgia and mythology, than to anything that suggested the harsh realities of the real war.
Subsequently, our hunger for something more substantial materialized in James McPherson’s remarkable “Battle Cry of Freedom” and many other superb histories, in the popular Hollywood movie “Glory,” and in my brother Ric’s and my 1990 documentary series “The Civil War.”
Related Disunion Articles on Fort Sumter
It was an emotional archaeology we were all after, less concerned with troop movements than with trying to represent the full fury of that war; we were attracted to its psychological disturbances and conflicted personalities, its persistent dissonance as well as its inspirational moments. We wanted to tell a more accurate story of African-Americans, not as the passive bystanders of conventional wisdom, but as active soldiers in an intensely personal drama of self-liberation.
We wished to tell bottom-up stories of so-called ordinary soldiers, North as well as South, to note women’s changing roles, to understand the Radical Republicans in Congress, to revel in the inconvenient truths of nearly every aspect of the Civil War.
Today, the war’s centrality in American history seems both assured and tenuous. Each generation, the social critic Lewis Mumford once said, re-examines and re-interprets that part of the past that gives the present new meanings and new possibilities. That also means that for a time an event, any event, even one as perpetually important as the Civil War, can face the specter being out of historical fashion.
Related Disunion Highlights
Explore multimedia from the series and navigate through past posts, as well as photos and articles from the Times archive.
But in the end, it seems that the War of the Rebellion, the formal name our government once gave to the struggle, always invades our consciousness like the childhood traumatic event it was — and still is.
Maybe Walt Whitman, the poet and sometime journalist who had worked as a nurse in the appalling Union hospitals, understood and saw it best. “Future years,” he said, “will never know the seething hell, the black infernal background of the countless minor scenes and interiors … of the Secession War, and it is best they should not.
“The real war,” Whitman admonished us, “will never get in the books.” We are, nonetheless, obligated to try.
Ken Burns is the director of the documentary series “The Civil War” and the forthcoming “Prohibition.”
A version of this Op-Ed appeared in print on April 12, 2011.
Monday, April 18, 2011
David Blight on the Civil War and American memory
Begin forwarded message:
From: Steven Mintz <sm3031@COLUMBIA.EDU>
Date: April 13, 2011 11:25:56 PM EDT
To: H-SLAVERY@H-NET.MSU.EDU
Subject: David Blight on the Civil War and American memory
Reply-To: H-NET List for the History of Slavery <H-SLAVERY@H-NET.MSU.EDU>
150 years after Fort Sumter, forces that gave rise to the Civil War still plague modern America
BY David W. Blight, New York Daily News, 4/12/11
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2011/04/12/2011-04-12_150_years_after_fort_sumter_forces_that_gave_rise_to_the_civil_war_still_plague_.html
In his "The Legacy of the Civil War," written in 1961, Robert Penn Warren declared: "The Civil War draws us as an oracle, darkly unriddled and portentous, of national as well as personal fate." While writing that book, Warren described his challenge: "to distinguish between historical importance" of the war and its "fundamental appeal to the American imagination." All the "attractions" Americans felt toward the Civil War, he concluded, were not "worthy." "Because the war made us great we like to look at it - as the dog likes to look at the icebox door."
Do we as a people gaze at the Civil War more than we actually understand it? Is this most pivotal event in our history still, at its 150th anniversary, a story we look at like rubber-neckers at a horrible car accident?
Or, have we finally matured to a stage of reasonable consensus on the war's causes and consequences?
And where is the Civil War's "oracle?" On Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg? Monument Avenue in Richmond? In the words on the walls of the Lincoln Memorial?
At Stone Mountain in Georgia? At Augustus Saint-Gaudens' masterpiece sculpture, the Shaw Memorial in Boston, dedicated to the African-American regiment, the 54th Massachusetts? Is it in a book, a favorite passage of prose by Bruce Catton or Shelby Foote, or poetry by Walt Whitman, or oratory by Martin Luther King, Jr., or an essay by James Baldwin? Or is that oracle simply in our minds, ready to burst into action when prompted by a modern issue, a fear - or a legacy that suddenly hits us between the eyes?
What indeed is the hold of our worst national nightmare and bloodletting on the American imagination?
The war's powerful hold on us is both deeply human and profoundly American. The many conflicts that expressed themselves through that single, great conflict are in many ways with us still.
The historical imagination is drawn to loss, to the withering story of the 625,000 dead American soldiers and the uncounted civilian casualties. Loss on a profound scale is the subject of some of the world's greatest literature, epic myths and national destruction and creation stories. As Whitman mused in "Specimen Days," it was "the dead, the dead, the dead, our dead - or South or North, ours all" that had unmade and might yet re-make America.
We are also drawn to epic history, that which invests us in what we innocently like to call a Homeric tale all our own, as though such is the test of peoplehood. If Civil War enthusiasts admit it, they love this conflict because it is a great contest for world-historical aims, a fundamental rending, but one with a beginning, middle and, if we so wish, a tidy ending. As William Dean Howells once said, Americans "love a tragedy," as long as "it has a happy ending."
For some, the Civil War's seductions involve the sheer pleasure of military detail, the strategic and tactical fight on the ground, or in the mental battlefield, where winners and losers can be crowned and great warriors anointed as geniuses. On perhaps a deeper level, many are attracted to this event because they have learned that a "modern" America was somehow born out of that terrible time, an America that despite the sacrifice was to become a powerful, centralized, world power able to forge The American Century to follow.
And in searching for the origins of our modernity, we often insist on a story of national reconciliation - reached largely by the denigration of the humanity and the destruction of the rights of the millions of blacks freed in the war. Such a heroic reunion story delivers a Civil War that ultimately unified us. In all our vexing diversity, people often love to revisit the Civil War to find a time when we fought to the death in order, as the pleasing story goes, to find our greater destiny and unity. We love being the nation that freed the slaves, rather than the one that owned four million people as property and had to destroy ourselves in order to save ourselves.
Increasingly over recent decades, new generations of Americans may also have read or been taught that the Civil War and Reconstruction brought the end of the first American republic and the bloody rebirth of a new, second republic. If we listen carefully, "rebirth" is the central metaphor of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. What he was saying is that the republic founded "fourscore and seven years" past was interred in the fresh graves of the cemetery he dedicated. A new "nation" had to be forged, somehow rooted in the frightening but beautiful idea of human equality.
When we see the Civil War through this lens, then our oracle is potentially infinite in its lessons and wisdom. And then we also begin to see why this event really is the pivot of our history, as our first great racial reckoning, but also in the redefinition of what it means to be an American in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution.
If we can remember our Civil War as this kind of constitutional and moral transformation - rooted in the social revolution of emancipation - then we may begin to grasp not only why it has such staying power in our imaginations, but why so many of our roiling political issues of today can be traced to those graves of 1863 and the new nation they died to create.
Today, we live in a society not only polarized over race relations and the advent of a black President, over the rights of immigrants, over religious tolerance, over who and what is a legitimate American and whether they shall be accorded "birth-right citizenship" as enshrined in the first line of the Fourteenth Amendment. But we have a political culture riven by a near war over federalism - the ceaseless debate about the proper relation of federal to state power. Yes, the Civil War is rooted in states' rights. But the significance of any exercise of states' rights is always in the issue to which it is employed. And in 1860-61, "state sovereignty" was exercised by some Southerners as an act of revolution in the interest, as they said themselves over and over, of preserving a racial order and a system of slavery.
Today, states' rights doctrines are advanced by many governors and Republican-majority legislatures in the very language of "secession" and "nullification" made so infamous in antebellum America.
A short list of examples among many tells us just how alive some Civil War legacies are in our culture. Kentucky has a bill pending to make that state a "sanctuary" from the Environmental Protection Agency. Arizona Republicans want to exempt products made in their state from federal interstate commerce laws. Montana is considering a bill to "nullify" the federal Endangered Species Act. The same state's legislature has a bill pending that would require the FBI to get a local sheriff's permission to make any arrests. Utah passed a bill authorizing the use of eminent domain to seize federally-protected land. And many Republican governors and attorneys general have tried to use the courts to nullify federal health care reform. Some state legislatures have tried to pass bills declaring their residents "exempt" from the health care reform law.
This is nullification by any other name, and it is happening, unfortunately, in too large a vacuum of historical perspective. We have a history with this idea, and it had a terrible result in 1861. Either the United States born in slave emancipation and that second American republic of 1865-68 is based on a social contract, forged and reforged by the new historical imperatives of industrialization and urbanization in the Progressive era, by a horrible economic Depression in the 1930s and a civil rights revolution in the 1960s, all of which for real and good reasons necessitated the increased exercise of federal power to protect human liberty, welfare and survival, or it does not.
The conservative movement in America seems determined to repeal much of the 20th century, and even its constitutional and social roots in the transformations of the 1860s. The Civil War is not only not over; it can still be lost. At its sesquicentennial, as much as ever, we should journey to our oracle, not to seek its "attractions," but to listen carefully for its "historical importance."
Blight teaches American history at Yale University, and is the author of "Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory," and the forthcoming "American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era."
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