The Day the Revolution Stopped

The Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, which
sparked the disastrous "Unite the Right" rally

The Republican Party establishment has a conundrum: it has tried to position itself as the party of Lincoln. Aggressive PR pushes from conservative leaders like Dinesh D’Souza have peddled the idea that Republicans are progressive on race, contra the Democratic Party, by comparing the 1864 Republican platform with the Democrats’ explicitly segregationist 1960 platform. We deserve Black Americans’ loyalty, they proclaim, because, um, Abraham Lincoln!

Which, for all its flaws, could’ve been a potentially persuasive argument pretty recently. Not persuasive to most African Americans, certainly, who judge by what each party has actually accomplished; but persuasive to traditionalist Whites who want reassurance they aren’t the moral heirs of Bull Connor. Pretending that party alignments haven’t changed in 150 years allows Republicans, who generally believe history is constant and inelastic, to claim Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant still represent their party.

Then Donald Trump opened his pie-hole and praised Robert E. Lee.

CUNY political theorist Corey Robin writes, in his book The Reactionary Mind, that conservatism is an essentially counter-revolutionary theory. That is, conservatives see progressives and leftists attempting to change what they consider an unjust system, and perceive that change as revolutionary. Revolutions are violent, of course, and seeing violence done upon their world, they “stand athwart history,” in William F. Buckley's words, “yelling Stop!”

However, conservatives cannot stop the revolution by simply defending what exists. If the current system weren’t terminally damaged, there would be no revolution; it’s impossible to defend a broken system, on the broken system’s terms. So conservatives constantly search about, seeking explanations why society should change as little as possible, while mollifying the conditions that made revolution necessary. Change is necessary, to eliminate the need for change.

Thus American conservatives have, at various times, allied themselves with abolitionism, labor unionism, civil rights, feminism, and other historical movements to correct injustice. More accurately, they ally themselves with the memory of these movements. That’s why, for instance, conservatives claim to be the true heirs of Dr. King, usually by grabbing his “content of their character” quote out of context. The present system thus becomes the fulfillment of past struggles.

Strange to say, I sympathize with this conservative impulse. We cannot fight noble fights forever, lest the fight itself become more important than its goal; Mainland China’s efforts to alleviate the damage caused by Chairman Mao’s excess proves the inherent risk of what Mao called “permanent revolution.” Maybe we haven’t won yet, but it remains necessary to believe we could, someday, win and stop fighting.

So conservatives try to elide the party realignments of the past 150 years, and claim they’re still “the Party of Lincoln.” Which, actually, is pretty admirable. (I’ll address Lincoln’s moral contradictions another time.) If Republicans still represented the values of Radical Reconstruction, I suspect we’d all get behind them. Well, maybe not all, but enough to make gradualism possible.

However.

While Republicans nominally embrace, if not current change, at least the changes of nostalgia, their president undermines them. Donald Trump lauds the commanding general of a fake nation founded on slavery. He reportedly calls nations with Black and Brown majorities “shithole countries.” He calls an all-white rally that literally marched under swastika flags “very fine people.” President Trump, it seems, can’t stay on his party’s message.

I’d suggest Trump probably doesn’t consider himself racist. Given his historic difficulty staying on-script, if he harbored explicit bigotry, surely he’d have dropped an N-bomb into a hot mike by now. However, unlike his party’s strategists, he defends the status quo in the language of the status quo. If that means protecting outright racists from well-earned social consequences, that doesn’t faze him. He isn’t a counter-revolutionary, he’s just standing still.

American conservatism has spent a half-century trying to shed the stink of racism in a country where the majority now finds out-and-out bigotry odious. Trump apparently hasn’t gotten that message. He still repeats Lost Cause propaganda that’s been extensively debunked; protects a social hierarchy founded on race, sex, and inherited wealth; and does so, unlike his party, in the unambiguous language of refusal to change, despite demonstrated injustice.

If Corey Robin is correct, and conservatism is indeed counter-revolutionary, American conservatism will have to reconcile their revolution with Donald Trump, who’s just a heel-dragger. For the coming generation, whenever any Republicans claim to be the real heirs of Abraham Lincoln or Dr. King, they’ll have to answer for Trump’s words. Until they cut Donald Trump loose, conservatives have surrendered any revolutionary aspirations; they’re the party of stasis.