Two White Pillars, Yankee Style

During a May 14 performance on the rooftop of Athens’ Georgia Theater, Titus Andronicus was playing the first song off their Civil War-themed album The Monitor when several people in the crowd began waving Confederate flags. After consuming, igniting, and wiping with said flags, the band finished their set and frontman Patrick Stickles vowed to avoid the town in the future, calling it “tainted.” Though the motives of the person responsible remain unclear—Stickles says that person sent him an email explaining himself, but he hasn’t read it—it’s probably safe to assume the provocation was deliberate. Someone going to that kind of trouble probably knows the song during which the incident happened is bookended by quotes from Abraham Lincoln and William Lloyd Garrison on the album.

Stickles explained the incident further in an interview with Impose:

I didn’t have the guitar anymore after ten minutes, after enduring the humiliation and degradation, and we were going to play a different song. So I decided to make a speech. I made a speech about why slavery was wrong and why the South deserved the war, and why the atrocities that were committed against the so-called innocent people by General Sherman were totally justified because that’s what it would take to end slavery. This was in Georgia, so I was really scared.

A writer covering the show had a slightly different take, calling the show “confusingly tense,” and saying when Stickles wasn’t “berating concertgoers for their lifestyle decisions, he was ranting about slavery.”

I hadn’t heard about the incident when I saw them five days later in DC, but the show did stand out for another reason. I used to see a lot of punk music, often bands with fairly radical politics; even Crass once, whose logo graces Stickles’ shoulder. But I had never seen all three bands on a bill, at some point during their set, go on a rant about the patriarchy, sometimes more than once. I have no problem with this sort of thing in general, but it seems related to what some have called a sort of lethargy, I daresay emasculation, of rock music and the supposedly radical left in the age of Obama. No need to worry about discarded liberty, we’re in good hands, we can focus on creating positive spaces or whatever. The fact is, there’s a vast gulf between “hang the war criminal president” and “check your privilege.” “Rock groups need to start really hating the President of the United States,” writes Zachary Lipez in Hazlitt. He was talking about endless mining of the rock cannon, but the same could apply to ostensibly radical bands whose politics are abstruse. Titus Andronicus’ “A More Perfect Union,” on the other hand, is also the title of one of the president’s more famous speeches.

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The editor of National Review has a new book out on Lincoln, the “apostle of opportunity,” and for the last couple weeks has been on a PR blitzkrieg during which he often mentions some variation of his desire to “clear away the anti-Lincoln flotsam” floating around the conservative universe. These people have been a chip on Rich Lowry’s shoulder for some time now. Even to this anti-neoconfederate researcher, the most interesting thing is that he feels the need to denounce them, and takes it as a sign that “the anti-Lincoln campaign is going somewhere and the leadership of conservatism in America is beginning to get concerned.”

They’re concerned about something, but not just neoconfederates. First let’s set aside the idea that this is just history seen through innocently rosy glasses, reading the same hoary conservative nostrums—Lincoln restored the country to its status as a “clamorous, unstoppable dynamo of economic development,” he can’t be conscripted by liberals because he has a “greater tolerance for economic inequality, a deeper commitment to bourgeois moral normas; [and] a more realistic view of human nature,” “paladin of individual initiative.” It’s tempting to think so, with all the religious language he’s used to describe the sixteenth president.

The Republican Party has a long history of exploiting the Lincoln mythology, from Calvin Coolidge, the subject of two conservative biographies in the last year, to this notable salvo from AEI the month the second Iraq invasion began (in which Victor Davis Hanson praised General Sherman’s terrorizing civilians as smashing the aristocracy), to today’s invocations of the “Party of Lincoln” in the course of condescendingly wondering why black people don’t vote for them. Whether “parallelism to Lincoln” is a useful thing depends on what they mean.

Lincoln Unbound is a political document in this genre. But what Lowry proposes isn’t something specific, he just projects virtues onto the sixteenth president and says the Republican Party should embody them. His message is discordant with both historiographical and political trends. In the Atlantic this week, Confederates in the Attic author Tony Horwitz writes “in recent years, historians have rubbed much of the luster from the Civil War and questioned its sanctification.” This includes not just body counts being revised upwards but also new considerations of Lincoln’s own racial views and continued exploration of the prospect of black colonization after emancipation.

The other context is a political moment in which left and right are increasingly suspicious of a government that has assumed imperial powers and commitments, all of which Lowry’s magazine tends to support. They part ways with Lowry and Lincoln in their opposition to war, enthusiasm for for civil liberties, and even states’ rights. As far as the nice things Lowry says about Lincoln’s support for road- and canal-building go, what is the lesson here? Fixing some bridges? Light rail subsidies? National internet, to “knit” our markets together? The historical gloss lets him get away with posturing as a respectable RINO. To paraphrase Bill Kauffman on The Plot Against America, this is a history a neoconservative would write, if a neoconservative could write history.

On war, Lowry toyed with the idea of Syrian intervention in 2003, and his views haven’t changed much, even as his mentor and NR founder decried “neoconservative hubris” near the end of his life. Lowry implicitly analogizes Lincoln’s wars to the ones he supported and would like to wage. He attacks right wing detractors of Lincoln and says the Civil War was obviously worth the cost, but has constantly advocated for wars with little or no regard for theirs. If the rumor that Buckley picked his replacement so as not to overshadow him is true, then I don’t know if that speaks good or ill of his judgment, but Lowry doesn’t give us much reason for doubt. Because our hapless editor is running around saying some awfully radical things, as in this interview with Ed Driscoll:

“I don’t think there’s a right to secession in the U.S. Constitution. I do think anyone, though, has a right to revolution. There are defenders of the Confederacy who will say that in 1776 we seceded from Britain, and the founding fathers were secessionists. No they weren’t, they were revolutionaries! You have a right to revolution if your cause is just.”

What kind of conservative says “anyone has a right to revolution”? This is the sort of muddy thinking that is only accepted because the idea it expresses is widely shared. Without getting into the knotty debate over what precisely the American Revolution was, what does it most resemble—egalitarian Jacobin revolution, restoration, or secession? Post-colonial independence is a mixture between the first and third, but probably more the third in the case of the United States, since there’s clear continuity between its institutions and those of Great Britain. The American experience and some post-colonial wars of independence excepted, secession tends to be a more peaceful type of revolution when it’s not brutally repressed. As with so many other movement conservatives today, Lowry, Hanson, and others fail to confront the implications of the Soviet Union’s collapse, which, though not quite bloodless, was a series of secessions collectively representing the largest step back from totalitarianism ever taken.

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I’m not really sure what these two things have in common, but it seems relevant that the lead singer of a radical punk band has the same view of total war as Victor Davis Hanson, and more or less the same understanding of the right to revolution as the editor of National Review. It’s just hard to say who it says more about.

(Re: the title)