This Juneteenth, Remember the GOP Is the Neo-Confederate Party

Juneteenth doesn’t just celebrate the end of nearly 250 years of Black chattel slavery—a brutal institution of forced labor, sexual abuse and exploitation, and wanton violence.

The day also celebrates the defeat of the Confederacy, a traitorous entity founded on the cornerstone belief of white supremacy and perpetual Black subjugation, as famously declared by Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens.

For that reason, amidst the revelry of the occasion, it’s also critical to acknowledge that while the Confederacy may be long dead, Confederate ideology is alive and well—particularly among the Republican faithful.

Honoring a Confederate General Isn’t a Cancel Culture Hill to Die On

America as a whole has a white supremacist problem, but it is perhaps nowhere more pronounced than on the political right, where openly revanchist, authoritarian, and anti-democratic powers consistently prove they are motivated by white racial resentment and vengeance. In short, the GOP is the neo-Confederate party.

This is neither hysteria or hyperbole—the GOP’s neo-Confederate agenda is often open and explicit. With the exception of Virginia, the so-called “Heritage Laws” that long prevented the removal or alteration of confederate monuments in seven states weren’t put into place by Republican legislatures until the 2000s (when they sensed growing opposition to the statues), and they’re still fighting to keep them on the books.

Florida attempted to codify a similar law this year, and though it died in committee, GOP legislators have promised to try again in the 2024 legislative session. This year in Mississippi, the Blackest state in the country, Republican Gov. Tate Reeves again proclaimed April Confederate Month. (Ten Southern states still have holidays that celebrate the Confederacy; Alabama and Mississippi actually observe Martin Luther King Day on the same date they commemorate Robert E. Lee.)

April was also declared Republican History Month by Tennessee’s congressional Republicans, whose celebrations seem to have included expelling two elected Black lawmakers—a show of white power’s utter contempt and disregard for democracy.

At the national level, GOP Sens. Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley both voted against a proposal to rename bases named for Confederates who led attacks against the country’s military forces.

Just days ago, in their respective speeches at North Carolina’s Republican convention, former Vice President Mike Pence and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis each made presidential campaign promises to change the newly christened Fort Liberty Army base back to its old name of Fort Bragg. It doesn’t matter that Gen. Braxton Bragg was the biggest traitorous loser among an entire insurrectionist nation full of traitorous losers. (Bragg is regarded as perhaps the Confederacy’s most incompetent and inefficient general, whom one of his own men noted “not a single soldier in the whole army ever loved or respected.”)

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In the year 2023, restoring Confederate names shouldn’t be on a presidential contender’s stump-speech priority list. But both DeSantis and Pence recognize that neo-Confederates make up much of their base.

That’s why the GOP is currently consumed by Lost Cause mythmaking, which scholar Mary Anne Franks writes requires “whitewashing the role of slavery in American history; selectively championing states’ rights; and promoting racial, gender, and religious supremacy.” Just as the United Daughters of the Confederacy prohibited the teaching of authentic history and banned books that defied Lost Cause ahistoricism, white conservatives around the country are currently leading censorious campaigns against historical accuracy, with the same end goal of persevering a white supremacist national memory.

Between January 2021 and December 2022, a UCLA Law School study found, lawmakers at every jurisdictional level proposed 560 measures against what the right has mislabeled “critical race theory,” some 240 of which were passed. Like their predecessors, the conservatives campaigning for book bans and removals are all too willing to employ white terror, harassment, and violence, including threatening teachers, administrators, and librarians, and not infrequently joining forces with far-right groups like the Proud Boys.

When Gov. DeSantis’ administration announced a high school Advanced Placement African American Studies course “significantly lacks educational value,” he was reassuring his status-concerned supporters that there is still strength in white power, and his willingness to flex the same. He was also signaling agreement with people like the Alabama mother who recently told a local outlet that there is already “too much Black history” being taught.

There is also the GOP’s wide-scale opposition to black enfranchisement.

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The conservative effort to suppress Black voting, one of the primary rights of American citizenship, has a lengthy history, from lethal anti-Black violence at the ballot box during Reconstruction, to white terror campaigns against Black folks trying to vote during Jim Crow.

The neo-Confederate GOP has undermined Black voting through suppressive legislation—voter ID laws, limited early voting, and the shuttering of 1,700 polling places in nonwhite neighborhoods. One Arizona Republican even suggested tests for voters, though he stopped short of proposing poll taxes.

It is not a coincidence that accusations of invalid votes in the 2020 election centered on those cast in the majority-Black cities of Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia. It was anger specifically over Black political power that moved white conservatives, brandishing weapons, to show up outside vote counting centers. Neo-Confederate politicians have called for increased “poll watchers,” and extremists have self-deputized and staked out voting sites.

America’s Tragedy Is Its Culture of Fear—Armed With Millions of Guns

It was the raging anger over Black and other nonwhite votes that led violent mobs of white supremacist insurrectionists to scale the walls, break the windows, and smear various bodily fluids throughout the U.S. Capitol. Under the guise of stopping voter fraud, neo-Confederates are using the same tactics as ever.

And speaking of the Capitol insurrection, there is the right’s open embrace of white supremacist vigilantism, evidenced not just by the Capitol terrorists being labeled “patriots,” but the celebration of and fundraising for murderous figures from Kyle Rittenhouse to Daniel Penny, whose only claims to fame are their willingness to kill Black folks and anyone perceived to be in alliance with them. Neo-Confederates have always used law-and-order rhetoric as a signifier of the racial order, where white lawlessness is justified and Black protest is criminalized.

And we are once again seeing the invocation of “state’s rights” on issues from marriage equality to immigration to abortion. Perhaps the least discussed (yet most consequential) case currently before the Supreme Court is Moore v. Harper, which would essentially give unchecked power to hyperpartisan, bad-faith red state legislatures, which is to say, the majority, to dismiss election outcomes up to the presidential vote. These are the very real extremes we’re facing with neo-Confederates racing to turn back the clock.

This is scary stuff, with potential consequences rising to those seen following the toppling of Reconstruction.

Juneteenth Isn’t for Everyone (and It Shouldn’t Be)

Christopher Rufo, the right-wing propagandist who proudly admits to cynically misconstruing critical racism to incite white conservative outrage, and Matt Walsh, a right-wing commentator whose obsession with trans people is begging for therapeutic intervention, aren’t just very online dudes driving CRT misinformation and anti-trans paranoia, they are active actors in a movement that seeks to erase Black folks from history, trans folks from public existence, and women from any realm beyond the home.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) may be regarded as a nutjob who on multiple occasions promoted secessionist sentiments, but so-called “sensible” Republicans, including former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, have done the same.

The neo-Confederate GOP march is very real and players from DeSantis to Green, Rufo to Walsh—with their calls for “tradition” that really mean maintaining the racial and gender order—are perhaps not always in lockstep formation, but do have their eyes on the same regressive end point.

Juneteenth—which we should never forget was labeled “divisive” and reverse-racist by numerous elected Republicans—is a reminder that the liberatory fight never ends. Especially when the GOP, a neo-Confederate party in all but name, is hoping to unfree so many of us.

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