Minnesota Confederates?

Public officials in Minnesota - governor, attorney general, and mayor - are resisting enforcement of legitimate immigration law and encouraging their citizens to physically interfere with federal law enforcement. They have absurdly and perversely used States’ Rights arguments to justify their actions. There has even been ridiculous mention of the 10th Amendment which has been a dead letter for 175 years.


Not to be outdone in historical ignorance and distortion, the Republicans are taking them seriously. History professor V.D. Hanson, who became a celebrity Republican spokesman by superficially trashing Southerners as traitors, has just informed us that Minnesota governor Walz is a “Confederate.” Some other “conservative” writers have broadcast similar opinions.


Not surprising, since blaming Southerners for everything bad has been stock-in-trade for the Republican Party since its creation in the 1850s. The worst thing these people can think of to say about the Minnesota leftist insurgents is that they are “Southern.” Even though Minnesota is in every way probably the single most un-Southern State in the Union.


The historical misunderstanding of these “conservative” spokesmen is monumental and can only be explained by ignorance or malicious bias. The felon Republican celebrity commentator Dinesh D’souza started this nonsense a while back by calling the Democrats “the party of slavery and segregation.” That is true, but it is absolutely absurdly irrelevant to make that a reason for voting against today’s Democrats. This kind of superficial demagogic talking point is standard Republican talk. If these people had any shame they would not even pretend to be qualified to discuss history, but of course they have no shame.


When the Southern States seceded they elected delegates to a convention of the sovereign people. Both on the hustings and in the conventions the question was openly and vigourously discussed and secession won a majority of the voters. The conventions, just exactly like the conventions that had ratified the U.S. Constitution, repealed that ratification and were then out of the Union.


And of course States’ Rights and State sovereignty had been a major, perhaps even a majority, opinion in the entire life of the Union up to 1860, something Hanson and his imitators can’t seem to grasp. Secession was not revolutionary resistance to the federal government. It was a constitutional and democratic process until Lincoln declared that the States were simply gangs of lawbreakers.


​Why can’t these people face the fact that the Minnesota insurgents are acting out of a Leninist playbook for popular revolt? They prefer instead to trash us and our forebears. Tim Walz is not a Confederate. He is more like John Brown who thinks his righteousness allows him to engage in crime.