HOW the SOUTH WON the CIVIL WAR: OLIGARCHY, DEMOCRACY, and the CONTINUING FIGHT for the SOUL of AMERICA by Heather Cox Richardson

Originally Published in 2020.
Published by Oxford Press in 2022.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson has made herself into a name brand historian with her near-daily first drafts of history in which she writes up the day's political news and ties in similar historic themes or long-running trends. 

How the South Won the Civil War follows along those lines. 

The book looks at two long-standing trends in American points of view in American history that are in constant tension with one another.

This quote from page xv of the introduction gets the thesis of the book pretty well:

America began with a great paradox: the same men who came up with the radical idea of constructing a nation on the principle of equality also owned slaves, thought Indians were savages, and considered women inferior. This apparent contradiction was not a flaw, though; it was a key feature of the new democratic republic. For the Founders, the concept that "all men are created equal" depended on the idea that the ringing phrase "all men" did not actually include everyone."

She continues: "So long as these lesser people played no role in the body politic, everyone within it could be equal. In the Founders' minds, then, the principle of equality depended on inequality."

That is the heart of the thesis - some think that everyone should be able to participate, others think that only the best people should participate because some people cannot handle the responsibility (or just want to do all of the wrong things with the power.)

Richardson goes through history and shows how this has played out over the decades. A big theme is that, in general, the South has believed that not everyone should participate. The North has gone back and forth, but consistently more on the side on equality than the South. 

The Civil War was obviously a major flare up in this ongoing struggle and seemed to end the paradox once and for all. But, the same issues migrated west and the Western states generally joined the South as time went on, especially as the Democrats stopped being the conservative party when it came to race relations after the elections of 1964, 1968, and 1972. Movement Conservatives discovered that racists liked it when they said things like letting states keep their own rules about who gets to vote and being able to create special public schools so that they stay segregated.

Not every Republican followed this line of thought and the mainstream Republican Party denied that this line of thought even had a popular foothold. But, the Tea Party Movement followed by MAGA and Christian Nationalism has pushed the radicals (the old John Birch Society types) into the forefront. Trump didn't create it, but he found it and exploited it.

The MAGA movement and Christian Nationalism continues this cementing of the West and the South and the belief that some people should not have a say. Nowadays, it is not slavery or Jim Crow or forcing people to be IN the closet, but MAGA shows spend an inordinate amount of time on gay marriage, trans people, and the bogeyman of CRT. It's not the same old thing (well, it oftentimes is for the LGBTQ+ folks, especially for trans people) but it certainly rhymes.

The only complaint I have about the book is that the author fails to see that the same type of elitism exists in both parties.  Examples include FDR and his brain trust, a center-left media that laid out a certain world view for 40 years and still tries to (I mostly agree with that view, but I also acknowledge that it existed and still exists in a much weakened state.)

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: HOW the SOUTH WON the CIVIL WAR by Heather Cox Richardson.