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A Confederacy of Dunces
I absolutely despise “alternative history” fiction. The distortion of real history is bad enough.
Enter David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and executives at HBO. Time-Warner’s pay channel has commissioned the creators of “Game of Thrones” to create “Confederate,” an alt-history series where the American Civil War ended in a stalemate and the Confederacy is now a 21st Century nation with institutionalized slavery. This is, as liberals would say, “problematic.”
The biggest hurdle the lead writers (the spousal African-American team of Malcolm and Nichelle Tramble Spellman) will have to overcome is the raison d’etre for slavery in the first place: large agricultural plantations needing vast numbers of cheap laborers to operate. At some point between 1865 and 2017 technology will overtake it. Will they suggest that slavery will be transferred out of the fields and into the factories? Will they be able to plausibly explain why white people will have no jobs in an industrialized South? And what about the rest of the world? Will there have been no world wars? No Great Depression? No Holocaust? Just 152 years of peaceful co-existence between the US and the Confederacy? No uprisings before 2017? It’s absurd.
What it will be is a Social Justice Warrior wet dream, a conglomeration of every hatred and prejudice in their own stone-cold hearts. It will lay bare exactly what they think. It will be the biggest “reelect the president” ad buy in history.
Published in History
I disagree. First, the original was more of a rumination on the role of chance in life. And now they’ve gone completely off the plot. It’s really devolved into a second tier thriller. Visually pretty impressive but the breadth of the story makes it less cohesive.
And you saw how the producers re-imagined the bad guys. The only major film I can think where terrorists are not white men with accents is True Lies. And there the terrorists were played broadly as evil men but laughably incompetent. To be fair to that film, it’s a comedy.
I’ve never been persuaded by the “inevitable decline of slavery” assumption. It rests on some convenient myths.
Even after a disembowelling defeat and Reconstruction, Southern Democrats were able to reimpose a sharecropping economy with unquestionable political and pervasive social controls which nearly reconstituted slavery. Eighty years after Appomattox, the greatest liberal Democrat in history was still unwilling to support anti-lynching laws or the most minimal voting right reforms.
What about cotton, rice, indigo, poultry/meat and timber production doomed slavery? The mule was the backbone of the southern rural economy seventy years after Lee surrendered.
Frankly, just as the genuine reconstruction of the South was occurring, the nation started to import millions of Mexicans to perform its agricultural labor, often under political and social conditions which were scarcely better than those which prevailed in Louisiana.
Sure, the slave economy might have evolved and been recast into a more benign serfdom, but the inevitable triumph of progress owing to technological factors of production is more of an assumption than a coherent theory.
Does anyone doubt that triumphant Nazis, despite their technological prowess, would still be relying on the raw labor of subject nations today.
Honestly, how much of our economy relies on the raw labor of the largest subject nation on earth?
Did you see the movie? Made after 9/11, they changed the islamist terrorists to russian nazis with swastikas on the back of their watches.
It was more of an international white supremacist conspiracy.
HBO is getting it from all sides. Activists are complaining that this series is being made by white executives and that it will surely glamorize racism.
Will the Democrat Party be portrayed accurately as the party of slavery in this new show? Doubtful. Somehow they’ll work in that myth of “the switch”. This historical fiction inevitably comes up when I point out to Democrat friends the Democrat Party’s unfortunate history of slavery, the Dred Scott decision, Jim Crow, KKK terrorist enforcement of Democrat Party supremacy in the south, etc., etc., etc. The response to this is, “but when did the switch happen?” That is, when did Democrats and Republicans magically switch their views on racial equality. My response of “what switch?” and “there’s no such thing” seems to be unsatisfying. This recent Prager U video on the subject is excellent (should be shown in schools) and the YouTube comments play out the same discussion, i.e. “when was the switch?”
This looks like it’s going to be the Kylie Jenner Pepsi commercial writ large. A big clumsy corporation run by liberals is presented with an idea. Its proponents claim it’s time has come; this has the potential to reach beyond the specialty audience and become the center of a national conversation, like “Roots” did in the late Seventies.
Then it blows up in their face like a Soviet 57 megaton bomb. And they’ll say, “We’re sorry, we’re sorry, we’re sorry…”
If it were a different war, an alternate history could be done without this much controversy. But the civil war is still passionately argued about and anyone even announcing their intention to do an alternate history about it is kicking a hornet’s nest. I don’t think people would be nearly as inflamed if HBO announced that they were going to make an alternate history show where Napolean defeated the Russians or where Germany won The Great War.
Democrats like to point to Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” as the moment when “the switch” happened. Ok then, let’s take 1970 as the approximate date when the South switched from a Democratic stronghold to GOP control.
Now if we look at the South under Democratic rule for a century from 1870-1970, what do we see? A shameful era of Jim Crow laws, legally-enforced segregation, public lynchings, and so on. Compare that to 50 years of GOP rule from 1970-2017, an era of legally-enforced desegregation, Affirmative Action, and unprecedented racial equality.
Must be a pure coincidence. Funny how all that changed overnight despite those racist Republicans being in charge…
Nixon took a big chance backing the 1957 Civil Rights bill, and Martin Luther King Jr sent him a handwritten letter thanking him profusely. King changed his tune later. So did Nixon, who I admire a great deal.
Few people who’ve ever picked up a book would say “Democrats have always been the backers of civil rights”, but then again, these days damn few people pick up a book. The liberals play games with labels, because sometimes “Democrat” is synonymous with “liberal”, but sometimes it’s not. Let’s be honest; we’re playing the same game.
Here’s a generalization that I think is bluntly true, if not in every last detail: If you’d waited for conservatives to start the civil rights revolution, or if you’d waited for liberals to defeat Communism, neither would have happened for decades after they actually did.
Back to the Future had Libyan terrorists as the bad guys, but that was back during the final years of the Cold War, when Hollywood was desperate to cast anyone besides the Russians as the villains. Even James Bond spent his time fighting Spectre, even occasionally teaming up with Russians.
To be fair, “Back to the Future” was written by Bob Gale, a totally staunch conservative (and Trumper, AFAIK), and if he’d wanted the Russians as villains, he’d have written it that way. It wouldn’t have made any sense for Doc Brown to try to get plutonium out of the Soviets.
Do you mean conservatives, as in the conservative movement largely created by WFB, or do you mean Republicans? If the latter, I’m pushing back. If only Republicans had been voting from 1870-1970, civil rights and anti-lynching laws would have happened sooner than they did, not later.
The Republicans pushed for, and the Democrats fought against both of your examples.
That’s exactly the point I’m making. Conservatives and Republicans are not the same thing. Since most of us here are gathered in the name of conservatism, not the GOP, I’m saying that the GOP has a better history of civil rights than people give them credit for. For that matter, to be fair, old time mainstream Democrats have a better history of standing up to the Soviets than we tend to give them credit for. Truman, JFK, and LBJ were not particularly peaceloving or “woke”.
But I stand by my assertion: if you’d waited for conservatives (not simply GOP-ers) to ratify civil rights, it wouldn’t have happened yet.
And if you’d waited for liberals (not Democrats) to maneuver the Soviets into quitting, it would never have happened.
Gotcha, Boss.
HBO is a Progressive hotbed. Their documentaries are uniformily geared left. My predictions:
Given lead time series will premiere in 2019-2020 season, as we enter Presidential primary season.
HBO goal will be to stoke racial tensions and consciousness in support of progressive candidates.
Confederacy will resemble apartheid South Africa, but even more repressive. Repressiveness will extend to white working class as increasingly desperate Southern aristocracy resorts to more and more divide and conquer approach in order to keep power and maintain income inequality. This allows proper progressive focus on mix of race and class.
United States will be progressive heaven, governed by “woke” diverse peoples. They will have single payer healthcare.
Rebellious blacks in the South will have a rebirth of their African heritage and see many adapt Islam in contrast to hypocritical Southern Christians. Message: Islam = Freedom; intersectionality triumphs over all!
As alternative history, everything will be bent to support themes described above.
Biggest risk for HBO: By making fantasy Confederacy so horrible may make racial concerns in today’s real America look not nearly as bad as progressives would like us to believe.
Let’s not fool ourselves that passionate argument alone will cause the controversy (and perhaps the ratings). Passionate arguments about race will cause the dustup. As well as the torture and the boobs (it’s Benioff/Weiss, right?). Maybe Alexander Stephens as a dwarf? Maybe a gay dwarf?
If you want to gainsay Gary here, I suggest reading Buckley’s “Why the South Must Prevail”. Dating the birth of the conservative movement to Buckley and then Goldwater’s candidacy and then reaching leftwards to Ripon Republicans for racial cred is a stretch. I enjoy talking about Kleagle and Exalted Cyclops Robert Byrd whenever I can, but the big picture political move of most opponents of racial progress in the South was into the GOP and towards remarkable and creditable improvement in racial attitudes.
Regarding the greater comfort and ease and simple human enjoyment of being around black Americans in the South before 1970 as opposed to the upper middle class North, that was patently and palpably true.
A transgender dwarf, so they can make a clumsy parallel about how segregated restrooms are exactly the same thing as denying a transgender male
hisher right to use the ladies’ room.Hollywood has its own equivalent of the “Buckley rule”: they’ll go as far left as is commercially viable, no less, no more. When they screw up it’s usually because they’re clueless about where the line falls. They’re in the business of affirming the left largely because their audience backs them up all the way with real cash.
Don’t believe me? Look at what happened to “The Birth of a Nation” last year. Hollywood could have closed ranks behind Nate Parker, but for once someone was so obnoxious, such an ingrate that even lib columnists said succinctly, “Life is too short to deal with him”.
Let’s just hope they don’t remake The Wizard of Oz.
Opponents of “racial progress,” or opponents of government-imposed social engineering?
Buckley conservatives opposed (and many of us still oppose) Affirmative Action, racial quotas, and public accommodation laws — not because we oppose “racial progress” but because:
A properly conservative approach to segregation would have been “let the market decide.” After all, segregation was initially imposed by Jim Crow laws, if you simply removed those laws and let each business owner decide whether or not to segregate their establishment, desegregation would likely have been slower but perhaps also less traumatic.
You already missed it. It was called Emerald City and it was a massive flop for NBC.
Meanwhile it was the progressives who were using eminent domain and urban redevelopment laws to seize and destroy whole historically black neighborhoods, replacing them with shiny new freeways and convention centers. The dispossessed residents could move into new federally-funded housing projects, which quickly turned into the crime-ridden hellholes synonymous with “The Projects.” Their welfare policies further destroyed black families and created a generation of young boys raised without fathers.
If you could erase all of that from history, and trade it for a more gradual desegregation process driven by market and social pressures rather than edicts from Washington, you’d have a very different alternative history of the past half-century, but would you really have less “racial progress?” Or might there actually be less racial tension and more upward mobility for minorities in such a parallel universe?
Don’t forget about Wicked, which (so I gather) portrays the Wicked Witch of the West as a misunderstood heroine.
Now, this one I’ll agree with you on. There was more racial equality/economic progress before the Civil Rights Act than after. Not because of the act itself, but what came with it; welfare and affirmative action.
I was more concerned with the gay dwarf orgy, frankly.
Frankly I’m surprised they chose to rehabilitate the Wicked Witch of the West. I thought Western was synonymous with imperialism, colonialism, and oppression?
Well, Buckley’s “The South Must Prevail” was written in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which attempted to provide minimal protection to voting rights. The essay also included some embarrassingly racist nonsense which Buckley later apologized for.
That Act didn’t get within light years of racial quotas, affirmative action and compulsory service laws.
Jim Crow was perhaps the most pervasive social engineering in late 19th and early 20th century America, and it certainly wasn’t color blind or a ratification of the property rights (or 2nd Amendment rights) of black Americans.
One doesn’t have to endorse substantive due process claims of the 14th and 15th Amendment to read them in an originalist light to deal centrally with politically enforced apartheid in the South.
For the Deep South in 1950, my answer to your opening question is widespread opponents of racial progress in nearly every sphere of political, economic, educational and social life, not a nuanced strict reading of the 14th and 15th Amendments.
Of course, by the late 60s Buckley was spot on constitutionally and socially and the former advocates for racial equality were beginning the movements which have racialized the country in such a destructive manner.