Making Sense of McDonnell's Confederate Nostalgia

One month after the passage of Obamacare and one year after the bailouts, Virginia Gov. McDonnell was issuing a coded appeal -- but not just on race alone. He was commemorating an era when states were largely left alone by the "big bad" Feds.

For all this talk about Bob McDonnell, I'm surprised that there is so little autopsying for the real motive for what he just did, aside from playing the race card and snubbing Obama (and there is more than just that).   Does anybody think that his commemoration of states performing the ultimate "nullification" coming just one month after the individual mandate and on the one-year anniversary of the bailouts is an accident?   Well before the current furor, many were saying that his state's plan to defy the mandate was little more than a rewind to 1860.  (As much as I dislike the mandate, I said in an earlier blogpost that Virginia's strategy came all too close.)  Add in their lingering resentments -- not just over race, but Roe vs. Wade, Lawrence vs. Texas, "bitter voters clinging to guns 'n religion", and motion pictures, TV, and mainstream publishing that comes exclusively from the blue state coasts -- and it seems almost predictable McDonnell would pull this stunt.

Yes, Virginia -- the Civil War was about slavery.  And just as with the Holocaust, nothing can or should dilute the horror of an era where human beings were lynched, legally raped, burned alive, sold as private property, and legally forbidden to practice their religions of choice, vote, or even read and write. Slavery is, was, and always will and should be the definitive issue of the "war between the States".

But, as my liberal, Jewish, college history professor recalled, it was ALSO about two separate and mutually exclusive economies, political systems, and lifestyles (one of which was based upon slavery) -- and by the mid-late 19th century, as they used to say in the westerns, "There ain't room fer the both of us, pardner."   No accident that the 1860s were just when the Industrial Revolution and railways were starting to gain steam (pun intended).   If the U.S. was to be anything more than a backwater runaway home for Britons and Germans, it needed to have a strong, central 'brand' and voice in its affairs.  Continuing to exist with economic split-personality syndrome would not have been tenable.   (Surprise, surprise:  the next round of intense federal intervention happened from Franklin Roosevelt to LBJ and Nixon, as the economy transitioned from a farm-based, every-man-for-himself, entrepreneurial Little House on the Prairie/ Waltons era to the suburbanization and The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit corporatism of WWII, the Cold War, and the 1940s-1970s postwar era.)

McDonnell was issuing a coded appeal -- but not just on race alone:  He was commemorating, with what Herb Caen used to call "the desperate strength of the moribund", a time and era when states and the lifestyles that defined them were largely left alone by the "big bad" Feds.  An era that inconvenient truths and necessities from the bailout to the War on Terror to Katrina to gay marriage (all of which require nothing less than muscle-bound federal intervention) have ensured is now Gone With the Wind.