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COMMENTARY

Trumpism without Trump:

Maybe he's beginning to
fade — but the danger to
democracy isn't
Trump's 2020 "Lost Cause" ideology has taught Republicans how to
seize power — and they may not need him anymore

By PAUL ROSENBERG PUBLISHED JUNE 12, 2022 1:07PM (EDT)

Former President Donald Trump speaks on May 28, 2022 in Casper, Wyoming. (Chet Strange/Getty Images)
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D
onald Trump's recent endorsement struggles (most notably in Georgia) in the

weeks leading up to House Jan. 6 hearings have led to renewed speculation that

the former president is losing his grip on the Republican Party. In fact, recent

reporting suggests that several prominent Republicans are likely to run for president in 2024,

whether or not Trump himself launches a third campaign. But let's put that in the proper

context: Trump's oft-repeated Big Lie about the stolen 2020 election has been called the new

"Lost Cause" (in literally hundreds of articles) but it's only one facet of a broader mindset that

has moved to the center of GOP politics — and none of that is going away, regardless of

what happens to Trump as a person or a political figure.

That mindset is rooted in Trump's claim that the system is specifically and maliciously rigged

against his base — meaning white Christian conservatives, especially men, who are

wholesome, innocent victims of malevolent outside forces, sinister elites and dangerous

minorities. This echoes the Lost Cause reframing of the Civil War to cast white Southerners

as the noble and innocent victims of similar malevolent forces. Freedom, not slavery, was the

cause the South fought for, according to the Lost Cause story goes — "freedom" defined as

"states' rights," but only for certain states and on certain issues, of course. Their soldiers, led

by General Robert E. Lee, — were depicted as the greatest and most noble warriors of

history. That's the heart of the big lie that Trump's big lie echoes, as attested by the

Confederate flags carried into the Capitol during Trump's failed coup  attempt, and echoed in

his repeated defense of Confederate monuments that wildly misrepresent history.

The "great replacement" theory echoes the same basic claim of victimhood, as do a number

of other Trump-era big lies: the "fake news" deflection of all damaging revelations, the QAnon

conspiracy theory, the "critical race theory" panic and the related anti-"woke" crusade. (It also
underlies Fox News' decision not to air the Jan. 6 hearings — a point I'll return to below.) 

With all these victimhood narratives in place, it's ludicrous to expect the return of a "strong,

responsible" GOP that Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden and the never-Trump Republicans yearn for. 

RELATED: To indict Donald Trump, prosecutors will need to prove intent. Well, here it

is

Two days after the Jan. 6 insurrection, historian Karen L. Cox drew striking parallels, in a

New York Times op-ed, between Trump's wholesale mendacity and the "Lost Cause" of the

Confederacy, whose central hero was Robert E. Lee. "Mr. Trump's lost cause mirrors that of

Lee's," she wrote. "His dedicated followers do not see him as having failed them, but as a

man who was failed by others. Mr. Trump best represents their values — even those of white

supremacy — and the cause he represents is their cause, too."

But in both cases, the myths were bigger than the men, Cox continued:

The Lost Cause did not belong to Lee; Lee belonged to the Lost Cause — a

cultural phenomenon whose momentum could not be stopped.

Even if Mr. Trump were to remove himself from public life in the coming

years, his lost cause and the myths he's helped create about elections, voter

fraud and fake news will likely continue, a cultural and political phenomenon

that shows no sign of ending.

Cox is hardly alone in making this point.  Five years earlier political scientist Angie Maxwell,

co-author of "The Long Southern Strategy" (Salon interview here), identified Trump's

candidacy with the Lost Cause. "Southern white support for Trump is not just about losing the

Civil War. It's about losing, period," she wrote. Nor was it limited to the South, even if that

was where he ran strongest. "Trump's Southern strategy turns out to be less about

geography and more about identity. And many want to go back to an America in which

people like them run the show," Maxwell wrote. While race was clearly a fundamental

ingredient, the defensive logic goes much farther:

Southern whiteness expands beyond racial identity and supremacy,

encapsulating rigid stances on religion, education, the role of government,

the view of art, an opposition to science and expertise and immigrants and

feminism, and any other topic that comes under attack. This ideological web

of inseparable strands envelops a community and covers everything, and it

is easily (and intentionally by Donald Trump) snagged.

All this was in place before Trump ran in 2016, but it wasn't center stage in American

conservative politics. Now it is. And even if Trump leaves the stage, the play will go on.

Evidence to that effect is overwhelming. As noted above, the same basic victimhood mindset

underlies the Fox News decision not to air the Jan. 6 hearings, catering to the whole

spectrum of reality-denying narratives about Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 election.

"There is a kind of perverse public service standard there. Fox is protecting its public from the

news," NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen tweeted. "It has made the call that the

committed audience won't stand for having the hearings 'shoved down our throats.'" This may

not qualify as new information, but Fox News is in the identity-protection business, not the
"news" business. That quasi-cult identity has been reshaped by Trump over the past seven

years, even as he previously reshaped himself as someone capable of doing that.  

Republicans like Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger

successfully defied Trump's efforts to steal the 2020 election, and then defeated Trump-

endorsed candidates. But it's important to understand that they're committed to project of

potentially stealing future elections, by repeating, amplifying and acting on a subset of

election lies that they're personally most comfortable with — which of course could always

shift again in the future. 

That's precisely what happened with the original Lost Cause, as historian Adam Domby

explores in "The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate

Memory," which focuses on the unique political culture and history of North Carolina. "The

construction of a coherent Lost Cause narrative was not always a deliberate process,"

Domby writes. "At times, it was an organic one built on minor exaggerations and fabrications

woven into daily life. Some stories were created to serve a specific purpose for an individual,

often for monetary gain; others, to garner social capital; and others still to aid in political

mobilization." A similar narrative mishmash was used by many so-called conservatives, first

to justify supporting Trump in 2016, then to explain away his 2020 election loss, and now to

justify or explain away the Jan. 6 insurrection. In every case, a supposedly conservative, no-

nonsense, traditionally-minded population engaged in fanciful, inventive storytelling in order

to create a new comfort zone and then inhabit it.

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As noted above, the core of the Lost Cause lay in denial about the central cause of the Civil

War and in portraying the Confederacy as engaged in an heroic struggle for freedom, not

slavery: "freedom" defined as states' rights to self-determination, thus turning the North into a

tyrannical bogeyman. "This allowed Confederates to be recalled not as traitors but as noble

patriots fighting to defend a set of principles that survived the war despite defeat on the

battlefield," Domby notes. "In addition to a new gallant cause, this narrative required a legacy

of valiant military deeds. The Lost Cause presented Confederate soldiers as the greatest in

human history, warriors who only lost the war due to the overwhelming resources of the

North." 

These key elements shaped others, such as the disappearance from historical accounts of

any white Southern opposition to slavery or secession and the historical fabrication of "Black

Confederates," along with the disappearance of mass Black resistance.

"Confederate mythmakers excised the memory of southern dissenters, Unionists, deserters,

draft dodgers, and even ambivalent southerners from their retelling of the war," Domby

writes. "Neither black nor white North Carolinians of the Civil War generation believed there

had been black Confederate troops during the conflict," but the long-belated creation of

"Class B" pensions for formerly enslaved people "reinforced white supremacy by

perpetuating a myth of widespread loyal slaves," even though the arguments made for such

pensions around the turn of the century "made clear that the loyalty being rewarded was to

white slave owners rather than the Confederate state." Only in the last two decades has the

existence of these pensions been trotted out to argue that enslaved people fought for the

Confederacy in any meaningful sense.

Domby's book is strongest in illuminating how these different strands weave together, serving

different subjects and their shifting needs over time. For simplicity's sake, military historian
Edward Bonekemper's "The Myth of the Lost Cause" effectively demolishes the core of that

false narrative. He identifies seven main tenets that fall into two main categories: The first

two are devoted to denying the central role of slavery in the conflict, and the rest to casting

the war in chivalric terms, with Lee as doomed hero. Although he devotes separate chapters

to refuting each tenet, two brief passages effectively refute the first four tenets in just a few

sentences. 

The first two tenets are these:

Slavery was a benevolent institution for all involved but was dying by 1861.

There was therefore no need to abolish slavery suddenly, especially by war.

States' rights, not slavery, was the cause of secession and the establishment

of the Confederacy and thus of the Civil War.

In response, Bonekemper cites one simple fact: When the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act was

strengthened in 1850, "the fear of being kidnapped and sold into slavery led some fifteen to

twenty thousand free Northern blacks to migrate to Canada between 1850 and 1860." This

terror-driven mass migration is clearly incompatible with the invented notion that slavery was

on the way out, or that the South was genuinely committed to the principle of states' rights.  

The next two tenets — central  to the chivalric account — are also quickly demolished.:

The Confederacy had no chance of winning, but did the best it could with its

limited resources.
 Indeed, it almost won, led by Robert E. Lee, one of the greatest generals in

history.

Bonekemper points out, however, that in military terms, "All the Confederacy needed was a

stalemate, which would confirm its existence as a separate country. The burden was on the

North to defeat the Confederacy and compel the return of the eleven wayward states to the

Union." 

If Lee had really been "one of the greatest generals in history," surely he would have

understood this. Instead, he pushed for dramatic victories, leading to catastrophic defeat.

Bonekemper has written an entire book on that topic, "How Robert E. Lee Lost the Civil War,"

but this observation alone suffices to pierce the great man's myth. A military commander's

first responsibility is grand strategy (as we have seen more recently in Ukraine), and getting

that wrong is to inflict carnage and defeat on your own troops.

Of course historians have much more to say about these questions, but the point here is that

the Confederate Lost Cause myth can be refuted with a few straightforward facts — and the

same is true of Donald Trump's 2020 Lost Cause. The 63 court cases Trump and his allies

lost offered absolutely no hard evidence for his stolen-election claims, and we just heard

former Attorney General Bill Barr, no friend to the Democrats, calling many of those claims

"complete nonsense," "crazy stuff" or simply "bullshit." We also now know that Trump's

internal campaign operatives, who had remained loyal through and after Election Day, told

him clearly he had lost, and that his own daughter took Barr's word for it. 

But here's the thing about myths: They generally can't be punctured by evidence. What

matters for myths is their power to make meaning, as Karen Armstrong argues in the
introduction to "The Battle for God." Secondly and even more important, the consequences of

Trump's election lies continue to unfold: There's a vigorous multi-pronged effort to enable

Republicans to win the White House in 2024, regardless of what voters want and regardless

of whether Trump himself is the candidate. In other words, Trump's Lost Cause myth is still

thriving, even if it will never give him what he wants most: erasing the stigma of being a

loser. 

Kemp and Raffensperger's success in winning re-election despite Trump is evidence, in fact,

that Trumpism can continue even without its namesake. Much the same can be said about

the other Trump-era big lies I referenced above. The QAnon cult began, for example, to

deflect attention from Robert Mueller's investigation deflection, although it had deep roots in

American conspiracy culture and historical antisemitism. Ambiguity was part of its DNA,

morphing in all manner of ways, so the end  of the Mueller investigation without any payoff

made little difference to its spread, and belief in QAnon has reportedly increased since Trump

left office, even though he can no longer order the mass arrests of alleged pedophile liberals.

Similarly, the hollowness of the "critical race theory" panic, as captured in Don Moynihan's

"Bullshit, Branding and CRT," is its not-so-secret source of strength. If Trumpism is our real

problem, more than Donald Trump as a figurehead or actual candidate, then opponents of

Trumpism need an appropriate counter-myth. Trump triumphed over the rest of the

Republican field in 2016 because conventional conservatism had utterly failed to deliver on

its promises.

Conservatives have excelled at winning elections and gaining political power, as shown in

Edmund Fawcett's historical overview, "Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition" (author

interview here.) But exercising political power hasn't gone nearly as well — because

conservative solutions based on ideologies of "small government" and the "free market"
simply don't work.  Rather than running away from "big government" as Democrats have

habitually done, at least since the Clinton years, liberals and progressives need to think

constructively about how to make government serve people better — not just as a matter of

policy, but as a way of shared meaning-making, because that's literally what it is. 

This is most visible in public schools, public libraries, public parks and other such areas of

the commons, as explored in the recent book "The Privatization of Everything" (author

interview here), yet we consistently fail to recognize or celebrate that, let alone be guided by

it in more difficult realms, such as responding to crime or inflation, to cite two highly relevant

examples. 

The essence of democracy is the promise that the people, acting together, can shape a

better world. When democracy fails to deliver, openings are created for autocrats, who will

promising impossible, quasi-utopian solutions in order to gain power. Once they have power,

as we have recently discovered, they never give it up willingly. By allowing anti-government

conservatives to hold power for far too long, along with their Democratic appeasers, we have

left ourselves vulnerable to authoritarian takeover. Even if Donald Trump is beginning to fade

from the scene, that danger is very much still with us.

Read more on our 45th president and his long-term effects:

Liz Cheney to GOP and America: Trump did it, and we're coming for him

Trump dances for the NRA: America's emotional health is critical and getting worse

Trump ignites a fury from his MAGA base after endorsing Kevin McCarthy for re-

election