Liberation Road and a few others on the left have identified the ‘New Confederacy’ as our main enemy—the main enemy of the working class, communities of color, queer people, women and immigrants. In this 3-way interview, Liberation Road members pull apart the idea of the New Confederacy and its relationship to the Republican Party and Trump. They share why we see this political bloc as the main danger to our people; what we think it will take to defeat it and why this matters strategically in organizing for socialism.
Bill Fletcher Jr. (BF) is. the former president of TransAfrica Forum; a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies; an editorial board member of BlackCommentator.com; and in the leadership of several other projects. Fletcher is the author of many books, a syndicated columnist and a regular media commentator on television, radio and the Web.
BA is an organizer in the ecological justice and radical science movements.
E is a labor organizer in the U.S. South.
Who and what is the New Confederacy, and why do we believe that it is the main enemy our people must confront and defeat?
BF: “New Confederacy” or the neo-Confederates refers to the specific form of right-wing populism that we have witnessed grow in the USA. It is neo-Confederate in that its basic soul is rooted in the white settler state and the formation known as the Confederate States of America. The New Confederacy is a political alignment of secular and religious right-wing populists; elements of the white middle class particularly small business and highly paid workers; and elements of capital that believe they can control any sort of reactionary mass movement. Neo- fascists can also be found within the New Confederacy.
The New Confederacy is our main enemy because it is growing, rather than declining; it seeks to upend democratic capitalism and introduce a 21st century apartheid system in the USA and to destroy the mass organizations of the people, including trade unions. Their approach to the environmental catastrophe is both denial and open opportunism.
E: The New Confederacy is a right-wing united front that has aligned the leadership of the Republican Party and its base under the banner of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capital. We use the term “New Confederacy” because this alliance is a thru-line of American history and American racial capitalism. We have to call it what it is. The Confederacy was an alliance of Southern capitalists who decided to wage the most brutal of wars in order to preserve slavery. The New Confederacy pays allegiance to that same brutality, which has never died in American politics.
The New Confederacy hasn’t come out of nowhere; it’s been systematically built through takeovers of state legislatures, governorships and city councils. It’s in the White House and in many State Houses. Trump seemed like a surprise to many, but the takeover of the Republican Party by Trumpists builds out of the Tea Party, the Bush years, and decades of austerity from Reagan on. So the New Confederacy is an intentional alliance: the elements of capital that benefit most from it have decided that genocidal fervor is an acceptable price to pay in order to maintain their power.
BA: This political bloc shows continuity with “Confederate” history in its tendency to split away from the structures of the US in moments of crisis, when all of the contradictions have come to bear their weight. This is how the Confederates responded to Reconstruction, the New Deal, Civil Rights, and now to the ecological and economic crises.
