Well...OK, Then

I read this whole piece about a Confederate nostalgic who insisted that slavery was not the root cause of the Civil War.  We've just covered the war and Reconstruction in class, and so all of this is fresh in my mind. 

I grew up in the vestiges of the Lost Cause.  Lord knows my grandparents believed it and my dad mostly did, too.  Trying to budge him wasn't easy.  Some of it was his lack of desire to read the scholarship that has come out in the last 75 years, but there is something deeply rooted in human nature that makes us turn away from evidence that discomfits us. 

The evidence that slavery was the root cause of the Civil War is overwhelming.  It is possible to cherry pick certain words and deeds to convince yourself otherwise.  Lincoln didn't mention slavery much in the early years of the war (though Confederate leaders did).  The reason was his desire to keep slave states like Maryland and Kentucky in the Union.  (Lincoln quipped: "I'd like to have God on my side, but I have to have Kentucky.")  As he himself noted, the longer the war went on, the more firmly cemented those states became to the North.  He also disavowed full emancipation until 1862.  However, Lincoln's position - and the reason for Southern secession - was not the existence of slavery, but its spread.  Lincoln refused to allow slavery to spread west into territories like Kansas, and his opinion was shared by millions of Northerners who were not abolitionists; they were Free Soilers.  The EXISTENCE of slavery was not why the South seceded, although they assumed that Lincoln was lying about his desire to leave slavery in place where it existed.  The SPREAD of slavery was very much on Lincoln's mind.  The South had lost the slave/free state balance in the Senate and it would never come back, unless they annexed more territory to the South.  There was an effort to annex Cuba in 1854, specifically to add slave states to the Union.

Motivated reasoning has come to define much of what I believe about American politics, and it exists to some degree on both sides.  Liberals, by definition, try and adapt their beliefs to existing evidence, but they can fall into a trap that has them ignore contradictory evidence, just like anyone else.  What is so pervasive right now among the American Right is a complete distrust of objective and expert data.  Climate change is a stand-in for economics, history, other forms of science...the list goes on.  Fox and the RW infosphere have created millions of Americans like Confederate Frank.

I don't know if we can survive them.