Thinking On Disunion

 I have MSNBC reporting on how Donald Trump and the Republicans persist in restricting voting, denying Trump's loss in the election, and generally act in an undemocratic manner while at the same time reading Ed Simon's As Far from Heaven as Possible: How Henry Wadsworth Longfellow interpreted Reconstruction by translating Dante in Lapham's Quarterly. Longfellow seems to be making a comeback. This short essay amy give you a reason for giving him a bit more respect. I found this passage worthwhile in these days of resurgent white supremacy.  This country may have done much on the basis of the alleged supremacy of white people, but this was also a denial, a betrayal, of the American creed.

For Dante, treason—whether betrayal of kindred, country, or God—was the sin most deserving of punishment because it severed the connections that made the maintenance of a commonwealth possible. Implicit within this framework is the idea of covenant, that the loyal upholding of a creed must be established among a community and with their God. New England intellectuals like Longfellow saw covenant at the core of American identity, a creed expressed in Thomas Jefferson’s declaration that “all men are created equal.” Like most Northerners, Longfellow understood the insurrection that began at Fort Sumter as a betrayal of the nation, but more importantly it was treason against the noble creed of the United States itself, something admitted by the Confederate vice president Alexander H. Stephens—who in an infamous 1861 address declared that “our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas” of the Declaration of Independence, for “its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition,"

The Confederates were  losers.  Their ideas are the ideas of losers. Emulating them will do nothing to make America great.