Rich Man's War, Poor Man's (Street)Fight
At the height of the Civil War in the summer of 1862, the Confederate Army instituted a draft to bolster their efforts. These policies were deeply unpopular, particularly among Southern yeoman farmers, who were much more susceptible to impressment than their elite counterparts. As a result, the maxim “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight” exploded into common parlance.
Having recently completed a semester on the Civil War, I am wary of prognostications of a second civil war by influential conservatives. However, this old wartime maxim has manifested itself again in the riots and insurrections that ravaged Middle America over the summer. Antifa and BLM have put it into stark focus as their elite puppet masters sow the seeds of violent discord into a hotly contested election.
The revolt of the Southern states was not a popular revolution. Neither is our current one. Both were built and conducted by the elite, for the elite. From their ideological frameworks to the boots on the ground, both rebellions were always a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.
Their Ideologies Had Elite Roots
The dominant ideology in the South that undergirded secession and the war was the “positive good” slave theory, the idea that slavery was both an economic boon and a benefit for a race that was considered to be below regular society. The South’s leading advocates for slave ideology were John C. Calhoun and James Henry Hammond, both career politicians. The leading intellectual pro-slavery tract was authored by South Carolina jurist and politician William Harper, Hammond, then governor of South Carolina, J. Marion Sims, an Alabama physician, and Thomas Roderick Dew, president of the College of William & Mary. It was further perpetuated by a cadre of other public intellectuals such as social theorist George Fitzhugh, planter Edmund Ruffin, jurist, legal scholar, and essayist Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, Professor George Frederick Holmes, and novelist and historian William Gilmore Simms.
The current crop of insurrectionists spring up from another class-based, discriminatory ideological frame: Critical Race Theory, and its offshoot, Intersectionality. This system of ideas, which supposes that society is actively engaged in the oppression of women and minorities, while simultaneously granting white people a series of unmerited “privileges,” was founded by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, then a student at Harvard Law, and is being peddled by a cadre of academics, including, Crenshaw, Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. It is being disseminated in the press by writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates and by Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times’s 1619 Project, and into the culture through the Black Lives Matter movement, whose founders admitted to being “trained Marxists.”
The Elites’ Proxy Fighters
At the heart of both the old and new insurrections was/is a fight to unmake the constitution of the nation in order to preserve the elites’ political order. The Southern planter class spent years campaigning to maintain and expand the institution of slavery in order to maintain their power. The current revolution is interested in maintaining and expanding “wokeness” for the same reason.
Both of these revolutions have also been proxy wars where the elites used the lower classes to fight their battles. The Confederate elite used substitutions and exemptions. Our current elites use their powerful fundraising apparatuses to organize protests which inevitably turn into riots. Consequently, both insurrections were mostly comprised of the disenfranchised. Most of the Confederate soldiers were poor yeoman farmers who held a few or no slaves. The rioters are mostly lower-middle class millennials deprived of the American Dream by useless college degrees.
Both factions were bound to the cause by ideological agreement, and by a twofold set of rationalizations: first, that their cause was just. Both the rebels and the rioters were fighting for some extra-constitutional, loosely defined set of “rights.” Second, that they were simply defending themselves from State Aggression. This excuse was prevalent in the Confederate Army during the war, and developed into the South’s “lost cause” theory. It has also been the excuse given by every Antifa member who would talk to a journalist since 2016. They rationalized themselves as the defenders of the oppressed from the “violence” of “systemic oppression” as well as of themselves from the aggression of the police.
As we brace for a post-election mired in further street violence, and an inevitable backlash from the elites should President Trump win re-election, we should remember the words of General George McClellan, who wrote in an 1862 letter to President Abraham Lincoln, “It should not be, at all, a War upon population; but against armed forces and political organizations.” Once the street violence in our cities is put down, conservatives should turn their eyes toward the real enemy. Because if the elites get their way, America as we know it may cease to exist.