The Occupation: Has Lincoln’s America Finally Been Replaced by a Victorious Confederacy?

Maybe not quite yet.

A montage of President Donald Trump signing a flurry of Executive Orders designed by Project 2025 architects to dismantle the American government, crash the American economy, and abandon America’s allies. Reprinted under Fair Use.

Interestingly, the oath to defend the Constitution against “all enemies, foreign and domestic” is not found anywhere in the original body of the Constitution. The only oath spelled out in the Constitution is the Presidential oath, which does not refer to “enemies”, but simply requires the President to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution. For other officials, including members of Congress, the Constitution only specifies that they “shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation to support this constitution.” In 1789 the First Congress adopted a simple oath: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support the Constitution of the United States.”

In April 1861, following the outbreak of the Civil War, President Lincoln ordered all federal civilian employees within the executive branch to take an expanded oath. This oath, called the “Ironclad Test Oath”, called not only for defending the Constitution in the future, but required all civilian and military officials to swear or affirm that they had never aided or encouraged “persons engaged in armed hostility” against the United States in the past — in other words, that they had never supported the Confederacy. In 1884, Congress deleted that reference to past loyalties, leaving us with the oath that every incoming Representative and Senator takes today:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.”

So it took a bloody civil war that left nearly 700,000 Americans dead (source) for our federal government to formally recognize that America’s enemies could emerge from within the house, not just outside.

Today, we face a situation as dire as any the country has faced before. Consider this thought experiment: suppose the Confederacy had won the Civil War and installed an occupying government in the North, loyal to the South, and dedicated to ensuring that the Northern states could never rise up again to threaten the hard-fought Confederate victory? How would the policies and actions of that hypothetical occupying regime differ from what we are witnessing today? The argument I want to make here is that these two scenarios are essentially identical:

What is happening in America today is indistinguishable from what would be happening if the Confederacy had won the Civil War and was now dismantling the North to ensure it could never challenge the victorious South again.

With the exception of explicitly calling it a revival of the Confederacy, this is hardly a novel interpretation of our current regime. Heather Cox Richardson, the brilliant historian whose daily missives are essential reading for anyone trying to understand what is happening in our country, has described the situation simply and harshly:

“the goal of those currently in power was never simply to change the policies or the personnel of the U.S. government. Their goal is to dismantle the central pillars of the United States of America — government, law, business, education, culture, and so on — because they believe the very shape of those institutions serves what they call “the Left.” (source)

That the Republican Party was fully on board with this agenda was clear in the aftermath of Jan 6. In the words of Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky:

“… between November 2020 and January 2021, the bulk of the Republican Party refused to accept defeat, refused to denounce violence, refused to break with openly anti-democratic extremism. From top to bottom, the Republican Party has ceased to be a loyal democratic party. (source)

Now that Donald Trump is back in the White House and Republican apparatchiks control both the House and the Senate, we need to take seriously the verdict of former Republican leader Mitt Romney, who recently opined to a biographer:

“A very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” (source)

If the Trump 2.0 regime wanted to model America after the Confederacy, would it do anything differently?

In asking this question, we immediately run into the problem of intentionality. Who, exactly, intended this to happen? To determine that, we simply need to follow the money. In this case, the money leads us back to a very specific initiative, Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page playbook for destroying liberal democratic America. Whose intention was it to write and and implement this manifesto of destruction? None other than a same subset of morbidly rich sociopaths who have funded the Republican Party for decades, invested heavily in filling the Judiciary with anti-Constitutional warriors, and turned Red States into “laboratories of autocracy” where rights and services could be cast aside by unaccountable super-majorities of Republican legislators.

Imagine for a moment you were the money boys behind Project 2025. Imagine further you wanted to neutralize a recently defeated adversary (the woke Left, aka the Blue States of America) whose territory you now occupied. How would you proceed? My guess is you would install a Vichy-like occupying government to oversee the dismantling of the defeated enemy. You would give that government one crucial task: to ensure that the adversary could never again accumulate enough power to dislodge you.

What would your occupying government do to secure that crucial task? You would basically want to do several things:

• You would want to install an easily manipulated, not very bright figurehead to provide the illusion of leadership for your occupation.
• You would want to keep the people in permanent subjugation and fear.
• You would want to undo the government’s ability to generate wealth and project power, redirecting the nation’s income streams into the coffers of your newly-minted dictator and his cabal of loyal oligarchs.
• You would want to eliminate key government functions and services so people would no longer be able to rely on the government for basic services and protections.
• You would want to replace the rule of law with the rule of loyalty to the Supreme Leader.
• You would want to dismantle the nation’s ability to generate science and innovation, you would want to destroy the universities.
• You would want to weaken or destroy any potential resistance to your occupation by silencing or delegitimizing traditional channels of information flow, that is, the mainstream media.

Unsurprisingly, the Trump 2.0 Administration is working diligently on all these fronts.

What we’ve lost, what we can recover

Unlike any other nation, the United States was designed. Our Constitution is not a legal framework wrapped around some exclusive community of like-minded people. It is not based on some concept of “blood and soil.” The United States was consciously designed by its Founders to be nothing less than an engine of human progress. It was built to evolve, to grow, and to embrace not just one bloodline of people, but all people who wish to join in the radical experiment it promised.

The Founders could not imagine what we would become. To their infinite credit, they were not interested in institutionalizing the status quo. Yes, they wrote a Constitution that inevitably reflected their time and place: a vast, rich land dominated by white, male landowners. But the American Constitution has survived over 240 years because it created a structure that transcended its origins, that provided a framework not only for surviving change, but for deliberately instigating, demanding, and incorporating change.

Americans today forget at their peril that our Founding Fathers were true revolutionaries, perhaps the last great generation of revolutionaries assembled in one place at one time on this earth. They designed a form of government that embodied the radical values and principles of the Enlightenment: “self-evident truths” that all men were created equal and held inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Their first purpose was to create a political system that could sustain and expand those values while navigating and shaping a future they knew they could neither imagine nor predict. Their second purpose was to protect this system from the ambitions of tyrants, whether arising from within or without.

To accomplish these twin goals, the American democracy was built on five pillars:

1. A federal government of separate but equal branches, with complementary powers and built-in “checks and balances” to limit domination by any one branch.
2. A separate system of State and local governments, to offset the powers of the Federal government and ensure that local and regional interests were represented.
3. A national electoral system and calendar of elections to ensure that officials were regularly held accountable by the people they were elected to represent.
4. A free and unfettered Press, to create transparency and hold the whole system accountable.
5. An explicit declaration of crucial citizens’ rights, enabling them to hold their government accountable at all levels: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

These pillars were designed to work together like the gears of a watch. Break any one of them and the system stops working. Break all of them and the system is no longer a democracy, it is a tyranny.

Since its ratification on June 21, 1788, the American Constitution has survived a staggering series of societal, political, and global upheavals: an industrial revolution; a civil war; an end to slavery; women’s suffrage; robber barons and plutocrats; two world wars; a great depression; a slow and painful expansion of civil rights; ill-conceived military adventures; and global terrorism. Each of these upheavals began with a crisis that could not be denied, triggered a massive mobilization of energy and effort, and resulted in a new version of American that could not have been predicted before the crisis began. Each transition demanded a radical reimagining of what America was and what it could be.

Today we face another moment of crisis, choice, and transition. We face perhaps our darkest hour since the 1860s. Simultaneously, we find ourselves exposed to the fundamental fragility of our society and the fundamental corruptibility of our political system.

It’s the Republican Party, Stupid!

The proximate cause of our discontent today is the national Republican Party. There are deeper fissures, of course, but the purpose of the Republican Party is to exacerbate and manipulate every possible division in the American public to its own advantage. As we now see, once in power they are not merely obstructionists, they are traitors, seditionists, and insurrectionists. Until they are removed from the political playing field, America cannot reasonably expect to emerge from the chaos Trump 2.0 and its Republican enablers have inflicted on the nation.

Cartoon by Randy Molton, 2015. Image source: Robert Reich on Substack, 2023.

Since making its original deal-with-the-devil in 1968, when it adopted Nixon’s Southern Strategy to win the support of Southern white voters by embracing their racism against Black Americans, the Republican Party has devolved into a heavily-funded, highly-connected hate group that traffics in racism and grievance for the sole purpose of staying in power to continue funneling massive sums of money out of the US Treasury and into the pockets of its wealthy benefactors and sponsors.

Under Donald Trump, the Party has reached peak fascism. It is no longer merely a fomenter of hate and division, it is now the owner and operator of the Federal Government of the United States. In the wake of this victory, it has fully revealed its core values. As noted above, those core values bear a disturbing resemblance to the a racist ideology and oligarchic ambitions of the American Confederacy. Donald Trump has essentially declared war on the American Constitution. The Republican Party (along with the rightwing majority in the Supreme Court) has aided and abetted him in this effort. In so doing, the Party has not just failed to defend the Constitution against “domestic enemies”, it has become a domestic enemy of the Constitution. Just like the Confederate Party that preceded and inspired it.

Is this hyperbole?

Consider the five pillars of American democracy described above. These are the principles that hold our democracy together, the foundational elements of the Founders’ design. Republicans in office — not just Trump — are today actively undermining at least four of these pillars (the one exception being the rights of states and localities, which they have successfully manipulated to their advantage for years).

Republicans see democracy as their enemy. They see any American not wearing a MAGA hat as their enemy. Under Trump 2.0, they and their wealthy handlers are attempting to replace our democracy with a kleptocratic plutocracy. They know that under our existing democracy, they will be a minority party forever. They know the demographics are baked in. They know they can only hold power in the long run by installing a minority government based on police power and white supremacy. It is their only option, other than extinction. It is our job as American patriots to make sure they fail to achieve that option.

We have to be realistic. Republicans have a lock on our federal government until the next Congress is sworn in on January 3, 2027. All signs indicate that Democrats will enjoy a healthy majority in that new Congress (source). All we can do in the meantime is exercise our Constitutional rights to resist Republican and Trumpian sedition whenever and wherever we can. In the interim, we can begin imagining what the next version of our American experiment should look like.

Reimagining America. Where do we go from here?

When I try to imagine a just and humane American future, in which a rogue Republican Party is not around to gum up the works, I think of our Constitution’s founding principles of equality and freedom, and of those inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to which it is dedicated.

It seems to me a perfect place to start in reimagining America after the fall of Trump (and it will be a fall) is to look back to Franklin Roosevelt’s last State of the Union address, delivered on January 11, 1944 (source). Anticipating the America that would emerge from the devastation of World War II, Roosevelt observed that our Bill of Rights was focused on protecting crucial political rights that enabled “life and liberty,” but modern America now required a greater focus on “the pursuit of happiness.” Having survived a Great Depression and a Great War, Roosevelt believed America had learned an important lesson:

“We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” (source, emphasis added)

Roosevelt proposed a new Bill of Rights, an Economic Bill of Rights, “under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all — regardless of station, race, or creed.” Listing these rights today, and comparing them to our current crisis, reveals how badly we have failed to build a just and humane America. Imagine a United States in which these rights are protected and respected:

• The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
• The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
• The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
• The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
• The right of every family to a decent home;
• The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
• The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
• The right to a good education.

As Roosevelt concluded:

“All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.”

It is not a coincidence that every one of these rights has been actively and aggressively resisted by the modern Republican Party. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that Republican policies, to the extent they exist, form a kind of evil negation of each of these rights. The Republican Party today is dedicated to resisting fair wages, removing food programs for poor children, embracing corporate monopolies, demonizing unions, denying healthcare to millions of Americans, polluting our air and water, cutting Social Security and other safety-net benefits, and reserving good education for the wealthy and privileged only. Fundamentally, It is impossible to imagine America rising out of its present state of despair with a Republican Party continuing to wield power anywhere in the American government, whether at federal, state, or local levels.

Banishing the Republican Party from national power is a necessary but not sufficient condition for American revival and global survival. It is just a first step. Think of it as clearing away the rubbish so we can finally remodel the house to withstand the real storm looming before us: saving our civilization from extinction due to climate catastrophe.

Never was the Republican Party more dangerous to the future of America and the world. Never was imagination more needed.