The Neo-Confederate Movement and Donald Trump

The Old South will rise again if this crucial part of the GOP coalition gains power

The American Civil War echoes in the 2024 presidential race, and in five Southern states — Texas, Tennessee, Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi — where Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s birthday is still celebrated alongside Martin Luther King’s birthday.

Donald Trump's remarks that the Civil War could have been avoided by negotiation and Nikki Haley’s statement neglecting to mention slavery as the chief cause of the conflict have been widely condemned in mainstream media as historically ignorant.

What the critics miss is that both Trump and Haley were signaling respect to the growing faction of Neo-Confederates in the Republican Party. There are hundreds of Confederate groups on Facebook with what appear to be thousands of members. Their network could be a crucial part of the coalition needed to win the GOP nomination and energize the base for the 2024 election.

You don’t have to be a Southerner to be part of the neo-Confederate movement, bound together by racial grievance, New York Magazine‘s Ed Kilgore reported in 2022. “The South is no longer simply a region: A certain version of it has become an identity shared among white, rural, conservative Americans from coast to coast.” Click.

“Support for Confederate symbols and monuments follows lines of race, religion, and education rather than geography,” wrote David A. Graham in The Atlantic around the same time.

After the removal of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s statue from the center of Richmond, VA in 2021, I surveyed and reported on the hostile online reaction, and how Trump played to the fears of these people.

I have since observed how enduring the neo-Confederate movement is. Not surprisingly, it is especially noticeable in South Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union on December 20, 1860 after Abraham Lincoln’s election as president that November. South Carolina’s secession “precipitated the outbreak of the American Civil War in Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861,” according to a National Park Service commemoration.

In South Carolina’s capital, Columbia, there’s Shotwell Publishing, which produces “Southern Books. No Apologies. We love the South—its history, traditions, and culture—and are proud of our inheritance as Southerners. Our books are a reflection of this love.” It produces books that criticize the Republican Party from the right: