this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2025
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If the last decade has taught me anything, it's that the civil war never ended.
Many of today's Republicans would be perfectly happy to bring back slavery, but just like they wouldn't cop to Project 2025, they just don't feel that the overton window has shifted quite enough yet to be comfortable admitting it.
That's literally exactly what has happened. This is the US without reconstruction. Lincoln might have actually done something but Johnson, the piece of shit racist that he was, basically shrugged off the war and pretended everything was all better. The south, full of hateful racist traitors, has been a festering rotting cancerous wound on the nation since then.
One of the most fascinating statistics is that a majority of white people have voted against the Democratic presidential nominee in every federal election since the Democrats supported the civil rights act on 1964. The fact the majority of the majority racial demographic were like whoa hold on let's hit the brakes here in response to the idea that black people are people is pretty revealing of some deep seated internal issues in a nation that was founded on a race based caste system.
I say race based caste system because the American/Western brand of chattel slavery practiced via the Atlantic slave trade is very different compared to slavery historically in other parts of the world. Partus sequitur ventrem meant that children born to slaves inherited the status of slave with the goal of establishing black people as a permenant underclass of livestock to remain in a state of perpetual bonded labor eternally.
This is why the story of the Haitian revolution is so powerful. Slaves expelled their slavers (the French) not once but twice and upon establishing a republic put in their constitution Slavery is forever abolished. This was decades before Britain or the US abolished slavery.
That's not true; Partus sequitur ventrem was common in many societies with slavery since ancient times. The Wikipedia article gives pre-islamic Egypt as well as Korea starting in the 11th century as examples, but is very thin on this and extremely America-centric. But also in the Ottoman empire, children of slaves were slaves themselves.
It has existed in other societies (without the same level of institutionalization or rigidity) but slavery elsewhere generally 1) Was not strictly race based and 2) had legally recognized pathways out of captivity. Generally slavery was tied to a debt that needed to be repaid or captivity during war and rather than an inherited bonded status. There are numerous stories of slaves being freed and rising to positions of prominence within society in other cultures. European enslavers genuinely believed that nonwhite, particularly black people, did not have a soul / were not fully human, which led to this level of dehumanization. When it comes to scale, impact and just profound inhumanity the European Atlantic slave trade is in a class of its own.
I would disagree that it was common in most other societies with slavery. Even in those where it was used, it was not instituted as a "generational slave workforce" intended to power a revenue engine like the plantation economies (while giving nothing back to the people/slaves that made that wealth possible).
It seems to me, as an outsider, that the union should have never accepted the surrender of the Confederates, and instead, kept going until every last racist was shot and killed.
But, two things about that.... Even after being "freed", people of color were still second class citizens, at best, and segregation continued for many years beyond the end of the war. So the problem didn't just magically go away when the slaves were freed. There were plenty of racist pieces of shit that were happy to see the blacks isolated into their own space, far away from them ....
So I'm not sure killing all of the Confederates would have made a huge difference.
The war didn't end, they just stopped saying certain things out loud. They also were far from the only racists in the country.
I'm so disappointed that there was so much progress with Obama, and he was such a good president (by comparison)... It seemed like the USA was on the way to a golden era of acceptance and equality for all.... Then this shit happened. It's like the racists were so pent up and they finally felt so oppressed by all the DEI that they hulked out and they're trying to take over, and undo the "damage" (as they see it) to the country over the last ~160 years since the civil war ended.
But WTF do I know? I'm just some guy who doesn't even live in the USA.
I agree with you.
Keep in mind that as the American civil war was winding down President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, and so his Vice President, Andrew Johnson rose to power.
(Note: keep in mind that the "democrats" and "republicans" political alignment flipped around the time of the New Deal, so during the time of the Civil War, it was the Republicans (like Lincoln) that represented the northern Union states, while the Democrats represented the southern Confederate states. "War Democrats" (like Johnson) were democrats who supported the Union. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Party_System)
And now for a bit of Civil War conspiracy theory...
Make of that what you will!