In the Rearview Mirror: The Weight of Dead Generations

Marx was wrong. He famously declared that “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” But it turns out that, for some, the remembered past can act like a tonic, an inspirational elixir, even a promissory note. Over the course of American history, popular movements of resistance and rebellion have sometimes resolutely turned their backs on the future in concerted efforts to return to some mythic golden age. Others have enlisted their collective recollections of the past to fashion an emancipated new way of life.

As the sesquicentennial of the Civil War begins, we are reminded of this plasticity of historical memory and the way it gets deployed to resolve contemporary dilemmas. Commemorations of the Civil War functioned for generations in the South to reinforce commitment to the Confederacy’s “Lost Cause.” “Confederate Balls,” reenactments of Jefferson Davis’s inauguration, and the like had a political purpose in solidifying core beliefs about white supremacy, states’ rights, and loyalty to the region’s all-white Democratic Party. Around the turn of the twentieth century, when the hot-blooded emotions of the war had finally cooled enough, the “Lost Cause” got nationalized and found a home in the North as well. There it served to turn a conflict over freedom and slavery into a shared national tragedy that hid the country’s ugly racial pathology.

In the South, that distinctive recall of the past at the same time worked to replenish the soil of social subservience, leaving the Southern oligarchy of landlords, merchants, and their political facilitators in charge. Still, for legions of true believers, the “Lost Cause” was empowering, firing resistance to both Reconstruction and subsequent attempts to end American apartheid. For a long century, most white Southerners reveled in their peculiar version of the past, used it to define their moral imagination, and mobilized politically on its behalf; but they were imprisoned by it, unable to envision a future that would liberate them from hierarchies of the South’s caste-based political economy. Already, the sesquicentennial has shown us there’s life still left in that old dog: Haley Barbour, the governor of Mississippi, recalls that life in 1960s Yazoo City wasn’t all that bad as the White Citizens’ Council kept the Klan at bay, and Virginia’s governor “forgot” to mention slavery in his sesquicentennial proclamation. Dream and nightmare!

Using and being used by the past is hardly unique to partisans of the Old South. Take the Tea Party. Memories of its revolutionary-era forefathers—no matter how fantastical the images of that revered past may be—incite among Tea Party partisans an enthusiasm to restore an idealized world of self-reliant heroism. Government—whether it’s King George’s or Barack Obama’s—is the great enemy; dependency its toxic seduction. No one actually contemplates donning knee breeches and pinafores, however. Rather, for Tea Party followers the nearest historic exemplar of what they want to see restored is a kind of Disneyland version of small town/suburban yesteryear: nuclear families, conventional marriage, home ownership, Christian morals, cultural and racial homogeneity, and economic self-sufficiency. One might call this the twenty-first century version of a romanticized family capitalism; profoundly sentimental insofar as it ignores how utterly dependent that suburban arcadia was on an intricate network of federal, state, and local government programs and bureaucracies.

Like those who once rallied to “The South Shall Rise Again,” the Tea Party rises in righteous resistance to reclaim the way we never were. It draws its energy from an imaginary past. But that same fantasy disarms it. After all, what helped set off the uproar a year or so ago were government bailouts of Wall Street fat cats. Tea Party militants, however, have reset their sights not on big business and finance—such anti-capitalism cuts too close to home—but on the leviathan state, in particular what’s left of its social-welfare apparatus. Back to the future may tickle the fancy and win votes but, without a real alternative to corporate...