Trumpist White Nationalists Want “Dixie Land” Back
They may know little of the song’s history, but old times there are decidedly not forgotten
The other day the song “Dixie” came up in conversation. My wife asked what was up with all the “looking away” in the song.
You know: Look away, look away, look away, Dixie Land!
What were they looking away from? Was it the vicious, inhumane toil that slaves faced every day in fledgling America? The heartless, soul-crushing sale of family members never to be seen or held in this life again? Were those lines about looking away a mantra — a form of antebellum gaslighting — to not consider what was really happening a way down South in the land of cotton, where old times are not forgotten?
Certainly, the two of us realized, instructing people to look away with constant distractions, misdirections, and disinformation is the quintessential modern Republican tactic. Long ago it replaced policymaking and, under Trump, any respect for facts, the rule of law, and the norms of democratic governance.
For example, after taking classified documents from the White House to his home in Florida and, after requests in the spring and a subpoena in June, after having pretended to give all of them back, the former president didn’t bother to profess innocence when he was caught lying yet again; he attacked the FBI, grifted on his supporters for more money, and offered more lies and mob-like threats.
So, maybe we’re already living in delusional “don’t-bring-up-the-facts” Dixie again: American history folding back upon itself in fetid rancor and shame. It is worth noting that the Department of Justice was created, in the summer of 1870, during President Ulysses S. Grant’s first term, primarily to root out the murderous lawlessness of the Ku Klux Klan. Thousands of Klan members, rightly referred to as “terrorists,” were quickly indicted and leaders were imprisoned.
It’s no wonder that today’s QAnon-Trump-Fox News Klan, still minimizing the insurrection on Jan. 6th, has nothing good to say about the DOJ and is actually calling to defund the FBI.
But, hey, we’re just here to talk about a well-known tune. Because it is such a popular and historic American song, it’s been much written about and discussed. As with nearly everything in life, the history is more complex than I’d imagined.
“Dixie” (or “Dixie Land,” as it is often called, or even “Dixie’s Land”) has a somewhat controversial history. Its authorship has never been firmly established, though most believe it was written by one Daniel Decatur Emmett (1815–1904) in his New York City apartment, in 1859, as a minstrel show song. Another New York–centric story has it that it was written about a landowner of Dutch descent there, Johann Dixie, whose slaves, having been sold south, were pining for the comparatively easy life on his Haarlem (early upper Manhattan) farm.
The song was also a favorite of Abraham Lincoln’s, before being adopted as a war-time anthem and de facto national anthem (more so than the official “God Save The South,” which lazily borrowed the same tune as “God Save The Queen”) of the South during the Civil War. Its lyrics were changed many times to better fit the war effort, and they were also frequently parodied. Still, it was written in the North (something akin to the irony that many iconic Christmas carols were composed by Jewish composers).
Two days after the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, President Lincoln (in what would be his final public speech) addressed a crowd gathered outside the White House. At the end of his remarks, he asked the Marine band to strike up “Dixie,” noting humorously that the song was now once again in the North’s possession, as something of the spoils of war:
I have always thought “Dixie” one of the best tunes I have ever heard. Our adversaries over the way attempted to appropriate it, but I insisted yesterday that we fairly captured it. It is good to show the rebels that with us they will be free to hear it again.
So, the renegade Southern states appropriated a song from the North, just as they (and their allied Republican-voting states) today continue to appropriate a higher proportion of all of our tax dollars while decrying the power and reach of the federal government.
I suppose it makes sense that politicians from debtor “red states” — like Mitch McConnell’s and Rand Paul’s Kentucky — would reflexively badmouth the federal government’s generous largesse and agitate against the fundamental principles of our union while talking up their admiration for autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s fascist “strongman” Victor Orbán.
Maybe one of the scores of zingers that regularly poured from the pen of (northern) founding father Benjamin Franklin applies here: “Creditors have better memories than debtors.”
Of states’ rights, perhaps the one we should honor most is the right of each state to pull its own weight.
Meanwhile, the current Republican Party continues its dedicated work to ensure every American can have the same quality of life enjoyed by denizens (can we really call all of them fully empowered citizens?) of states like Alaska and Louisiana and Mississippi. What they want seems to be an Alabama writ large, where low taxes for the wealthy are underwritten by the poor and civil and even voting rights are sharply curtailed, and public education is decimated.
Republicans appear keen to quietly bring back Dickensian debtor’s prisons via endless fines; you know, it’s not really a prison, it just feels like one. Now, pay up, so we can maintain low taxes for the white folks who are already doing quite well.
The modern anti-science Republican may not blush to still refer to individual states as “laboratories,” but their lab workers are innovating a form of Christian authoritarianism, as spelled out by Florida Senator Rick Scott.
Don’t get me wrong. They are all lovely states, generally speaking. Still, they keep voting in politicians who are not serving their true interests and duping their residents into hating “socialism,” even while they are checking out books at the local library, driving on federally funded highways, and receiving urgently needed federal help after natural disasters — most recently, severe flooding across several southern states.
And of course, more and more, making certain that the votes of many of them don’t count.
The New York Times recently ran an opinion piece, by Republican operative Liz Mair, gushing about how popular Republican governors like Kristi Noem, of Nebraska, and Brian Kemp, of Georgia, are, mostly for what Mair claims as their “fiscal responsibility.”
So, everyone is expected to ignore their putting the fiscal burden more and more on the poor and working class, their cavalier approach to protecting citizens during the pandemic, their slavish devotion to Trump and his Big Lie about the 2020 election, the endless Fox News’ Goebbelized dehumanization of Democrats as “enemies,” “anti-Americans,” and — for some twisted conspiratorial reason I can’t fathom — “cannibalistic pedophiles.”
Oh, and the now regular talk of violence, especially if Donald Trump actually must face anything resembling the rule of law.
As Jeff Tweedy sings in a new Wilco song: “There’s no middle when the other side/Would rather kill than compromise.” He sings those lines twice because, well, right about now they bear repeating.
Trump was priming his supporters to become cult members when he praised them for insane loyalty back when he was a candidate in 2016. Now, he could walk out into the middle of Fifth Avenue, a one-term, twice-impeached, globally disgraced president, with his pockets stuffed with classified information that he may have shared with any number of foreign agents, and could shoot someone and not lose a voter.
What the far right is desperate to instill in their followers — and certainly there’s been continued Russian assistance with this — is for them to never again think of the rest of us as fellow Americans. They will do anything to keep us apart, at each other’s throats, in their overarching effort to train us to think that we don’t need each other. We do, and we’re always stronger and better when we act in fellow feeling ways. (We are not enemies, though Rush and Newt, and then Donald, cynically taught you to think that way, and so it came to be.)
Do you really want Putin’s Russian economy? Orbán’s Hungarian economy? Erdogan’s 80% inflation rate in Turkey? The strength of our economy lies in the diversity of our population and the freedom of our press, not in misinformation, conspiracy theories, and the determination of politicians to traffic in lies.
Insurrectionists carried the Confederate flag — which Donald Trump has defended, along with Confederate monuments and military bases named for Confederate generals — to the Capitol on Jan. 6th, along with Trumpian flags that were often themselves mixed with symbols of the Confederacy. One can easily imagine some of them humming the tune to “Dixie” as they broke windows, used those flags as weapons against the police, and generally defaced and disrespected perhaps the single most potent symbol of American democracy.
As Medium and substack writer Jessica Wildfire, who grew up in the South, notes, the southern states never gave up on the Civil War and have been successfully fighting it for the past half-century.
If you are concerned about the rise of the old Confederacy and modern white nationalism — and what their winning would mean to us socially and economically — well, you ain’t just whistling Dixie.
You know, that song composed in the North that the South appropriated as a nice tune by which to destroy the union and keep their slavery-based economy going. Those of us who grew up in the 60s and 70s always knew that old times there were not forgotten.
Whatever you do, for the sake of our democracy and the future of our children and grandchildren, don’t look away.
