A Fool's Errand

 In the final weeks of the Biden administration—shortly before Trump's second inauguration—I recall seeing an opinion piece in Politico. It took the quixotic line that Biden ought to pardon all the January 6 rioters who opposed the certification of his election before the expiration of his term. 

The authors gave essentially two arguments for this seemingly paradoxical course of action: 

1) Trump was going to do it anyway, as soon as he took office; so why should Democrats not steal his thunder and get the credit for magnanimity? 

And 2): it would help heal the nation's wounds. However wrongheadedly, about half the country still supported a man for office who insisted the 2020 election was stolen and that the attempted coup on January 6 was justified. To get past this epistemic and moral chasm between two sections of the country, why not let one of the two parties to the conflict publicly and conspicuously forgive the other? 

I was not convinced. As to argument 1, I was not at all certain at the time that Trump really would go so far as to pardon every single January 6-er. 

I thought at the time: "Surely even he wouldn't be so brazen." (Ha!)

As for the second argument, I absolutely see its appeal. It's exactly the kind of unrealistic sentimental nonsense that tends to attract me. 

I am far from immune to that sublime call in Edgar Lee Masters's poem "Anne Rutledge": "the forgiveness of millions toward millions."

It speaks to the same impulse in me that momentarily believed in the summer of 2024, after the assassination attempt against Trump, that maybe he had experienced a moral awakening and "become nice," as he put it. 

Yes, I think, why cannot we have reconciliation? Why cannot we have mutual forgiveness and love?

But even in my general condition of sublime stupidity on these subjects, I started to entertain some doubts about the Politico authors' thesis once they cited the obvious historical parallel. 

They said: Biden ought to pardon all the January 6 rioters because that's what happened after the civil war. 

Indeed, it's true: the federal government offered a general amnesty to insurrectionists after the nation's last biggest insurrection too. 

Did that "heal the nation's wounds," though? Well, I suppose we haven't had another civil war since then; so it could be said to have "worked" in that limited sense. 

But peace was in some sense bought at the expense of letting the losing side of the civil war win on the one issue that most mattered to the outcome of the conflict: the human rights and political equality of formerly enslaved people. 

This is the point of Albion W. Tourgée's great novel, A Fool's Errand, which I just finished reading. 

The book stands virtually alone in its era for being a novel about Reconstruction by a white author that is actually sympathetic to the aims of the newly enfranchised Black population of the South and their northern Republican allies. 

Tourgée himself was a former Union officer who went on to be a civil rights attorney. He was actually lead counsel in Plessy v. Ferguson, in addition to his literary endeavors.

Yet his book is surprising at times in its political views. During the first third or so of the novel, I felt some disappointment, as Tourgée seemed to be making the usual conservative critique of Reconstruction familiar from other whites of his generation: namely, that it moved too fast and went too far, etc. 

But by the time one is half-way through the book, however, it becomes clear that Tourgée's point is in many ways the opposite: Reconstruction failed because it didn't go far enough. 

The true original sin of the Radical Republican Congress, he insists, was that it allowed the Southern states back into the union too hastily—in exchange for only a paper promise of emancipation and equal rights for the newly freed people (promises these states immediately proceeded to subvert and render hollow). 

In charting this story, Tourgée notes that time and again, misguided Northern elite calls for "forgiveness," "reconciliation," and "magnanimity" ended up dooming the goals of Reconstruction—effectively ceding the peace to the South even though the North had won the war. 

Tourgée describes the Northern preachers who, having won on the battlefield, went on to proclaim forgiveness to the South, saying that "the law of love [is] co-equal with the love of law"—much as our Politico authors urged us to do toward the January 6 insurrectionists. 

And Tourgée traces the dread results of this sublime naiveté. He insists that Northern humanitarians completely misunderstood and failed to reckon with the intensity of racism and caste prejudice in the South, which would not dissipate peacefully merely because Northern whites extended a post-war hand of friendship. 

"I begin seriously to fear that the North lacks virility," Tourgée's protagonist observes in one chapter; "This cowardly shirking of responsibility, this pandering to sentimental whimsicalities, this snuffling whine about peace and conciliation, is sheer weakness." 

As a result, he goes on: "Rebellion has ended without punishment. [...] From this day the prestige of the Federal soldier will begin to wane throughout the land. [...] On the other hand, the glory of the Confederate leader will hourly wax greater and brighter. [...] The former has a country debauched by weak humanitarianisms, more anxious to avoid the appearance of offending its enemies than desirous of securing its own power and its own ends. These men who have led in the Rebellion will not be slow to perceive and take advantage of the opportunity; and other generations following them will note the fact that the sure, safe, and brilliant road to fame and success is an armed rebellion[.]"

It is very obvious that this has been the outcome of our own mass forgiveness of the January 6 rioters—and the same results would surely have followed if the pardons had come from Biden's hand instead of Trump's. 

We simply have two unmatched opponents in this country. On the one hand, we have liberals who wanted as soon as possible to let bygones be bygones and restore some sense of normality to the country—much like the Northerners of the post-civil war era. 

On the other hand, we have a group of deeply reactionary right-wingers who perceive even the most tentative steps toward equality and the seemingly most secure and common-sensical gains from the 1960s civil rights movement as a personal affront and humiliation that they will stop at nothing to destroy. 

As a result of the same mismatch—the same lack of resolution on the part of the apparently victorious and more powerful federal government, coupled with an intensity and unity of purpose on the part of the recently "conquered"—the South in the end effectively won the civil war; after losing it on the battlefield. 

By means of racial terrorism—torture, public murders, kidnappings, conspiracies against rights—all of which Tourgée traces in terrible detail in his novel—white racist minority rule was fully reestablished in the South within just a few decades of the end of the Civil War. 

Black voters were either effectively deprived of the vote through various species of legerdemain or intimidated into silence and inaction through overt violence and brutality. 

Such were "the sweet and peaceable fruits," as Tourgée ironically observes, "of that spirit of conciliation which had swept over the land when punishment impended over the heads of these knights of law and order[.]"

So too, we have lived to see a future in which the January 6 insurrectionists—though they failed on that shameful day in 2021 to subvert an election and overthrow our democracy—in the end won the war and got the insurrection they sought anyway. 

We have lived to see the principles that appeared to prevail momentarily on January 6 be cast into the dust. Our federal government now declares everyone who stormed the Capitol on that day to be a cherished and favored son of the nation; and "the sure, safe, and brilliant road to fame and success" is now held to be "an armed rebellion[.]" 

As Tourgée puts it later in the book: "it was accounted far more honorable to have struck at the Nation's life than to have interposed a life to avert the blow[.]"

In both cases—the 19th century and the present—we have the same ultimate result: the return of white racist minority rule.

After a short-lived attempt at racial progress circa 2020, we now have ruling the country the avatars of a reactionary backlash whose scale and intensity we humanitarian liberals could not have begun to anticipate or fathom. 

The white nationalists now in control aim not just at subverting the strides of what they denounce as "wokeness"—but turning the clock back much further: destroying the protections of the Voting Rights Act and anti-discrimination protections and all the other most basic and hard-won gains for which people gave their blood and lives in Selma and Montgomery. 

Indeed, the backlash has penetrated so far that even the progressive leftists who seemingly led the way during the "woke 1" era (as it is suddenly called) are now describing the movement as "crazy" in hindsight—a "fool's errand," if you will—to borrow Tourgée's ironic title: an accès de folie of which we all now rightly repent with cringing embarrassment. 

Both the progressive left and the moderate centrists now seem to agree that talking about race is unhelpful and that concentrating on "pocketbook issues" like gas prices and affordability is an easier sell to voters—and they may well be right as a matter of electoral strategy. 

But meanwhile, racial injustice has not become any less of a feature of American life. Quite the contrary: white racist minority rule is being reestablished in the South, with the help of a supine Supreme Court and a federal executive controlled by more or less open white nationalists. 

Black voters are once again being deprived in large parts of the country of a vote that actually counts, now that Southern state legislatures have carte blanche to dilute their voting power through gerrymandering; and the federal civil rights office more or less openly commits itself to vindicating only the claims of white citizens and ignoring everyone else. 

We are living to repeat over again the same history Tourgée unfolds: "The rule of the majority had been overthrown, the power of Government boldly defied, and its penalities for crime successfully evaded, that the enfranchisement of the colored man might be rendered a farce; and the [...] Amendments and Reconstruction legislation had been shown to be practically nullified." (Of his protagonist, he later writes: "he was staggered to note what an utter reversal of the decision made upon the field of battle had been effected.")

In the 21st century, as in the 19th century—the insurrectionists won. 

We now have more or less open and confessed white nationalists like J.D. Vance, Pete Hegseth, and Stephen Miller running the country, with their frequent overtures to neo-Confederate rhetoric and their praise of European far right groups who call for purging and summarily expelling nonwhite immigrants from the Continent. 

We have our current Secretary of State talking just this week about how "racial resentment" has supposedly been exported from Cuba's Marxist government. In other words, Black Americans can't possibly have any justified grievance or will of their own that motivates civil rights struggles. The racial justice protests of 2020 could only be explained, in Rubio's insinuation, by some subversive plot on the part of outside Marxist agitators. 

Here too, we find an old standby of white racist ideology: as Tourgée describes it, it is the conviction that Black Americans are "mere ethnological ciphers, who had no power, except when acting in conjunction with some significant figure in the notation of human races."

White racist minority rule keeps managing to reestablish itself in this country—despite being opposed by the vast majority of public opinion in what purports to be a democracy—not because the white racists have numbers on their side; but because they have single-mindedness and relentless determination. 

The racial egalitarians lost in Tourgée's era, he writes, because they "pandered to a sickly sentimentalism, relinquishing therefore the substance of power, betraying and abandoning their allies, and heaping upon them the contempt and shame of the failure which resulted thereby[.]"

It's hard to escape the impression that we on the liberal left are making the same mistake today. We denounce the racial justice struggle of just a few short years ago as "woke 1" and "crazy." We exhibit contempt for our own allies and efforts. We propose that this or that vulnerable member of our coalition should be thrown under the bus to appease our enemies. We say: maybe we could sacrifice trans people? Or asylum-seekers? Maybe we toss them to the wolves and save ourselves thereby? 

What is missing in every case is a willingness to exercise lawful power when we have it on behalf of our values. 

Our opponents on the white racist right do not lack for any such willingness. 

And that is why they keep winning and we keep losing, despite their relative lack of votes. 

"[T]hey are thoroughly united, and are instinctive, natural rulers. They are not troubled with scruples," Tourgée writes of the Southern aristocracy. 

And so, he offers a terrible prophecy of the coming years that—alas—history bore out: "just as before the civil war, the South will again dominate and control the nation."

But Tourgée does not end his book solely on a note of despair. He does not simply say "the labour and the wounds are vain [...] and as things are, they remain" (Clough). Instead, he concludes, with Clough, that we must not say "the struggle naught availeth." 

Instead, he insists that Reconstruction accomplished one genuine good: it won the paper promise of equal rights and justice under the Reconstruction Amendments. 

This paper promise was hollow and ineffective on its own, Tourgée repeatedly observes—it was "rendered inoperative and nugatory" through violence and skullduggery and racial terrorism almost as soon as it was announced, he writes. 

But that doesn't mean it was meaningless. It was, to the contrary, an admission of the nation's original sin: a confession that the nation's founding egalitarian ideals were inconsistent with the permanent oppression and disenfranchisement of 14% of its population. 

"The confession of error is the hardest part of repentance," Tourgée writes; and this was the great gain of Reconstruction: "It recognized and formulated the universality of manhood in government power, and, in one phase or another of its development, compelled the formal assent of all sections and parties." 

What is needed to make this paper promise live, at last, is for the racial egalitarians to overcome their weak-kneed sentimentality and desire for "conciliation" with white racist rule in the South—of the sort that proposes schemes to outdo our opponents in magnanimity by forgiving the insurrectionists before they have a chance to forgive themselves. 

We must accept that "[t]he South—that pseudo South which has the power—does not wish this thing [i.e., racial equality] to be done [...] and will oppose it with might and main. If done at all, it must be [...] an act of sovereignty, and exercise of power." 

And so, the book ends with what can only read to us now as a prophecy of the future civil rights movement—almost a century before the fact: "when the Nation has smarted enough for its folly, it will find a way to undo the evil, whether the States-Rights Moloch stand in the way, or not." (I am reminded of MacDiarmid's lines: "Yet in the perspectives that before me open / I know the evil will be undone and vengeance wrought / With a completeness beyond human thought.")

So too, in our own age, we must believe that the nation will eventually have smarted enough under the reign of a fascist racist minority that it eventually recognizes the necessity of acting with determination in the wielding of lawful power, to the extent our Constitution permits, to actually make good once more on the paper promises of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments. 

We may still hope, then, in spite of all, that our country may yet experience another "new birth of freedom"—and that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, will not perish from the Earth."