Note: This post has been revised since it was originally posted at 1:33 a.m. (Pacific Standard time) to improve its clarity and to make minor corrections. The publication time has been altered accordingly.
In ridiculing my view that the United States should dissolve, a friend on Facebook pointed to something he called “progress,” which he apparently viewed as impossible or at least severely hampered in the absence of the Union. It’s not really clear to me what he means by progress, but my old favorite professor at California State University, East Bay, argued that he would not have been hired as a professor in the 1960’s, due to his race. And of course, there have been all the expansions of civil rights, suffrage first for all men in the wake of the Civil War, then some decades later, suffrage for women, and still some decades after that, the progress of the Civil Rights and feminist movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s.
It is not only the prospect that a surviving Confederacy would have stood in the way of these achievements, but that it would likely be an environmental hellhole that, in many eyes, rationalizes the Union. But such notions of progress must be taken in context, and the counterfactual case—that is, the case of what would have happened had the Confederacy been successful in asserting independence—must also be considered in any evaluation of ‘progress’ associated with the Union’s hegemony.
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