Hatred in Our Politics

Why we should never adopt repugnant values in support of policy preferences

A wounded North Carolinian officer at the Battle of Gettysburg. Original artwork by Joseph O. Chapa

There is so much that we don’t usually talk about.

I went to tour the Gettysburg National Military Park on Saturday. Our guide on the way up—a retired US Marine officer—prepped our little tour group for what we were about to see. He described the military Campaign that drove Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia into Pennsylvania and he described the orders President Lincoln passed to George G. Meade and his Army of the Potomac, above all, to protect Baltimore and Washington. He told us about the relationship between Lee and his best corps commander, James Longstreet. He told us about Daniel E. Sickles’s shenanigans as he moved far in front of the defensive position to which he was assigned to occupy ground that he considered better suited for his mission.

But our guide also talked about slavery and racism. I could tell that he was committed to saying what needed to be said, but also that he was trying to gauge his audience. How much should he say and how quickly? He talked about how the claim that the Confederacy seceded over “states’ rights” wasn’t, well, right. He encouraged us to read the Articles of Secession of the various southern states—which do indeed make clear that states such as Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia—were seceding over slavery. But he might just as well have recommended that we read the Cornerstone Speech.

In the Cornerstone Speech in Atlanta, just before the war began in 1861, the Vice President of the Confederate States, Alexander Stephens, extols the virtues of the new Confederate Constitution. The Confederate Constitution changes the term of the President from four years to six. It gives cabinet ministers the permission to engage in debate on the House and Senate floor. But then, Stephens turns his attention to another benefit of the Confederate Constitution, a provision that is “though last, not least.”

“The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution [of] African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. [Thomas] Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the ‘rock upon which the old Union would split.’ He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact.”

Stephens goes on to say that the prevailing view at the time of the founding was that “somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution [of slavery] would be evanescent and pass away.” Stephens continued,

“Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. … Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”

The war was a war about slavery because the Confederacy’s secession was about slavery.

I thought our guide on the way up to Gettysburg handled these difficult issues exceptionally well. He said what was true, but he did it gently—perhaps wondering even as he said it whether all the members of his audience had ever heard it before.

Because there is so much that we don’t usually talk about.

Next month, my colleagues at the Marine Command and Staff College and I are taking our students on a staff ride of the same battlefield. The College’s instructional approach to staff rides focuses on operational decision games (“ODGs” in acronym-obsessed military speak). A battlefield tour focuses on the individual personalities and the decisions they actually made in history. The ODG approach, in contrast, attempts to present students with the operational challenges that faced the military leaders, and the to turn the decision over to the students. Rather than asking students “what did Meade or Lee do here and why,” we ask students “what would you do here and why?”

At the level of tactics and military operations, there is plenty of room for disagreement. Reasonable and prudent people may disagree as to what the best course of action is amidst the fog and friction of war about which Clausewitz warned us.

I worry, though, that as our country is as divided now as it has ever been during my lifetime, we might fail to distinguish between political questions about which reasonable people can disagree and moral questions about which one answer to the question is grounded in what is good, and true, and beautiful while another answer is morally repugnant.

These distinctions are hard to draw because, in one single question about policy, there might be both kinds of disagreements happening at once. We might disagree about the policy prescription, and yet agree about underlying principles. Or we might disagree both about the policy prescription and the underlying principles.

Here are a couple of sticky examples:

Permissive gun laws make it easier for people to defend themselves and their families against unjust aggression. But permissive gun laws also make it easier for both violent offenders and the mentally unwell to obtain guns to harm innocent people. I hope partisans on both sides of this issue can agree, at the very least, that the value that motivates their opposition is important—even if they ultimately disagree on the policy prescription.

If you take a (traditionally) conservative view on abortion, you can (I hope) at least acknowledge that, all else equal, a woman really does have a moral right to bodily autonomy. If you find yourself on the progressive side of this question, you can likewise (I hope) acknowledge that, insofar as your opponent believes the human growing inside the woman’s body is a person, that it, too, has rights. Partisans on both sides will disagree fiercely about the policy prescription, but each side can nevertheless recognize the importance of the value that undergirds the other side’s argument.

The hard thing is not to say “the other side disagrees with me about the policy prescription, and therefore the other side is evil.” That rhetorical move is as easy as it is unhealthy.

The difficult task is to figure out where to draw the line between which values are evil and which are not. The values that motivated the Confederacy’s secession, and by extension the war, were evil.

I worry in our current climate that large swaths of elected representatives (and, indeed, of voters) have allowed evil to infiltrate their political values.

On the issue of immigration, I’m happy to accept that reasonable people will disagree about the policy prescription. Reasonable people will come up with different answers to questions like, “what federal enforcement ought to be applied at the US’s southern border,” and “what rights ought non-citizens to have in our criminal-justice system.”

But I have seen things on social media that go so far beyond policy disagreements. I have seen celebrations of pain and suffering. I’ve seen so much, dare I say it, joy in the violation of human dignity—yes, even the dignity of those immigrants who entered the country illegally—that I am starting to believe that, for some, the violation of dignity is not an unintended consequence, but it has become embedded in the moral values that undergird the policy position.

It is against these kinds of impulses that we must be on our guard. As moral agents in a complex world, we must be willing to ask ourselves whether we have allowed morally repugnant values to seep into our political motivations.

I decided to sketch the wounded North Carolinian officer from the memorial at Gettysburg for a few reasons. The most compelling of these reasons is that we visited the statue on Seminary Ridge on a wet and misty day. It wasn’t a hard rain, but the air was wet.

“State of North Carolina Monument” by Gutzon Borglum, Gettysburg PA. Photo by Joseph O. Chapa

The statue was designed by Gutzon Borglum, the same sculptor who designed Mount Rushmore. The memorial to the North Carolina regiment depicts four people. The officer kneels, wounded and bandaged, but still pointing the way for his subordinate soldiers. In the mist on the day, the moisture collected around the details of his face, and especially his eyes. Like a saturated cloud before a thunderstorm, the water built up until it was heavy enough to fall, and when it did, it left sweat streaks from his temple and tear streaks from his eyes. You can see it if you look closely at the picture.

“State of North Carolina Monument” by Gutzon Borglum, Gettysburg PA. Photo by Joseph O. Chapa

That image—the image of tears staining the face of this North Carolinian officer—was too compelling not to try to sketch.

But there is another reason to focus on this memorial in this essay. The statue was emplaced, not immediately after the war, and not during Reconstruction. The statue was placed by the state of North Caroline in 1929. And its designer, Gutzon Borglum, was, if not a member of the Ku Klux Klan, then at least “deeply involved in Klan politics.” It is credibly alleged that, whether he was technically a Klansman, he certainly sympathized with its central principles. In addition to Rushmore and the North Carolina memorial, he also designed the Confederate relief of Jefferson Davis, Lee, and Stonewall Jackson at Stone Mountain, GA, though it was completed by a different artist. The sculpture remains the subject of contention within the contexts of history, heritage, race, and memory.

Note the timeline. The KKK arose first in response to reconstruction in the late 1860s and gained full strength by the 1870s. The KKK embodied the values for which the Confederacy fought the Civil War. In other words, the war had ended; the policy prescription had been decided; but the morally repugnant value lived on.

The KKK receded in significance and influence in the late 19th century, but saw a resurgence in the early 20th. The KKK that Borglum supported was every bit as racist as its predecessor. The morally repugnant value persisted. And it was alive and well even when this statue was placed on the Gettysburg battlefield.

There is a lesson for us here. Our policy prescriptions should grow out of our values and our values should be rooted in our moral sense. I’m no historian, but I have read enough to know that the slave states’ views on slavery did not weaken from the founding to the 1860s. Instead, they became entrenched. The institution of race-based chattel slavery was seen by many—even by many southerners—as a necessary evil at the time of our country’s founding. By the time of the Civil War, it had come to be seen as right and good and its defenders marshalled all the societal power of politics, culture, and even the Christian church to defend it.

Values can outlive policy debates.

We can disagree about policy prescriptions. Our system of government was designed for us to have those disagreements. And even when we disagree with one another about the values that undergird those policy preferences, we can at the very least do everything we can to ensure that our own values are grounded in what is good and true and beautiful. What we must never do is adopt repugnant values in the service of our policy preferences—values that might cause us to dehumanize humans or to rejoice in suffering. Values, after all, can outlive policy debates.

Credit where it’s due

This post was edited by Megan Chapa, Doug Luccio, and Dr. Christopher Stowe. I am especially grateful to Dr. Stowe for pointing out to me the connection between Borglum and the Klan and for, almost daily, contributing to my historical literacy.

As always, the Views Expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the US Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any part of the US Government.

*This post was edited to correct a few details about the sculpture at Stone Mountain.

**I also (eventually) added the voiceover