Editor’s Note: the original publication where this article was posted has since been eradicated, so we brought this post over to The Sports Bank before it got deleted. It originally ran in the summer of 2017, and we have now updated it in certain places.
The civil war will be staged in the marketplace of ideas instead. This weekend kicks off another season of college football, a sport that has morphed into a Civil War metaphor over the past couple decades.
As you can see above, the Southeastern Conference (SEC) map is nearly identical to the Confederacy map.
It’s also almost identical to the Zaxby’s map, for what it’s worth.
From 2006-present, a SEC school has won every national championship but four, leading many SEC fans to believe that they are exceptionally distinct from the rest of the country.
Since 2004, every national championship but one has been claimed by a school from a Southern or literally former Confederate state.
SEC exceptionalism is a football fan version of an old saying you commonly hear below the Mason-Dixon line:
“American by birth, southern by the grace of god.”
Just like with secession and rebellion, a lot of SEC fans believe that they have had a special, unique American experience. Thus, every college football season it’s the SEC versus the rest of the country, and the bowl system feeds into this by intentionally trying to pit a northern team against a southern program whenever possible.
It’s a much better and healthier way for us as a country to keep fighting the Civil War; better the battle waged in a recreational game than in the courts, or in violent protest.
And right now, we’re hearing a lot about civil war, mostly from far-right extremists, domestic terrorists and other MAGA heads obsessed with Trump, who are infuriated by the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago.
But what they don’t realize is how the red state versus blue state narrative is a fiction. It’s actually the electoral map at the county level, not the state, which actually gives you a much clearer picture. Every state is magenta, and none are actually red or blue.
And even the county map itself is also grossly inaccurate, as it shows Donald Trump winning an overwhelming majority of the “land,” even though he lost the popular vote by three million.
Land itself doesn’t vote, only the population does.
The old Republican tactic of trying to divide and conquer with the moronic “city people aren’t real Americans” narrative has now reached new levels of hypocrisy with Trump.
This crowd, in the supposed “heartland,” has a cult like devotion to a man from a big city. Not just a big city, but the largest and most populated city of all. It’s such a laughable contradiction that these days the only well-known figures still clinging to the idea are irrelevant buffoons like Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee.
The bit really should have been retired after 2004, because Karl Rove was the last operative to use it effectively. There is real resentment and condescension in rural America for city-dwellers, but it’s not over what urbanites eat, drink, consume culturally or how much they wave the flag.
It’s actually race, the issue which has consistently divided us more than any other throughout our history, which is the real wedge.
The white nationalists protesting the removal of a statute to Robert E. Lee, in Charlottesville 2017, were chanting “blood and soil,” a slogan expressing the nineteenth-century German idealization of a racially defined national body (“blood”) united with a settlement area (“soil”).
It’s a slogan heavily utilized by Nazis and it idealizes agrarian life as a counterweight to urban forms, but also contains racist and anti-Semitic ideas of a sedentary Germanic-Nordic peasantry as opposed to (specifically Jewish) nomadism.
The slogan espouses the ideal of the peasantry being the foundation of the nation and its conservatism.
It’s not surprising to see the Confederate flag and the swastika marching hand in hand with another.
In both cases, as well as in the Civil War itself, the primary wedges originated along the lines of race.??? It seems logistically impossible to actually fight another war between the states because the divide is in counties, cities and towns, not states.
Usually, any place where there are a higher percentage of minority groups (cities) and higher educated people (university towns), they vote Democratic. Typically, whiter and lower educated communities vote Republican.
This reality has peacefully existed for decades, so an actual military civil war is almost certainly outside the realm of possibility.
NPR referenced an 1861 speech by Alexander Stephens, who would go on to become vice president of the Confederacy. “[Our new government’s] foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man,” Stevens said, in Savannah, Ga.
“That slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”
Remember these quotes the next time a “heritage not hate” advocate attempts to lecture you on how the Civil War was actually about “state’s rights,” and not slavery.
The Southern Poverty Law Center released a study showing that the two biggest surges in the number of Confederate monuments erected coincided with the 1890s, when Jim Crow Laws were being enacted, and the 1960s, when the Civil Rights movement was gathering momentum.
It’s an interesting question to ask, why are there confederate monuments in union states? Simple, because the people who identify themselves with Pepe the Frog avatars, swastikas, wearing white hoods, waving Confederate flags and “make America great again” hats are in every state.
Obviously, this country was never as divided as during the Civil War from 1861-1865. Since then, the ’60s and today are probably as divisive as it’s ever been.
It seems logistically impossible to actually fight another war between the states because the divide is in counties, cities and towns, not states.
This reality has peacefully existed for decades, so an actual military civil war is almost certainly outside the realm of possibility.
Paul M. Banks is the owner/manager of The Bank (TheSportsBank.Net) and author of “Transatlantic Passage: How the English Premier League Redefined Soccer in America,” as well as “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry.”
He has regularly appeared in WGN, Sports Illustrated and the Chicago Tribune, and he co-hosts the After Extra Time podcast, part of Edge of the Crowd Network. Follow him and the website on Twitter and Instagram.