Topic: The Box Office
HBO’s next big thing is a series titled Confederate, set in an alternate America where the South won the Civil War, becoming an independent nation and preserving the institution of slavery. Because contemporary progressivism had perfected the technique of virtue signaling via willful stupidity, the announcement of this new project has produced a backlash, as if HBO is planning to produce a pro-slavery polemic. Whether the nosebleeds protesting Confederate really believe what they’re saying is a good question; probably, in the spirit of doublethink, they do and don’t simultaneously. In contemporary America, the issue of race has become an ideological depth charge, guaranteed to roil the waters of the leftie fever swamp.
Very likely Confederate will turn out to be a tiresome Cautionary Tale for Our Time along the lines of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale. HBO knows full well that it must kowtow to every piety of the Left regarding race or risk being subjected to a public shaming in the style of Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Thus the free exercise of the imagination, so necessary to make a project like Confederate succeed, is pretty much off the table. And that’s too bad, because with the possible exception of an Axis victory in World War Two, a Southern victory in the Civil War is the most written-about scenario in the genre of alternate history: a rich vein of the imagination from which to mine the raw materials for a riveting dramatic series.
Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee (1953) is perhaps the best-known novel on the theme of an alternate Civil War and embodies several ideas that could be very useful to the producers of Confederate. Moore envisions a Union defeat at Gettysburg in July 1863, followed by the occupation of Washington and a march on Philadelphia by General Lee’s victorious Army of Northern Virginia. Union resistance collapses and the US government capitulates on July 4, 1864. The ensuing Peace of Richmond consigns Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, Kansas, the American Southwest and California to the Confederate States of America, and also requires the United States of America to pay large reparations in gold. Thus by 1940, when Moore’s narrative commences, the CSA is a global superpower. The truncated USA, its economy ruined by postwar inflation, its dwindling population beset by chronic poverty and hopelessness, is a powerless and despised backwater.
In Moore’s CSA slavery has been formally abolished but blacks, though no longer property and humanely treated, have no political rights. In the USA, however, the situation is very different. Rage against defeat in war and the humiliations that followed finds its focus in virulent racism. Blacks—on whose behalf, it is said, the ill-advised President Lincoln precipitated the nation into civil war—share the blame with the despised Abolitionists for all the ills of the war and its aftermath. Mass lynchings are common, often perpetrated by members of a secret terrorist organization, the racist, nativist Grand Army of the Republic.
A TV series based this background material could be as arresting and provocative as Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle. But for all its imaginative power, Moore’s alternate history offers no space for a politically correct narrative. By and large, the people of his imaginary America accept their world as it is. There is no heroic black resistance movement. There is no abolitionist movement. None of our contemporary assumptions about race and politics are operative. Moore shows, in short, that an America in whose history the South won the Civil War would be a different America. But I’m sure that HBO, anxious to placate its progressive critics, will depict the boringly familiar: all those pieties concerning race, politics and economics with which contemporary progressivism feels comfortable. No doubt modernized slavery will be organized on a corporate basis, with wicked plutocrats exploiting black labor for the benefit of the shareholders. And no doubt progressives themselves will be cast in the role of heroic, enlightened abolitionists—with blacks, just as they are in reality, condescendingly regarded as a mascot group.
As I thought about all this, an idea occurred to me. What if slavery in the CSA had evolved in such a manner as to replicate apartheid-era South Africa, with most blacks concentrated in “homeland” areas? And what if, to control these homelands, the white government had created a class of blacks receiving special privileges in return for serving as administrators, police officers, etc.? And what if the nucleus of resistance to the CSA developed among those black men and women? The dramatic possibilities are obvious—and, alas, obviously unacceptable to the doubleplusgoodthinkers of contemporary progressivism.