Allen Guelzo, Reconstruction, And The Rittenhouse Case

Last week I ran into a 2018 paper by the Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo, Reconstruction as a Pure Bourgeois Revolution, in which I found a stimulating perspective on the current political situation, which I think represents a counterrevolution by the elites allied with the Lumpenproletariat, white climate activists, and pansexualists, against "Trumpism" a populist alliance of the working and middle classes that is in fact multiracial. (These are precisely the people David Brooks sneers at, though he also finds them "terrifying".)

Guelzo's paper has also appeared on YouTube as "Reconstruction: The Last Bourgeois Revolution":

After last year's election, my attention was drawn to the US presidential election of 1876, that was disputed and resolved by an electoral commission that produced the Compromise of 1877, which awarded the election to the Republican Rutherford Hayes while effectively ending Reconstruction by withdrawing Union troops from the southern states. Guelzo has little to say about the compromise itself, but he deals with Reconstruction as a historiographical phenomenon. In doing so, he circles around to the central issue, that whatever the good or bad of Reconstruction itself, it was ended by an alliance of northern capital, northern philanthropy, and southern segregationists.

This is a view clearly reflected in Frank Ellison's 1952 novel Invisible Man, and it's a major part of the protagonist's dilemma. Jim Crow was an institution supported by the national Democrats and the do-gooder elites., but a revisionist historical narrative has also emerged that even as all right-thinking people disavowed it in the 1960s, actual social policy after that continues to enforce segregation and suppression of African-Americans via urban ghettos and the eugenic measure of widespread abortion.

Guelzo hiself favors a related historical "revisionist" interpretation of Reconstruction:

The great Republican goal of abolishing slavery was not seen by Republicans, as we are tempted to see it, as a crusade to right a racial injustice; abolishing slavery was not, to them, much of a racial question at all but rather an economic one. . . . The Union “represents the principles of free labor,” declared William Cullen Bryant, and only when “the victory of the Northern society of free labor over the landed monopoly of the Southern aristocracy” was complete would the war be over. . . In the most basic sense, free labor was simply shorthand for liberal economic democracy. It was the Enlightenment’s school of economics, and like the Enlightenment, it predicted that “democratic, bourgeois freedom and the supremacy of economics would one day lead to the salvation of all mankind.” (pp 56-57)

Guelzo in fact doesn't go much farther than to support what he calls this "revisionist" historiographic view of reconstruction, but it raises a number of productive questions. It's generally accepted that northern capital and philanthropy allied with southern segregationists to halt Reconstruction and establish Jim Crow. It's hard to tell at this remove how or why this was done, but it clearly had the approval of the industrial elites of the time.

Guelzo cites the hard Marxist theory that fully freeing the slaves was undesirable in that the northern capitalists wanted to avoid a full proletarian revolution, and there may be some merit to that view. But you don't have to be Marxist to think it was in northern capital's continued interest to have a supply of cheap labor, although slavery actually proved less efficient economically than at-will employment. George Washington's own plantation ran at a loss.

But if we follow the broader revisionist theory of the post-Martin Luther King civil rights movement as effectively a Democrat-led extension of the 1877 compromise, an urban re-segregation and re-formation of African-Americans as a new underclass, we get results that can provide insight into the Rittenhouse case and its outcome.

The first has been, especially since the 2020 BLM riots, a near-universal tendency to equate African-Americsn's with the Lumpenproletariat, the Marxist unreliable underclass of career petty criminals, addicts, prostitutes, and street people. George Floyd was one of these, but because he was African-American, his class identity was minimized in favor of his racial identity, but his treatment was actually an outcome of his class, not his race.

We can then move to the strange incongruities of the Rittenhouse case: Kyle Rittenohuse himself, a bourgeois aspiring college student of mixed race, naively got himself into a situation during a BLM riot where he was attacked by at least four white men (Jump Kick Man included) with criminal records, effectively members of the Lumpenproletariat, who were allied with and agitating in protest at the killing of another violent petty criminal by police, this one African-American.

So far, the Rittenohuse outcome has brought a collective sigh of relief from bourgeois supporters of law, reason, and social order, and so far, there's been no large renewal of BLM style riots from the Lumpenrpoletariat and their elite allies in the media and politics. But this case is a clear indication of the actual fault lines that have existed since Reconstuction, and to which we still await a remedy.