The general mistake that brought down the Confederacy, Mencius Moldbug claims, was that it was conservative, rather than reactionary:
Had the South seceded in 1850, even had Virginia voted to secede (as she almost did) in 1861 before Lincoln’s inauguration, we would probably have a Southern Confederacy to this day.For fans of the Confederacy, we must describe the general mistake that brought it down. The Confederates made many errors, of course, as any government of any longevity must; but perhaps the general pattern of their error was that the Confederate nation was conservative, rather than reactionary. Perhaps, in the 19th century, this was avoidable; but it was still fatal.
A conservative is one who, rather than simply rejecting the revolutionary tradition of democracy, finds some effective way to contaminate it with reality, thus producing a weak but somewhat effective simulation of archism out of basically anarchist materials. Conservatism always appears, because it is easy. And it always fails, because it is weak and fraudulent. It is a case of tiling over the linoleum.
The American populist conservatism of the late 20th century, so reminiscent of Disraeli’s “Tory democracy,” is a fine example. It uses the tools of democracy to appeal to the inchoate urge of the petty-bourgeois or kulak class for law, order, and national power. In the long run, this is a great way to persuade your aristocracy that it needs to smash the bourgeoisie. Not a fortunate result, and not the only way that real power has of resisting this feeble attack, either. But in the short run it can improve things, sort of, for a little while.
The Confederates failed because they failed to realize that they were Cavaliers. Lord only knows what they would have done if they had, but it would have been quite a bit more drastic. This was not quite a realization available to the 19th-century Southern intellectual — not even to the most extreme, such as the fascinating George Fitzhugh, star of what Louis Hartz called the “Reactionary Enlightenment” and author of the amazing and mischievous proslavery tract Cannibals All. Even Fitzhugh was not quite ready to restore the Stuarts, and he was probably more talked about in the North than read in the South. It was just the wrong century for that sort of a thing.
The Confederacy, in particular, failed first and foremost because it seceded way too late. It should have done the deed in 1850 at the latest, and probably earlier. It was not necessary to wait for Abraham Lincoln, John Brown and the Secret Six for the South to know that the North was after its blood. It should have been clear by the 1830s that the marriage with Puritan revolutionary democracy was not a winner.
After that, it failed because it failed to secure British support. Sheldon Vanauken, in his excellent Glittering Illusion, tells the story of this fiasco. The demise of the Confederacy was the demise of the aristocratic tradition in Great Britain, and yet these natural allies could both have survived had Palmerston lifted a finger in the appropriate direction.
The reason he did not, as Vanauken explains, is that the general feeling in Britain was that the Confederacy could not possibly lose — being far more studly than the successful nationalist revolutionaries in Greece and Italy. (Of course, the liberals of Greece and Italy (a) were actually liberal, and (b) actually had the British Navy on their side.)
Thus, the fighting should be kept going as long as possible, to bleed the loathsome Jonathan. Many British aristocrats were quite surprised, and quite disappointed, when the surrender of Richmond did not lead to a protracted guerrilla campaign. Of course, this was not to be expected from a movement which was conservative, rather than revolutionary — not to mention one faced with the utterly (and appropriately, in my judgment) ruthless North. Again, the error is one of building reaction on the ideological foundations of revolution.
He adds an important caveat:
But before we get too carried away with the Lost Cause, note: we are still working on the temperance theory. We are describing the Confederacy as if it were a normal country, not one built on the evil of slavery. Surely, different rules apply.