INSIDE OUTLOOK
Five myths about denying
the vote to people with
felony convictions. B3The liberals who dislike
“cancel culture” but don’t
panic about it. B5KLMNO
Outlook
SUNDAY, AUGUST 2 , 2020. WASHINGTONPOST.COM/OUTLOOK EZ BD B
T
he Lost Cause offered former Confederates and
their descendants a salve for the past. According
to this mythology about the Civil War, the South
was the victim, even in defeat. Confederate
armies were not vanquished on the battlefield
but overwhelmed by insurmountable Union resources;
Confederate soldiers were heroic martyrs, none more so
than Robert E. Lee; defense of states’ rights, not slavery,
caused the war; and African Americans were “faithful
slaves,” loyal to their masters and the Confederate cause.
Through distortions and omissions, White Southerners
constructed a version of history that absolved them of
blame. Although they were a defeated minority, they
organized to spread their message through monuments,
literature, film and textbooks across the country — where
it dominated for more than a century, shaping partisan
politics, American culture and, of course, race relations.
Even as Confederate monuments tumble this summer,
we may be witnessing an attempt to form a new lost cause.
Today, President Trump describes his opponents as “un-
fair,” the pandemic sapping his popularity as a “hoax,” the
polls that show him losing to Joe Biden as “fake,” and the
election in which he’ll face ultimate judgment in Novem-ber as “rigged” or potentially “stolen.” His defenders are
already laboring to cast him as a righteous, noble warrior
martyred by traitors and insurmountable forces. They rely
on the same tools that were used to promulgate Confeder-
ate myths: manipulating facts, claiming persecution,
demonizing enemies and rewriting history. In oth-
er words, Trump is laying the groundwork to claim moral
victory in political defeat — and to deny the legitimacy of
the Democratic administration that would displace him.
The original Lost Cause will never be replicated. It
articulated a fully developed set of beliefs about slavery,
honor and region, grounded in the experiences of a
slaveholding republic. Trump and his followers do not
have such a coherent ideology, nor do they enjoy the kind
of geographical monopoly that the Confederates pos-
sessed. But their arguments are animated by some of the
same tactics that allowed the Lost Cause to thrive for more
than 150 years, which may help Trumpism, too, live on past
its political moment. If it succeeds in attracting adherents,
they will be a minority. Nevertheless, a small but vocal set
of defenders can still shape our politics and our society.
We’ve seen it before.
SEE TRUMP ON B4The next Lost Cause?
The South’s mythology glamorized a noble defeat, says
historian Caroline E. Janney. Trump backers may do the same.
‘I
f you don’t have an underly-
ing health condition, it’s safe
out there,” Gov. Doug Ducey
told Arizonans in late May, hoping
to stimulate the economy. Those
words were also a death sentence
for Dad, a healthy and exuberant
65-year-young man named Mark
Anthony Urquiza. He, like so
many others, would not have died
if American leaders — President
Trump and governors like Ducey
— hadn’t been so cavalier about
pushing consumers to spend
money. They have blood on their
hands.
When a shelter-in-place order
took effect in March, both my
parents believed in mask-wearing
and social distancing. I work to
reduce zoonotic transmission of
disease by protecting tropical
rainforests from deforestation, so
I’d been talking to them about the
coronavirus for months. We
watched in horror as New York
brought in refrigerated trucks
and dug mass graves.
I was particularly worried for
their safety because of who they
are and where they live. The data
shows that Latino people are
three times more likely than
White people to contract corona-
SEE CULPABILITY ON B2Governor, my
father’s covid
death is on
your hands
Officials minimized the
threat. Kristin Urquiza’s
parents believed them.Book review by Kenneth W. Mack
T
he air was hazy on a January night in 2018 when
Isabel Wilkerson, the journalist and author of a
much-lauded narrative account of the Black migra-
tion out of the American South, arrived in Delhi. Wilker-
son’s visit had been prompted by a book she was writing
that used the Indian caste system to illuminate America’s
racial hierarchy. It was her first trip to India, but one aspect
of what she saw there seemed instantly familiar. She
quickly discovered that, as an African American woman
schooled in the folkways of race in her home country, she
could easily distinguish upper-caste Indians from Dalits,
or Untouchables. In turn, “Dalits... gravitated toward me
like long-lost relatives.” Patterns of deference and social
performance marked caste onto her hosts’ bodies, even
when Indians did their best to shake them off.
Wilkerson spent much of the 2010s researching and
writing her book, just as the United States was moving in a
direction that seemed to validate its thesis. A series of
killings of African Americans, often by police officers,helped birth a new anti-racist social movement. Athletes
knelt, monuments to slavery began to come down, repara-
tions for enslavement and its long aftermath became a
mainstream idea, and the politics of White grievance took
over the White House. When she finished her book, she
titled it “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” Wilker-
son’s thesis is that Americans’ current obsession with race
is somewhat misplaced, for there is a deeper and more
intractable system that hides behind the chimera of race,
and that system is properly called American caste.
Caste, Wilkerson argues, is something we internalize
unconsciously. “Race is fluid and superficial,” she asserts,
joining the many scholars who have pointed out that race
— with all its assumptions of the innate intellectual and
moral superiority of one arbitrarily designated group of
people over another — is an illusion. “Caste,” on the other
hand, “is fixed and rigid.” “Caste, like grammar, becomes an
invisible guide not only to how we speak, but to how we
process information.” The caste system disguises itself by
making us see race traits as real and immutable, and
anti-racist work as simply the elimination of prejudiced
thinking. The real problem, Wilkerson argues, goes deeper.
SEE CASTE ON B2U nder America’s racial hierarchy
lies a deeper system of division: Caste
KIERSTEN ESSENPREIS FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTINSIDE BOOK WORLD
Enchanted by butterflies,
and unlocking their
mysteries. B7Trump tried to rein in
Mueller — but only
Mueller could do that. B8A
s soon as Pat Philbin, the
deputy White House coun-
sel, uttered the lie, my head
shot up from my note-taking. “In
the Judiciary Committee,” he said
to every member of the U.S. Sen-
ate assembled for his boss’s im-
peachment trial, “... there were
no rights for the president.”
It was just past 10 p.m. on Jan.
21 — the first day of President
Trump’s Senate impeachment tri-
al. I was sitting near the head of
the narrow, curved House manag-
ers table across from committee
Chairmen Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.)
and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). They,
too, looked astonished.
I had come to know, and like,
the man with the slightly nasal
drawl now peddling Trump’s
falsehoods. Philbin was r ecog-
nized for his integrity: The eru-
dite former George W. Bush ad-
ministration official had famous-
ly rushed (along with Jim Comey)
to the hospital bedside of then-At-
torney General John Ashcroft in- They were trying to block
the White House from taking ad-
vantage of Ashcroft’s illness to
extend a domestic surveillance
program. Philbin’s insistence on
principle had cost him career
SEE IMPEACHMENT ON B5
The lie behind
Trump’s
impeachment
defense
Democratic counsel
Norman Eisen
recalls the Senate trial