A 2022 Memorial Day Reflection.

Today is Memorial Day.

I've done a Memorial Day reflection post a couple of times, and I did a short history of Memorial Day once on our companion blog here:

Memorial Day

Observers here may have noted that I failed to put up a post for Memorial Day when this post was first made, in 2012.

This is in part due to Memorial Day being one of those days that moves around as, in recent years, Congress has attempted to make national holidays into three day weekends. That's nice for people, but in some ways it also takes away from the holiday a bit.  At the same time, it sort of tells you that if a holiday hasn't been moved to the nearest Friday or Monday, next to its original location on the calendar, it means that the holiday is either hugely important, a religious holiday, or extremely minor.  The 4th of July and Flag Day, one major and one minor, do not get moved, for example.

Anyhow, Memorial Day commenced at some point either immediately after or even during the Civil War, depending upon how you reckon it, and if you are date dependent for the origin of the holiday.  In American terms, the day originally served to remember the dead of the then recent Civil War.  The holiday, in the form of "Decoration Day" was spreading by the late 1860s.  The name Memorial Day was introduced in the 1880s, but the Decoration Day name persisted until after World War Two.  The holiday became officially named Memorial Day by way of a Federal statute passed in 1967.  In 1971 the holiday was subject to the Uniform Monday Holiday Act which caused it to fall on the last Monday of May, as it does now.

The day, therefore, would have always been observed in Wyoming, which had Grand Army of the Republic lodges since prior to statehood. But, like many holidays of this type, observation of the holiday had changed over the years.  In the 1960s and 1970s, by my recollection, the day was generally observed by people visiting the grave sites of any deceased family member, and therefore it was more of a day to remember the dead, rather than a day to recall the war dead.  This, however, has changed in recent years to a very noticeable extent.  Presently, it tends to serve as a second Veterans Day, during which veterans in general are recalled.  This year, for example, Middle School children in Natrona County decorated the graves of servicemen in the county with poppies, strongly recalling the poppy campaigns of the VFW that existed for many years.

Wyoming has a strong military culture, even though the state has lost all but two of its military installations over the years. The state had the highest rate of volunteers for the service during World War Two, and it remained strongly in support of the Vietnam War even when it turned unpopular nationwide.  The state's National Guard has uniquely played a role in every US war since statehood, including Vietnam, so perhaps the state's subtle association with Memorial Day may be stronger than might be supposed.

On remembrance, we'd be remiss if we didn't point out our Some Gave All site.

It's worth remembering here that Memorial Day has its origin in a great act of national hatred, the Civil War.  That is, the day commenced here and there as an effort to remember the Civil War dead, which, at the end of the day, divide sharply into two groups; 1) those who gave their lives to keep their fellow human beings in cruel enslaved bondage, and those who fought to end it.

Now, no doubt, it can be pointed out that those who died for slavery by serving the South, and that is what they died for if they were killed fighting for the South, didn't always see their service that way.  It doesn't matter. That was the cause they were serving. And just as pointedly, many in the North who went as they had no choice were serving to "make men free", as the Battle Hymn of the Republic holds it, irrespective of how they thought of their own service.

And it's really that latter sort of sacrifice this day commemorates.

The first principal of democracy is democracy itself.

And because of that, it is inevitably the case that people will win elections whom you do not wish to.  Perhaps you may even detest what they stand for.

Democracy is a messy business and people, no matter what they claim to espouse, will often operate against democratic results if they don't like them.  In the 1950s through at least the 1990s, the American left abandoned democracy to a significant degree in favor of rule by the courts, taking up the concept that average people couldn't really be trusted to adopt a benighted view of the liberalism that they hoped for which would be free of anything, ultimately, liberally. An enforced libertine liberalism.

The results of that have come home to roost in our own era as a counter reaction, building since the 1980s, has now found expression in large parts of the GOP which have gone to populism and Illiberal Democracy.  

We have a draft thread on Illiberal Democracy, which is a term that most people aren't familiar with, but it's best expressed currently by the Hungarian government of Viktor Orban, to the horror of Buckeyite conservatives like George F. Will. 

Defining illiberal democracy isn't easy, in part because it's most commonly defined by its opponents.  Setting aside their definitions, which it probably would be best defined as is a system in which a set of beliefs and values are societally defined and adopted which are external to the government and constitution of a county, and a democracy can only exist within it.  The best historical example, if a good one can actually be found, might be Vichy France, which contrary to some assumptions was not a puppet of Nazi Germany so much as a species of near ally, but which had a right wing government, with elections, that operated only within the confines of the beliefs of the far right government.

Much of what we see going on now in the far right of the country, which is now the province of the GOP, is described in this fashion, although not without its ironies.  Viewed in that fashion, the January 6, insurrection actually makes sense, as the election was "stolen" because it produced the wrong results, culturally.  I.e., if you assume that the basic concepts of the Democratic Party fall outside of the cultural features which the far right populist wing of the GOP holds as legitimate, such an election would be illegitimate by definition.

The United States, however, has never viewed democracy that way.  Not even the Confederate South, which may be the American example that treads on being the closest to that concept, did.  The Southerners felt comfortable with human bondage, but they did not feel comfortable instituting an unwritten set of values into an unwritten constitution.  Slavery, the core value of the South, was presumed justified, but it was written into the law.

Much of the nation now does.

Indeed, in the Trump wing of the GOP, or the wing which came over to trump, and brought populist Democrats into the party, that is a strong central tenant.  When the far right in the current GOP speaks about being a "Constitutional Conservative", they don't mean being Constitutional Originalists.  Rather, they are speaking about interpreting the Constitution according to a second, unwritten, and vaguely defined "constitution".

The ironies this piles on are thick, as the unwritten social constitution this piles on looks back to an American of decades ago, much of which has indeed unfortunately changed, but much of which the current backers of this movement are not close to comporting with themselves.  The imagined perfect America that is looked back towards, the one that we wish to "Make Great Again", was culturally an Anglo-Saxon Protestant country, or at least a European Christian one, with very strong traditional values in that area.  Those who now look at that past as an ideal age in part because social movements involving such things as homosexuality and the like need to appreciate that the original of the same set of beliefs and concerns would make heterosexual couples living outside of marriage and no fault divorce just as looked down upon.  Put another way, the personal traits of Donald F. Trump, in this world, would be just as abhorrent as those of Barney Frank.

This is not to discuss the pluses or minuses of social conservatism or of social liberalism in any form.  That's a different topic.  But American democracy, no matter how imperfect, has always rested on the absolute that its first principal of democracy is democracy.  Taken one step further, a central concept of democracy is that bad ideas die in the sunlight.  

That has always proven true in the past, and there's any number of movements that rose and fell in the United States not because they were suppressed, but because they simply proved themselves to be poor ideas.  In contrast, nations which tried to enforce a certain cultural norm upon their people by force, such as Vichy France or Francoist Spain, ended up doing damage to it, even where some of the core values they sought to enforce were not bad (which is not to excuse the many which were).

All of that may seem a long ways from Memorial Day, but it's not.  No matter how a person defines it, as the end of the day the lost lives being commemorated today were lost for that concept of democracy and no other.  Those who would honor them, from the left or the right, can only honor them in that context.

That means that those who would support insurrections as their side didn't win, aren't honoring the spirit of the day. And those who would impose rule by courts, as people can't be trusted to vote the right way, aren't either.

Related threads:

Tuesday, May 30, 1922. Lincoln Memorial Dedicated.