The War of Southern Aggression

The MAGA Reconstruction of the North Is Well Underway

Confederate apologists often claimed, as Nikki Haley did during the 2024 Republican primary campaign, that the Civil War was fought over “states’ rights.” The Southern rebellion was indeed about “states’ rights,” but only in the sense that it was about the Confederate States’ right to determine who was an American citizen and interpret the Constitution to its own satisfaction. That’s why Confederates inverted its secession as “The War of Northern Aggression.”

The sources of today’s crises come into focus once we understand that we are well into a war of Southern aggression — a neo-Confederate project to remake the entire country in its own image and win the war the South never conceded. There is a geographically distinct “nation” within the American nation — the Neo-Confederate States — that refuses to accept the legitimacy of the United States as the pluralistic democracy that the rest of the country aspires to be.

Seen in this light, the brutal invasion of Minnesota is not an aberration, but the most recent maneuver in the MAGA military reconstruction of the North, a coordinated assault on not just the idea of liberal democracy, but on those living in states that, who, however imperfectly, still strive for it.

MAGA Reconstruction

Capital-R Reconstruction was a high point in American history precisely because it was the moment when the nation insisted—by force if necessary—that the defeated Confederate states accept the legitimacy of the United States, the supremacy of federal law, and the political equality of those they had enslaved.

Violent Southern resistance to that project—most notably the formation of the Ku Klux Klan and the systematic use of terror, murder, and intimidation to prevent Black Americans from registering, voting, or holding office even after being elected—made military Reconstruction unavoidable. Federal power was deployed to reconstruct the South so that it would conform, in fact and not merely on paper, to the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.

What we are witnessing now is something I denote as reconstruction with a lowercase “r.” It borrows the tools of Military Reconstruction—federal force, occupation, administrative override—but inverts their purpose. Instead of enforcing freedom and civil rights, it is used to strip them away; instead of seeking to subject an authoritarian region to democratic order, it seeks to subjugate a democratic region to an authoritarian order. The symmetry is intentional. It is meant to underscore both how deeply rooted today’s aggressors’ ambitions are in American history, and how radically different the moral stakes are.

The resistance to Reconstruction took the form of murderous guerrilla warfare and lynch mobs determined to restore a racial caste system. The ongoing resistance to MAGA reconstruction takes the form of nonviolent heroism—by people who have placed the freedom and human dignity of their neighbors above their own safety. That contrast is the point. It is the clearest measure of what is being undone, and of what is now at stake.

The Neo-Confederate Agenda

What is the MAGA reconstruction intending to achieve? It is not the deadly but shambolic project we are continuing to be told it is, nor is it a “partisan” project, nor does it fit the familiar model of a personalist strongman enterprise. To recognize the project’s core animating intentions, one has only to look at what the legislatures in the Neo-Confederate states have enacted within their borders, and what the Roberts Court has already accomplished in terms of privileging Christians and giving “Christian” values the color of law, overturning the gains of the civil rights movement, and much more (see: To the Supreme Court, the 20th Century Was Wrongly Decided).

Thus, much of Project 2025 was less the product of DC think-tanks' imaginations than a compendium of what Neo-Confederate states have already enacted within their borders. Those states continue to be “laboratories of autocracy” supplying the Trump regime with the tested and honed policies and personnel that were lacking in Trump 1.0. To be clear, that is not to dismiss Trump’s egregious grifts or side projects like tariffs, but to understand that he has grafted those grifts onto the project that was well underway before he took office, and will continue after he has left.

The MAGA Reconstruction Is Not a Partisan Project

We must understand that we have arrived at this moment not because Donald Trump or the Republican Party won the hearts and minds of a national electorate, but because organized interests concentrated in a single geographic region have spent the past two decades capturing the nation’s governing institutions. Once we recognize the House and Senate Republican caucuses, the Roberts Court majority, and Donald Trump as instruments of a sectional oligarchic project, the collapse of checks and balances—and the systematic weaponization of federal power—becomes not only intelligible, but predictable.

Consider the actions of the Trump regime that make no sense if the objective is winning elections, but make all the sense in the world if the objective is the MAGA reconstruction of the rest of America and if the MAGA worldview is taken literally — i.e., how people behave when they truly believe down is up.

January 6th pardons

If the 2020 election had actually been stolen from Trump, it would be irrational for him not to pardon those who risked so much to “save” democracy on Jan. 6th, or to allow those who went along with the “stealing” of the election to remain in public office. It would be somewhat akin to the original Continental Congress not freeing those jailed by the British after declaring independence. Especially in the context of the Roberts Court immunity decision, both actions sent a clear message that no action taken on behalf of the Trump Regime would be too extreme to be pardoned and no action taken against it too small to evade penalty.

FBI and DOJ Purges

Over the last year we have applauded the integrity of those in the Department of Justice and the FBI who have resigned rather than undertake a wide variety of actions, from corruptly dismissing charges against Eric Adams to opening an investigation of Renee Good. In the down-is-up MAGA world, where the election had been stolen and seeking to hold Trump accountable was the partisan weaponization of the Justice Department, being told to investigate Trump should have brought the same response, and they have as much regard for those who carried out those projects as we might have for prosecutors who stayed to build a case against Renee Good, for example.

Attacks on elected Democratic politicians

Crucially, the stolen-election myth does not draw its power from claims that Democrats stuffed ballot boxes or manipulated vote totals. It draws its force from a deeper presumption: that Democratic victories are invalid because they rest on the political equality of people who, in the neo-Confederate worldview, are not entitled to the same standing in the polity as white Christians. The 2020 election was a fraud not because the votes were miscounted, but because of whose votes were allowed to count, meaning that elected Democrats are not political opponents but the “enemy within” —a subversive threat to the “real” America. Kristi Noem made this logic explicit when she described Los Angeles as a city in need of “liberation” from its elected leaders—leaders portrayed not merely as misguided, but as alien usurpers imposing illegitimate values. Trump made these intentions known throughout the campaign if anyone cared to take him seriously.

Over-the-top attacks on DEI

These attacks are well understood in terms of their rhetorical appeal to MAGA’s white Christian nationalist base and their priority of reclaiming what it means to be American. Not recognized, though, is their instrumental value—a wholesale warrant to purge the military, federal law enforcement, the federal government, and civil society institutions of the leaders who the regime believes are most likely to stand up to it. Nearly unreported was the resistance from Republican members of Congress to the Biden Administration’s efforts to weed out white nationalists embedded in the military and federal law enforcement.

Renee Good and Alex Pretti smeared as domestic terrorists

Especially since 9/11, the Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden Administrations developed, refined, and deployed counter-insurgency tactics for controlling hostile urban populations around the world which are being deployed now in Northern cities. These tactics have four principles: obtain total information (think Palantir, etc); eradicate the active resisting minority; gain the allegiance or passive acceptance of the general population; and make credible the ability to terrorize with impunity. To be clear, that ICE is incompetent in conventional law enforcement techniques does not mean they are incompetent at executing this strategy; in some ways, their thuggish lawlessness is precisely the point. (Thus, calls for “better training” are unlikely to solve our problems.)

These tactics have long been deployed against communities of color and movements for justice without attracting the same national attention and outrage. Furthermore, it’s far from unprecedented to see the murder of law-abiding white citizens exercising their constitutional rights. During the mass resistance in the South to the civil rights movement, police murdered or gave the Klan and their allies free rein to murder white activists, including Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, Viola Liuzzo, James Reeb, Jonathan Daniels, William Lewis Moore, and journalist Paul Guihard. Those murders went unpunished.

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[This has been excerpted from Michael Podhorzer’s column posted on his spectacular Substack, Weekend Reading. Please visit to read the original version in its entirety, and stay tuned for Part II.]