'One Big, Beautiful Bill': The Pickett's Charge of Trumpism
By: Stuart Stevens
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
We are living through the second revival of the Great Lost Cause.
Stuart StevensJul 06, 2025205
When I grew up in Mississippi, the Fourth of July was a muted holiday. July 4, 1863, was the day Vicksburg fell to Grant. On July 3, 1863, the 11th Mississippi Regiment, with the University Grays of the University of Mississippi, led Pickett's Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg. They reached the stone wall of the Union defenses, the furthest advance of Lee's army. The Mississippi casualty rate was 90 percent. The Flag captured that day belonged to the 11th Mississippi Regiment, now on display at Richmond's Museum of the Confederacy.
In the living room of my house in Vermont is a large wooden chest that a relative used to pack belongings when moving into the Vicksburg caves that served as bomb shelters during the siege. On the inside of the top, my many-times-great-aunt marked each day of the siege with a precise line carved into the hardwood. There are 47 lines.
I've been thinking a lot about those days in 1863, a hinge in history that changed the world, as did another summer day in 1944 on the beaches of Normandy. If my ancestors had prevailed, what kind of country would we have today?
Strangely and sadly, the Trump-led Republican Party is trying desperately to answer that question. It was Sergeant Ferdinando Maggi of the 39th New York Infantry who captured the 11th Mississippi Regiment's flag at that stone wall in Gettysburg, where the Confederacy began to die. Today, another New Yorker is fighting to reverse the Union victory by reviving the glory and values of the Confederacy.
At its core, Trump and Trumpism are rooted in the assumption that America is divided into a permanent natural order of racial classes, with whites, of course, at the top. Sergeant Ferdinando Maggi fought with the Garibaldi Guard, a collection of immigrants named for Giuseppe Garibaldi, the hero of the battles that unified Italy. The defeat of the Confederacy made possible the country that welcomed immigrants and tried to uphold the values that "all men are created equal," enshrined in a document signed on another July 4, four score and seven years earlier.
The Confederacy was founded by wealthy white men desperate to hold on to their power and secure their fortunes. In 1860, Mississippi was the fifth-wealthiest state in the nation. By 1866, it was the poorest state and remains so today. Trumpism is driven by wealthy white men desperate to hold on to their power and secure their fortunes. As was the case with the Confederacy, they have convinced enough non-wealthy whites to join them in their battles to create a powerful movement.
With the passage of the Republicans' "Big Beautiful Bill," it is the foot soldiers of Trumpism who will suffer, just as almost all of the 280,000 Southerners who died fighting for the cause of wealthy men were poor. The states of the old Confederacy depend most upon the federal government that they tried to destroy. The ultimate Welfare Queens are states like Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana that receive upwards of 40% of their state budgets from Washington. Slash Medicaid, close Social Security offices, strangle the VA health system, and who is hurt the most? Poor people.
Just as the slave-owning white planter class would have benefited the most from a Confederate victory, so it is with the wealthy in Trump's Confederacy. The rich will pay less in taxes. Medicaid could end tomorrow, and it would not affect their families. They have private, "concierge" medical care. When Trump's moronic Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said that his 94-year-old mother-in-law would "wouldn't call and complain" if she didn't get her Social Security check, he was being honest. The closing of Social Security offices will not affect her or the lives of wealthy individuals.
When the Supreme Court allowed states to ban abortion, it was only a ban that applied to the non-rich. If Ivanka Trump needs an abortion, Florida laws are not going to stop her from flying on a private jet to seek medical care. Walk through any VA hospital and count the millionaires. Good luck; you won't find many.
Sometimes when I have posted a rant against Trumpism on social media, some MAGA wag will shoot back a variation of "Cry your heart out, you lost." They don't get it. Odds are pretty good their life is being negatively impacted by their vote, while, ironically, Trump seems determined to improve my standard of living. I could stand in front of a Home Depot in South L.A. for the next year, and ICE would not go after me. I'm the same color as the Crayola crayons I grew up with labeled "Flesh." And if they did try to detain me, I could lawyer up with more legal talent than Sean Combs.
My hatred of Trump and Trumpism isn't about me, but it is about a loved one called America. We are living through the second revival of the Great Lost Cause, that nostalgia for a world in which the purpose of organized society was to make life better for white people. I'm named for a relative who was named for the Confederate cavalry general Jeb Stuart. He was a traitor, just like the seven Confederate generals whom Trump, the draft-dodging Yankee, hails as heroes.
I believe we will look back on July 4, 2025, as the Pickett's Charge of Trumpism. There are more decent Americans standing on the same side of the wall as Sergeant Ferdinando Maggi than on the side where my relatives died trying to preserve slavery. There will be bad, awful days ahead, more dark defeats for liberty like the Battle of Chickamauga, but J.D. Vance is wrong: America is an idea with extraordinary power. America will continue to welcome the children of first-generation immigrants like Usha Bala Chilukuri Vance, despite the hate of their fathers.
We are right and Trumpism is wrong. There are more of us than them. On this Fourth of July weekend, let us celebrate the July 4 victories of 1776 and 1863 and go forward with the confidence and courage that the evil of Trumpism will die the same fate as the evil of slavery.
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In the long run Trumpism IS a Lost cause. But how long?
Could be a while based on republican actions. In Florida they are already trying to cancel an election in an area forecast to go from red to blue.
The election that Miami just canceled: Why voters are furious
No veto on controversial election change. Miami mayor already signed it into law
"We are right and Trumpism is wrong. There are more of us than them."
Nope! The left is losing voters in all demographics. Maybe after the midterms the progressives willl find they have permanently fallen out of favor
columbusfreepress.com /article/greed-survival-primitive-emotion
Greed: The Survival of a Primitive Emotion
by Lawrence S. Wittner July 5, 2025 4-5 minutes
Congressional passage of Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” provides the latest evidence that human greed, despite its primitive nature, remains alive and well.
Perhaps most noticeably, the legislation provides for over $3 trillion in tax cuts that disproportionately help the wealthy and their corporations. This largesse is facilitated by slashing over $1.4 trillion in healthcare and food assistance for low-income Americans and increasing the national debt by $3.3 trillion. Estimates reveal that at least 16 million Americans will lose health care coverage and 7 million people (including 2 million children) will lose food aid or have their food aid cut significantly. Meanwhile, according to the Yale Budget Lab, the nation’s top 0.1 percent―people with an annual income over $3.3 million―will receive tax cuts of $103,500 on average. Condemning the legislation, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops declared simply that it “takes from the poor to give to the wealthy.”
Other measures in the legislation supporting the wealthy and their businesses at public expense include financial subsidies for coal, oil, and gas companies, the opening of opportunities for oil and gas corporations to drill on public lands (including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the National Petroleum Reserve), and the reduction of royalty fees for such fossil fuel drilling.
Of course, this kind of class legislation and the greed that inspires it are nothing new. Throughout history, some people have amassed great fortunes, often with the assistance of governments and other powerful entities. Kings, princes, and their courtiers provided themselves with castles, vast landed estates, and other perquisites of wealth, while millions of their subjects lived in miserable huts and dug a few potatoes out of their fields in a desperate effort to survive. In later years, this situation was replicated to some extent as business titans garnered great wealth by exploiting workers in factories, mines, and fields.
Although this pattern of economic inequality was viewed as immoral by every great religious and ethical system, it did have a brutal logic to it. After all, in these situations of overall scarcity, some people would be poor and some would surely die. By contrast, growing rich helped guarantee survival for oneself and one’s family.
But with the advent of the industrial revolution, these tragic circumstances began to dissipate, for human beings increasingly possessed the knowledge, skills, and resources that had the potential to produce decent lives for everyone. Indeed, as science, technology, and factory output advanced and produced unprecedented abundance, there was no longer any morally justifiable basis for the existence of hunger, homelessness, and mass sickness.
In these altered conditions, avarice has become increasingly irrational―the driving force behind irrational men like Donald Trump and his billionaire friends , who, even as millions of people live and die in poverty and misery, seek to wallow in great wealth.
Gandhi put it concisely when he declared , decades ago: “The world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.”
Fortunately, over the course of human history, humane thinkers, social movements, and political parties have worked to rein in untrammeled greed in the interest of a better life for all humanity. In recent centuries, they have recognized the fact that sharing the wealth is not only a moral stance, but a feasible one.
Let’s hope, then, that despite this brazen and regressive move by the Trump administration to bolster economic privilege at the expense of human needs, the forces favoring human equality and compassion will ultimately prevail.
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Lawrence S. Wittner ( ) is Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press).
this is too good