Sunday, Oct. 30, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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America’s first big lie was the Lost Cause, denying that slavery caused the Civil War even though each state’s articles of secession indicated the opposite. Ten years later, Lost Cause proponents claimed a noble states’ rights cause. Some textbooks in the South even today call it the War Between the States. Our citizenship test allows two answers to the question: slavery and states’ rights.
This rare instance of losers writing history resulted in the extension of overt racism for a century, leaving us with the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings, Jim Crow laws, separate drinking fountains, President Dwight Eisenhower sending troops to escort nine Black children to Little Rock High School, all the way to the 2020 public police murder of George Floyd.
A second big lie was disastrous for Americans and the world. Three years after World War I, Adolf Hitler peddled his Nazi ideas that Germany didn’t lose the war, but rather Germans had been betrayed by leaders selling out to the enemy, creating high indemnity payments and a defeated nation bereft of its own material resources. A sympathetic judge let Hitler off with a short time in jail, and the rest is history. Today, we anxiously await where our own sympathetic Supreme Court will take us down the path of demagoguery.
Democracy survived those big lies; the outcome of the current one is in doubt.
