NPR on John Kelly’s twisted understanding of the Civil War:

During an interview Monday night on Fox News, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly said that “the lack of the ability to compromise led to the Civil War.”

His comment was swiftly countered by confounded observers, who pointed out that the Civil War was fought over slavery and that compromising on slavery would be morally unconscionable — and that the country did strike such compromises for decades and they did not, in fact, prevent war.

They did prevent war for several decades. Lots of people died in time to miss the war, so from that point of view, the compromises were a big success…except of course for the people who were slaves who died in time to miss the war.

Kelly said he thought applying contemporary standards of ethics to the past is “very very dangerous” and demonstrates “a lack of appreciation of history.” He praised the “men and women of good faith on both sides” of the Civil War who followed their “conscience” in their fight.

That really is an incredibly stupid thing to say. We should apply contemporary standards of ethics if we have reason to think they’re better standards. We can still understand that people are stuck with what’s available to them, but that doesn’t mean we have to say oh well slavery was seen as a fine thing by people who owned slaves so mustn’t judge.

After Kelly’s remarks, scores of commentators responded with rebuttals, their tone ranging from bafflement to shock to weary repetition.

John Podhoretz, the conservative editor of Commentary magazine, wrote on Twitter, “80 years leading up to the Civil War were a history of efforts to compromise with the South. And then the war came. Started by the South.”

As Vann Newkirk, a writer at theAtlantic, put it succinctly, “the entire fabric of American law was a compromise with slavery.”

The idea that the Civil War was caused by a failure to compromise was expressed by historian Shelby Foote in Ken Burns’ 1990 documentary The Civil War. Foote, who once wrote that he “would fight for the Confederacy today if the circumstances were similar,” was criticized by fellow historians for, as The New York Times put it, playing down “the economic, intellectual and political causes of the Civil War.”

…

“Compromise on what?” asked Joshua Zeitz, a historian and the author of Lincoln’s Boys, asked on Twitter. “Extending chattel slavery throughout the western territories?”

“The only compromise on the table in 1861 would have given slavery explicit constitutional protection,” writes Jamelle Bouie, chief political correspondent at Slate.

“Focus on compromise only makes sense if you view slavery as bad but not *that* bad,” Bouie later wrote.

The way the Magdalene laundries were not that bad…if you were a male Catholic apologist at no risk of being held captive in one.

[Ta-Nehisi] Coates also directly rebutted Kelly’s assertion that “we make a mistake … when we take what is today accepted as right and wrong and go back 100, 200, 300 years or more … and apply it back then.”

The “notion that we are putting today’s standards on the past is, in itself, racist — implies only white, slave-holding, opinions matter,” Coates writes. “Majority of people living in South Carolina in 1860 were black — they did not need modern white wokeness to tell them slavery was wrong. Majority of people living in Mississippi in 1860 were black. They knew, in their own time, that enslavement was wrong.”

Oh but that’s some of those terrible contemporary standards of ethics, thinking that the people enslaved or held captive or exploited or tortured should be heeded at least as much as the people who did the enslaving or torturing. We should stick with the Eternal Truth that only people like John Kelly and Brendan O’Neill get to have standards of ethics that count.