2025, Lowcountry Left and the Battle of Cedar Creek

The Lowcountry’s progressives and liberals are afraid. We doubt our leaders. We were surprised. We have lost confidence in each other and ourselves. Obama hope and change victories seem far away. Project 2025 has emerged, been challenged and now seems to be fading into the background as the Heritage Foundation, Donald Trump and the Religious Right prepare to repackage this aging collection of right wing position papers inside another package or branding. Some of this has been cut and pasted into one vehicle after another for so long that it was originally written in Wordstar and pumped out on memeograph 

We continue to push on organizing the community. Our Faith Communities, Education and Government working groups are functionally organized. Arts and Culture will shortly be working. Science, Technology and Medicine is now staffed. See how DiversCity is structured to defend our seven hummocks of Lowocuntry Community.  Here is how to contact us to get involved. 

There have been dramatic changes since this first version of this blog was posted on July 12. However the fundamental challenge remains the same. Local Democrats are now excited with a new leader on their ticket. Local Republicans have doubled down on Trump, having eliminated most o the state's moderate Republicans and lady Republicans from the legislature in primaries so they can pursue and absolutist position on Abortion. The Dominionist takeover of the State Republican party is now complete, with hundreds of lifelong conservatives now being driven out of their own party or forced to submit to a religious agenda that accepts no compromise. A bitter and divisive referendum about funding I-526 is now on the local ballot. All of this overwhelms a local political culture evolved to manage issues which change over years, not days. Young progressives are largely skeptical, wondering if they really want to spend more of their lives here. The established political leadership, conservative and liberal, can't deal with any of this and now largely hopes apathy and among the young and gerrymandering will insulate them from consequences in the next two elections.

However the problem here in the Lowcountry hasn't changed at all. We have inherited a weak working class economy and a poor school system in most areas. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in right wing money has been allocated to support takeover of our community through groups like Unity City and Moms for Liberty, largely due to Charleston's symbolic importance in US history as the only major colonial era city available for political takeover (A goal impossible to realize in New York, Boston, Philidephia or Baltimore). This historicity is perceived as critical to a movement that sees America's mythical history as a "Christian Nation" at the time of it's founding as a mandate for a destiny that puts their "Christ Centered" people in charge of seven mountians of influence here and later everywhere in the US.

The Republic has been here before.

Phillip Sheridan, a tiny man, knew his Union army was in trouble when he mounted his huge horse Rienzi, at 6 am on October 19, 1864 in Winchester. The Confederate Army, which everyone believed was exhausted, mounted a night attack. His soldiers were routed. The starving Confederates had occupied the Union camps and were eating hot federal army breakfasts and reading love letters from union sweethearts.
After an hour, 11 divisions of the magnificently trained, supplied and positioned federal Army of the Shenandoah were on the verge of dissolving into a frightened mob.

Sheridan may have been frightened, He didn’t show it. He intercepted a few of the leading wave of retreating federal soldiers and turned them around to block the road, doing the work of a Sergeant. After he had gathered 100 men across the road, he was doing the work of a Captain. When 1000 men in blue stood between the attacking Confederates and the still disorganized main body of his army, he was doing the work of a Colonel. By the time several thousand of the once panicked Union soldiers had established a functional defensive line and the main body of the Union army was organized behind it, he was performing the work of a Brigadier. The Confederate advance halted at 10 am. 

That afternoon, the once panicked men of the Army of the Shenandoah counterattack under the leadership of Lt. General Phillip Sheridan, a man only five feet, two inches tall, riding one of the biggest horses anybody had ever seen. By sunset, the Confederate army was a shattered wreck stumbling in retreat towards its inevitable surrender. 

Our Desperate Fight and Need for a Bigger Horse

We are frightened. The Lowcountry has become the target of a massively funded attempt to exterminate our culture of diversity and tolerance. Moms for Liberty has exhausted us. Ed Kelly and its other agents on the school board have violated every standard of responsible governance. We have held them by mass vigilance through abusive and unnecessary meetings which drag on past midnight.  

We were tired. We got some sleep and woke up to a resurgent Trump, Unity City and Project 2025. Blexit, a project to push African Americans in SC out of progressive politics and turn black citizens into Tim Scott clones is paying 200 thousand dollars to “useful negros.” Blexit’s goal is to undo the accomplishments of the Civil Rights movement after black people “get over slavery.” We’re groggy and scared. The enemy is eating our breakfast while they read the love letters from our progressive sweethearts from the North and West whose electronic love letters consist of pleas for money so they can win other people’s elections. Our own Democratic Party grinds its remaining members down making phone calls and writing postcards for voters in other states. Some more of our friends are packing to leave. Nobody thinks we have a chance.

It’s time for those of us prepared to fight to get on our horse and turn our panicked friends around. 

That's not easy. We’re also the caregivers and volunteers. People suffer when we don’t help. As our numbers have thinned over the years, the oppressive need we confront has become overwhelming. That need is manufactured by the enemy, which long ago learned that the sick, hungry, homeless and poor are the cheapest way to keep us busy.  

If we don’t adjust we’ll be feeding people the day before the midnight knock on our door. 

Opposition has become personal. I was yelled at for three minutes during a July 4th neighborhood picnic by a Trumper whose insults were remarkable only for their length, volume and lack of originality. He did not like my flag. He finally fled when I raised my phone to record. We’ve all lost friends and family to Trump. Our liberal hearts ache to save them and heal our relations. 

This is not the time for that. 

We worry that we may not know enough or be perfectly right enough to fight back. We want to read another book. We want to do more research. We fret about typos. We need to be absolutely perfect lest we commit the mistake of an imperfect strike against the monsters who will believe and say anything. Surely if we’re careful, the responsible and logical fruits of our education will command their respect. Maybe they’ll listen and grant us their painless surrender. 

Nothing we say is going to stop these people. 

Charleston's Worries about What We Need to Stop

We worry about where we should concentrate our effort. Should we save the schools and libraries? Is it about race? Is sexism the problem? What about the climate? Should we ignore Unity City and fight Project 2025? Can we have just one more book discussion? 

No worries there. It’s all one fight, against groups of people all controlled by the same money. Behind the rednecks and religious extremists are the billionaires, pulling the strings and cutting the checks. They want all of what is going to be left of the planet. The culture war stuff is just the most cost effective battering ram they can hire to crush the opposition. 

The  fight  we need to win is the one for the hearts of our fellow citizens, the frightened people prepared to go either way. Many have already voted for Trump twice. They’ll go along a bit further now, more later. Someday their cooperation could extend to concentration camps. It all happens a little at a time. 

We aren’t going to save South Carolina in the short term. A culture of ignorance and prejudice lives here that we were too kind to exterminate when we should have 40 years ago. It’s  entrenched. Trump has roused it to shameless abusiveness.  

We can hold on to the urban core of the Lowcountry, an area about 15 miles distant from N. Charleston City hall in every direction. We can also hold Richland County and a few, poor rural areas which don’t really matter because they’ve been bled empty of talent and resources by generations of grinding oppression. We’ll have to hold that until the rest of the nation throws off Trump, hunts down the traitorous leadership of his insurrectionist MAGA army and hoses down the republic with political disinfectant. 

It’s a struggle which will consume the rest of our lives for some of us. It’s a fight the smartphone generation doesn’t want to have. Can’t they just swipe left and get a different political and economic reality? Trump didn’t destroy America last time. Some people are busy trying to raise kids, keep jobs or avoid pissing off their HOA. Nobody wanted this. We wanted hope and change. 

DiversCity is building a network to coordinate the struggle in and around Charleston. We don’t want to be your boss, because we know you won’t tolerate that. We don’t want your money because we know you’re probably broke and cheap. We’ve run the revolution on bake sales and raffles before. 

What we need and must have is your attention, voices and participation. 

The opposition doesn’t understand Charleston. They think we’re Macon, Georgia with more tourists. Most of them haven’t lived here very long. They believe you can just move into Lowcountry Culture and tell people what to do the way they move into a house covered with Vinyl Siding in Mt. Pleasant. The firewalls in Lowocuntry culture they can’t see function not only to slow down progress, but also to limit damage. This isn’t the first disaster this community has had to live through. It probably won’t even be worse than Hugo. 

If you want a Lowcountry anything like the one we’re struggled with and loved, it’s time to lead, follow or get out of the way. You can get on your horse like Phillip Sheridan. (I’m tuned in to his problematic personal history and abuses of native Americans, no need  to prove you’ve been to college to me.) You can line up and hold the line, like his soldiers did. You can go home, ignore us or even begin packing to leave. It's your right to decide. 

Do What You Will, but As for Us, We'll Fight

As for me and the founders of the DiversCity project, We’re going to fight. We need your help. The time to step up is now. 

If you are willing, we’ll see you at Gage Hall at 6 pm on Bastille Day, July 14. Bring a dish to share. We’ll finish building that first defensive line. Hopefully by November, at least in the Lowcountry these people will be leaving the Lowcountry or at least leaving it alone.