Jean Lewandowski is a retired special needs teacher. She lives in Nashua.

“’When I use a word’, Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less’. ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many things.’ ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that is all.’” — Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking Glass.

Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis, now a presidential candidate, declared civil war last year. This isn’t hyperbole. Borrowing cynically from Winston Churchill’s speech 83 years ago this June, as England battled Hitler in France, DeSantis announced: “We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.”

As propagandists do, he has hollowed words of all historical context and common meaning and filled them with the fears and passions of potential recruits. True to his promise, he’s already launched attacks against his enemies: Disney, teachers, books, drag queens, women, refugees, transgender youth and their parents.

Obviously, those groups aren’t Nazis, and DeSantis is no Churchill. He’s more like Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy during the Civil War of 1861-1865. In many ways, that was a culture war much like today’s. To Davis and his insurrectionist army, “preserving our culture” meant what Southern leader John C. Calhoun euphemistically called “the peculiar institution,” an economic and class system built and dependent on the enslavement of human beings.

In the early 1800s, anti-slavery sentiment was growing, but disputes remained largely legal and political. As land was claimed from Native America, and the Kansas/Nebraska Act opened the possibility of expanding the slave-based economy westward, violent clashes began to erupt in the territories. The Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott decision of 1857 that the U.S. Constitution didn’t guarantee citizenship to people of African descent, even in free states. Many historians consider this the worst decision the Court ever made. It energized the new Republican Party, and when Abraham Lincoln was elected president, the battle lines were clear.

The echoes of that time of cultural change are strong. As we saw with President Obama, the election of Lincoln in 1860 brought a flood of conspiracy theories. “Warnings circulated in pamphlets and the press that an antislavery federal government would inspire a wave of violent slave revolts. Texas’s declaration of secession asserted that northern abolitionists had for decades been sending ‘emissaries’ to ‘bring blood and carnage to our firesides.’

Georgia’s insisted that the ‘avowed purpose’ of Republican leaders was to ‘subvert our society and subject us not only to the loss of our property [they meant people they’d enslaved] but the destruction of ourselves, our wives, and our children, and the desolation of our homes [and] our altars.’” (historynewsnetwork.org.) President Trump’s inaugural address about “American carnage” used much the same fearful language and imagery.

Many January 6th insurrectionists waved Confederate battle flags because they still grieve the “lost cause.” As Americans become more culturally diverse and win positions of power, propagandists feed the fear of ‘The Other’ and promote the sale of high-powered weapons for self-protection. Self-styled militias and white supremacist groups have metastasized in the last 20 years. Movements like the Free State Project call for secession. Violent attacks against immigrants, non-Christians, LGBTQ+ people, and racial minorities continue to increase. Court decisions are overturning hard-won civil rights. The Supreme Court’s recent ruling denying women’s right to bodily autonomy may well be the Dred Scott decision of our era.

This fight is as old as the European migration to the Americas, when people fled from religious and political wars and oppression, then imposed their own dogmas in the colonies. After the Revolution, creating a constitutional republic began with an ideal that “all men are created equal,” but framers traded away the rights of people of color and women to bring Southern states into the bargain. Since the Civil War, progressives of all eras have fought for women’s, racial minorities’, workers’, disability, and LGBTQ+ people’s civil rights over and over.

As Mr. Dumpty suggests, whoever defines words wields their power. Today’s anti-democratic activists are descendants of all those who fought to concentrate power among a minority elite. They use voter suppression, gerrymandering, and political corruption to gain and maintain it. Both Republican presidents elected this century lost the popular vote, and many Republicans have demonstrated their willingness to use political force and foment civil violence to subvert the will of the people. This is authoritarianism.

The majority of Americans still believe in the promise of democracy. Authoritarians call us a mob because they’re afraid of us. They’re afraid of us because there are many more of us, and we aren’t afraid of them. We aren’t afraid because we stand in solidarity.

We embrace the beautiful diversity of America; teach our children to respect all Americans’ stories; advocate for liberty and justice for all; and take responsibility for the kind of world our children will inherit. The authoritarians have declared war, but democracy has won in the past, and it will again.

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