Ex-Army commander details 'stark' parallels between Confederate 'fire eaters' and modern MAGA

Retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, ex-commander of U.S. Army Europe, has compared the MAGA rhetoric of 2025 to that of pre-Civil war southern "fire eaters"—and finds disturbing similarities in a new thinkpiece for The Bulwark.

Hertling, who, in August said that Trump's reliance on "yes-men" is, from a military standpoint, a recipe for "true strategic disaster," says that "there are echoes in our political rhetoric of the men who helped talk the United States into civil war," the onset of which, he says, "can be attributed, in part, to a group of political arsonists."

Among the 'Southern fire-eaters' to which Hertling compares to modern-day MAGA, include Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina, William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama, Edmund Ruffin of Virginia, whom, he says, "moved beyond grievance into agitation and violence."

These agitators, Hertling says, "cultivated a rhetoric that was designed not to persuade opponents but to radicalize their many followers."

Rhett, for example, "nicknamed the “Father of Secession,” spent years insisting that South Carolina break from the Union, even as most fellow Southerners urged patience. Yancey, he says, carried that message into rallies that became "showcases of defiance," and Ruffin "celebrated violence as a necessary cleansing," Hertling explains.

While these were the major players, Hertling says, "plenty of politicians held extreme views," but it's "the tactics of the fire-eaters, studied closely, reveal a playbook we are beginning to recognize today."

Among those tactics: demonizing political opponents and claiming violence was a "patriotic duty when Washington failed to submit to their will."

And while it may be easy, Hertling says, to dismiss these fire-eaters as "relics of a slaveholding past," the temptation to do just that is dangerous.

"The tactics they used, the contempt they showed for compromise, the way they weaponized words, and the way they mobilized supporters have direct echoes today."

Hateful and violent rhetoric, Hertling notes, "makes political violence more likely," as seen more so, studies show, from the far-right than the far-left.

That violence has been seen most recently in the slaying of MAGA podcaster Charlie Kirk, as well as with the murders of two at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. in May, and in June, when an elderly woman was killed by a Molotov cocktail at a peaceful protest in Boulder, Colorado

"Each of these acts had its own ideological contours, but all emerged from the same poisoned soil," Hertling says. "There is a connection between these contemporary tragedies and the fire-eaters of the pre-Civil War period: similar rhetoric."

The rhetoric, however, isn't the danger, but rather the lack of a challenge to that rhetoric that is the catalyst to violence, he says.

"The lesson is not that every fiery speech or performative political gesture portends bloodshed," he said. "The lesson is that when incendiary rhetoric or action is left unchallenged, when it attacks social norms and takes over the public square or social media, violence becomes the predictable next step."

These modern-day fire-eaters, Hertling says, are "not harmless showmen. They are dangerous instigators who are "playing with matches in a dry season."

"If we want to keep our politics from becoming a literal battleground, we must demand leaders who believe in the hard work of democracy rather than performative rhetoric—who see opponents as adversaries, but not as enemies," Hertling warns, "who see compromise not as weakness but as the essence of politics; who know that words can build trust as well as destroy it."