I think it depends on the context and purpose.
Doug Mastriano is a Pennsylvania state senator who represents a district that includes Gettysburg. If he dressed up for a reenactment, a popular tourist attraction there (see video below), I don’t necessarily have a problem with it. Somebody has to play the Confederate soldiers’ roles. And for a guy with a Ph.D. in history, participating in a show that recreates history for spectators is plausible.
Mastriano is the 2022 GOP nominee for governor, and I have other reasons for saying voters shouldn’t elect him. Two years ago, I criticized him (here) as someone whose “understanding of 7th-grade civics is wanting.” An election denier, he wanted the legislature to overrule the voters and award Pennsylvania’s electoral votes to Trump, who lost the state by over 70,000 votes (details here). This shows he can’t be trusted to uphold our democracy; and if he’s elected governor, he’d have substantial power to interfere in the 2024 election.
There are additional reasons, which I pointed out in my November 2020 posting, to not elect him to statewide office. As I wrote then, after being elected to the legislature, he “made himself into a poster boy for the usual rightwing nutcase causes: Anti-gay, anti-Muslim, a ‘reopen’ advocate and anti-masker.” And he’s dishonest: “He blamed the Notre Dame Cathedral fire on ‘Islamic terrorists’ (it was accidentally started by workmen).” He can’t be trusted on any level.
More recently, he’s been barring reporters from his campaign events. A free press is vital to our democracy. Never trust a politician who doesn’t want the general public to know what he’s telling his supporters. But we do know what he told them at one campaign event, because CNN found a way to cover it despite being kicked out by his goons (watch video here): He “railed against abortion, Covid restrictions, and what he claimed is Marxist ideology in public schools.”
Mastriano also is a Christian Nationalist (details here) who has “called the separation of church and state a myth” (quoted from Wikipedia here). If elected governor, he’ll almost certainly implement policies that violate the constitutional rights of some Pennsylvania residents, triggering expensive court battles. Here, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure; this can be avoided by not electing him.
Then a story came out (here) on Friday, August 26, 2022, that Mastriano posed for a 2013-14 faculty photo at the Army War College, where he was an instructor, in a Confederate military uniform (above). This was not for a reenactment event. Reuters, the news outlet that broke the story, explains faculty members were “given the option of dressing as a historical figure,” but only 6 of 21 participants did and only Mastriano posed in Confederate attire.
Why did he do that? Reuters said he didn’t respond to queries and wouldn’t answer questions. It didn’t violate school policy at the time; the military didn’t ban display of Confederate flags and symbols until after George Floyd’s murder and a wave of civil rights demonstrations in 2020. And this is something he did over 8 years ago. But it’s fair to wonder what his thinking and motives were — especially in light of what else we know about him.
Republicans have defended Confederate monuments that were erected in the early 1900s, decades after the Civil War, throughout the South to intimidate black people. Those monuments were built at the same time that the Ku Klux Klan was waging a reign of terror against the South’s black people.
The GOP has worked in many states to suppress black voting. Virtually all the Trump campaign’s large recounts, costing millions of dollars, in the aftermath of the 2020 election were in cities with large black populations. For these and other reasons, the GOP is widely viewed by liberals as a racist party, and I view them that way.
Mastriano, despite his Ph.D. in history, is not a scholar or a serious student of American history and culture. A career Army man, he has written almost exclusively on military subjects. He may have competence in that field, I don’t know, I haven’t read any of his work; but it’s clear he would bring neither a broad perspective nor tolerance to the office of governor. He doesn’t even respect the basic right of voters to choose presidential electors.
Jenna Ellis, a disreputable lawyer who worked on Trump’s team to overturn the 2020 election and is now an adviser to Mastriano’s campaign, accused the media of having a “meltdown” over his Confederate uniform and “the left” of wanting to “erase history,” and claimed he wants us to “learn from it” (details in the Reuters article). I don’t see what there is to teach grown adults by dressing up in a Confederate uniform (why not a Union uniform?); I think it mostly sheds more light on who Mastriano is, his bigotry and racism, his insensitivity to the people offended by this, and has lack of good judgment.
Why the Army War College tolerated this is a mystery, but knowing bad PR when they’re clobbered by it, they’ve removed the photo from their website. It’s up to Pennsylvania voters to make sure he doesn’t make it into the statehouse.
Postscript: “No big deal,” say Republicans. See story here. That tells me they don’t care if it offends black voters, who they think shouldn’t even be voting (see my posting here).