Is Jim Webb seceding from the Democratic Party?

Former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, who is considering a run for the Democratic nomination against Hillary Clinton, posted a nuanced Facebook statement on the Confederate flag controversy roiling Southern states since the racially motivated Charleston shootings.

“The Confederate Battle Flag has wrongly been used for racist and other purposes in recent decades,” Webb wrote. “It should not be used in any way as a political symbol that divides us.” The one-term senator added, “we should also remember that honorable Americans fought on both sides in the Civil War, including slave holders in the Union Army from states such as Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware, and that many non-slave holders fought for the South.”

The Democratic Party has a much longer history of flying the Confederate flag than the Republican Party. It wasn’t that long ago that sympathy for the Lost Cause would have been expected of a Virginia Democrat.

But now Hillary Clinton is implying that even private companies should try to avoid selling the Confederate flag, which she says has no place in America today. Most flag dead-enders are Republicans, though the Republican governor of South Carolina and the state’s both Republican senators have called for the flag to be removed from state capitol grounds.

Both Republican senators representing Mississippi and the GOP speaker of the state house have all called for the Confederate insignia to be deleted from their state flag. No major Republican presidential candidate still defends the flag. The most they will say is that decisions on whether to unfurl it should be left up to the states.

Webb, on the other hand, says, “This is a time for us to come together, and to recognize once more that our complex multicultural society is founded on the principle of mutual respect.” He called on Americans to “think through these issues with a care that recognizes the need for change but also respects the complicated history of the Civil War.”

Judging from the comments on his Facebook post, Webb isn’t going to be able to count on much mutual respect from Democratic primary voters on Civil War history, complicated or otherwise.

“I don’t need to agree with you on every issue in order to support you, but this should be low-hanging fruit for you to be on the right side of,” wrote one. “And there’s no reason not to state that the Confederate battle flag represents a quasi-nation whose short existence was spent trying to fight for an immoral cause.”

“Honorable people fight on the both sides of every war. It’s the casus belli that matters,” chimed in the next commenter. “Honoring the ‘white man’s flag’ (their words, not mine) excludes millions of black slaves who lived in the antebellum south and would have opposed war and slavery if they’d been asked.

“Mr. Webb, as an active duty Marine I’d love to support you,” opined another, before chastising “the wrongness of the white supremacist society that [the Confederates] fought for and that their battle flag came to symbolize. I am deeply disappointed in your position on this matter.”

“Have you read the secession declarations of the Confederate states, Senator?” yet another inquired. “There is no honor in what that flag stood for.” Finally, one signed off in disgust, “Goodbye Jim.”

Goodbye, indeed, to any chance that Hillary won’t run against Webb’s cultural conservatism with the scorched-earth ferocity of Sherman’s March to the Sea if he ever gains the slightest bit of traction. But it is consistent with Webb’s past positions.

Of Confederate veterans he has said, “I am not here to apologize for why they fought, although modern historians might contemplate that there truly were different perceptions in the North and South about those reasons, and that most Southern soldiers viewed the driving issue to be sovereignty rather than slavery.”

Long before he cast liberal votes as a senator from Virginia, Webb praised the South as the main “obstacle to the collectivist taming of America, symbolized by the edicts of political correctness and “the greatest inhibitor of the plans of the activist Left and the cultural Marxists for a new kind of society altogether.”

Yet Webb has retreated from other anti-liberal positions faster than the Confederate army fled Gettysburg. Five years before he ran for Senate, he wrote, “It is a pleasurable experience to watch Bill Clinton finally being judged, even by his own party, for the ethical fraudulence that has characterized his entire political career.”

Webb previously fumed about Clinton, “Every time I see him salute a Marine, it infuriates me.” Webb campaigned with Bill Clinton.

For 20 years, Webb — who once told an interviewer “Jane Fonda can kiss my ass” — wouldn’t shake John Kerry’s hand due to Kerry’s Vietnam activism. As a politician, he was happy to appear with Kerry.

The author of the 1979 Washingtonian piece “Why Women Can’t Fight” and a subsequent 1997 Weekly Standard article discussing the role of women in the armed forces as a “War on the Military Culture” told Tim Russert during the 2006 Senate campaign he was absolutely comfortable with women leading men in combat.

As a writer he called affirmative action “a permeating state-sponsored racism that is as odious as the Jim Crow laws it sought to countermand.” Webb did reiterate a toned-down version of the argument in the Wall Street Journal on the “myth of white privilege.” The commentary didn’t seem to influence his voting record, however.

People do change their minds. They also move past old grudges. But Webb, whose drift toward the Democratic Party was motivated partly by economic populism and mainly by his passionate, prescient opposition to the Iraq war — changed a lot to accommodate his new party’s platform. He was enthusiastically supported by the progressive netroots.

It’s odd that after assimilating to the party of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, the battle flag of the Lost Cause seems to be the hill he’s willing to die on.