Over at the Federalist, David Marcus fumes at “conservative cowards” who support the removal of Confederate statues, arguing that it’s their fault that mobs are now tearing down statues of the Founders and, on Friday night, Ulysses S. Grant.
This is absurd. While I cannot speak for every conservative opponent of honoring the Confederacy, my position has been quite clear for a long time in opposing public displays of the Confederate flag as well as statues. Here I am writing from Columbia in the American Spectator in 2008 in favor of removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Capitol grounds. I have drawn a strong distinction between honoring people specifically for making war against the United States to expand slavery and honoring what our Founders did to advance freedom and establish the U.S., in spite of the fact that they owned slaves.
Furthermore, there is a distinction between advocating the removal of certain statues through a process put in place by local governments and allowing such decisions to be made indiscriminately by the mob — something that I oppose, regardless of the statue.
But Marcus’s argument rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of conservatives supporting the removal of Confederate statues. I don’t support the removal of statues because I view it as a “compromise” or as a way of “offer[ing] an inch” to the Left or because I think it will spare me from charges of being called a racist. I am in favor of their removal because monuments to the Confederacy disgust me. Because I hate that they were traitors. I hate that they fought to expand slavery. I hate that romanticizing the Confederacy helped enshrine a system of state-sponsored oppression of one race that persisted for a century. And particularly, as a federalist and a conservative, I have a special loathing for the damage the Confederacy and its defenders have done to the cause of limited government. In addition to tainting arguments in favor of state sovereignty, the actions of the Confederacy and those who sought to preserve its legacy provided the justification for major expansions of the federal government.
So, when there’s an argument about Confederate statues, I don’t see it as a concession to the Left to support taking them down. I see it as an expression of my own deeply held values.
Marcus tries to argue that conservative critics of Confederate statues are somehow doing it out of fear of being tagged as a racist or to curry favor with the Left. But this is an uncharitable way to look at it. I can just as easily accuse Marcus of being the coward, of being afraid to challenge the Confederate statues out of fear of being labeled “politically correct,” out of fear of damaging his brand as being a real, true, strong conservative. But I would much prefer to argue in good faith.
And I fundamentally reject the notion that if I want to be able to defend statues of Grant or George Washington, that I have to defend every Confederate statue against the threat of removal. To me, it would be surrendering to the mob if I let their actions force me to take a position that runs contrary to my values.
