My Republican Party is still the party of Lincoln, that led the Civil Rights movement, and defends the Constitution and its Bill of Rights. The Confederacy opposed all four.
It is these conservative Republican principles I believe deeply in my core that lead me to support moving the statue of a generic Confederate soldier in Leesburg, Va., where I serve as an elected official on the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors.
American conservatism seeks to conserve the Constitution and the values that continue to make America great. The monument in Leesburg — erected by Jim Crow Democrats and confederate memorial groups in 1908, likely attempting to intimidate black Americans and to glorify the ‘Lost Cause’ — doesn’t need to be honored in our town square and doesn’t reflect our values.
As a conservative, I stand for the liberty of all Americans — no one can argue that is what the Confederacy stood for. Indeed, that’s exactly what they feared and what they fought against. For many Americans, these statues are a reminder that parts of our nation celebrated and continues to honor those who sought to keep them enslaved forever. Remembering the good and the evil in our history is important, but that doesn’t mean we need to honor or celebrate evil in our public squares. History can be properly remembered in history books, in museums, and at sites where the history happened and where it can be put in proper context.
Instead of destroying the Leesburg statue and the gross history attached to it, our statue should be moved a couple miles away to the Ball’s Bluff Battlefield. There, at a Civil War battlefield, it can educate and serve as a memorial for families who seek to remember their ancestors as American veterans.
Among the hysteria surrounding this issue, many Republicans including President Trump think memorials to the Founding Fathers will be moved and targeted next. Trump said, “I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?” The premise underlying Trump’s argument is that the founders are morally equivalent to Confederates. He argues that the people who created the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence are morally the same as those who sought to destroy the values enshrined in all three.
This argument is intellectually lazy and based on false logic. Yes, a small fraction of the American Left want to remove memorials to the founders because many of them owned slaves; few mainstream or progressive Democrats subscribe to this view.
The vast majority see the clear difference between living in the evil cultural norms of the times and fighting a war to preserve those evil cultural norms. The unrivaled accomplishments of the founders also clearly outweigh their personal faults; the values and processes in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights led to the most free and prosperous society in human history.
And, they also led to the abolition of slavery.
Those who have a more advanced view of history and the Constitution know that its crafters put in place a political system that minimized the long-term power of the south and would force abolition. One of the causes of the Civil War was the political and economic pressure the north was putting on the south using their political power given to them in our founding documents. America was not yet ready for abolition in 1789, but the founders’ writings and comments on the process to amend the Constitution show it was constructed to advance civil rights.
The founders, despite their personal flaws, advanced ideas and created a nation that delivered individual liberty and economic prosperity to arguably billions of people worldwide.
If you ignore the personal flaws of Confederates, what values were they fighting for? The Articles of Secession from the southern states all prominently included slavery. The “Constitution of the Confederate States of America” also expressly protected it as a “right”: “Article 1, Section 9 (4) No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.”
Are those values that anyone should want to honor? As anyone can see, there is no equivalence between those who are arguably the biggest promoters of liberty of all time and those who fought to jettison our founding values in favor of keeping slavery.
Now, will some radicals like Al Sharpton and those in academia still argue against our founders? Yes, but fear of a few wrong-headed people is no reason to further perpetuate these tributes to evil. Localities, not national figures, should decide and lead this debate.
After all, last time I checked, conservatives still support the constitutional principle of federalism, which empowers local governments to make decisions not given to the federal government in the Constitution. This principle would dictate that each community should decide the fate of these statues, not the federal or state governments.
And when localities take up this debate, maybe they should heed Robert E. Lee’s advice on Confederate monuments, when he said after the war, “I think it wiser, moreover, not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.”
Ron Meyer (@Ron4VA) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He was elected to the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors in 2015, representing the Broad Run District. He is editor of Red Alert Politics (a sister publication to the Washington Examiner).
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