On Aug. 28, the Virginia state legislature removed the last three Confederate monuments from Capitol Square, a park near the state Capitol in Richmond. Conservatives haven’t paid much attention to this story, aside from a handful of op-eds in right-leaning media, mostly opposing the decision. In this particular case, Virginia’s decision was the right one. Conservatives must rethink how they engage the Left on the issue of historical memory.
Confederate monuments should come down for both patriotic and moral reasons. The Confederacy tried to dismember this union for the sake of a wicked political project. If someone’s main claim to fame as a public figure is having fought for the Confederacy, they do not deserve our admiration. Nor do they deserve to have statues framed in a way that honors them.
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Local communities should have a say in shaping their monument landscape. Decisions about Confederate monuments should, therefore, be reached by democratic processes, not the direct action of mobs or rioters. They should also be moved to museums or historical sites rather than destroyed. Since we shouldn’t ignore the ugly parts of our history or destroy pieces with aesthetic value, Confederate statues deserve a place in our sites of remembrance, but not in our places of veneration.
Both of these conditions were met in the recent Virginia case. The statues were removed by the legislature and handed to the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation, which has promised to preserve them.
Conservatives often accuse liberals of wanting to erase history, but it isn’t always clear what the charge of history-erasure is supposed to mean. If it means that leftists want to ignore history, then it is clearly false. The dominant left-wing approach to the past in America very much wants to talk about history. Specifically, it wants to talk about the crimes of the past and keep them fresh and salient in the public consciousness.
Perhaps what conservatives mean to say is that leftists want to condemn the American past. That, at least, is what critics of Virginia’s decision to remove the Confederate monuments from Capitol Square have said. Hayden Daniel at The Federalist wrote that “The activists who call for the removal of Confederate statues quickly move on to those of the Founders once their demands are initially met. They’re hostile to all of American history, not just that of the Confederacy.” And at Fox News, David Marcus commented that “As usual, the destroyers of monuments brook no nuance in their march to destroy American history.”
These authors are driven by a legitimate worry: that if conservatives agree to take down Confederate monuments, then we’ll somehow be forced to take down monuments to the founders as well, or to all historical figures who were complicit with slavery or racism. But that consequence doesn’t follow.
Our principle should be that sites of veneration should only honor figures who deserve our praise. That’s how we can make a principled distinction between the founders and the Confederate leadership: The former deserve our admiration and the latter do not.
Some extreme liberals certainly think that most of American history is a tale of evil. This more radical group would be happy to tear down most of our monuments. Their mistake isn’t that they want to take down Confederate monuments, however, but that they fail to grasp the magnitude of the founders’ achievements and therefore fail to see why we should honor them.
In general, conservatives should be more concerned with developing our own approach to historical memory, one that’s guided by our own moral judgments and our sense of the truth, rather than instinctively reacting against whatever leftists happen to be proposing. This approach may lead to similar policy decisions on occasion, but democratic politics is partly about coming to agreements on specific cases, even if we do so for somewhat different reasons.
THE GOP’S TENT IS TOO BIG IF BO FRENCH FITS UNDER IT
Hence, we can support the removal of Confederate monuments on perfectly conservative grounds, namely, our commitments to the integrity of the nation and to the dignity of all persons. And we can defend statues of the founders on those same grounds, since they helped to create the nation, and designed a political order that protects the dignity of those who live under it.
Christian Alejandro Gonzalez is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on civic education, Western political thought, and American historical memory.