Recent years have handed defenders of the Confederacy their greatest defeats since 1865. As flags come down and statues are melted down, millions of Americans are finally waking up to the fact that honoring treason against the United States — undertaken for the purpose of allowing certain people to own other human beings — was never a righteous cause. But the Confederacy’s advocates are not ready to accept their defeat. Which is why there’s a fight over the Pentagon’s plans to remove a Confederate memorial from Arlington National Cemetery.
The planned removal met with objections from Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, cries of anguish from Confederate sympathizers and a lawsuit that has temporarily left the statue in place. Conservative media is full of condemnations of the memorial’s removal. A group of 44 far-right Republican members of Congress wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin demanding that he leave the statue in place.
It is not possible for an honest person to claim that symbols of the Confederacy only stand for honor and tradition.
The memorial at Arlington, as described on the cemetery’s official website, depicts a number of figures: not only noble and brave Confederate soldiers, but also “an enslaved woman depicted as a ‘Mammy,’ holding the infant child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war.” It was erected in 1914, at a time when pro-Confederate politicians and groups were erecting statues and memorials around the country. Their campaign was part of a broader effort to both rewrite the history of the Civil War and reassert white supremacy in the South. (They also argued against textbooks that portrayed slavery as the central cause of the Civil War. Sound familiar?)
The statue’s removal was scheduled in compliance with a law intended to remove commemorations of the Confederacy from U.S. military facilities. In late 2020, Congress passed a Defense Department spending bill that required bases honoring Confederate generals to be renamed and Confederate memorials to be removed. Then-President Donald Trump vetoed the bill, citing the provisions on the Confederacy as a prime reason. Congress overrode his veto on Jan. 1, 2021, just five days before Trump and his allies mounted their own attack on the U.S. government.
The lawsuit was filed by a group called Defend Arlington, an affiliate of Save Southern Heritage Florida; the parent group says its purpose is “to counterpunch the ‘erase-ists’ and to preserve and promote the history of the south.” Confederacy advocates of that sort always insist that they aren’t racist or trying to defend slavery. They just want to honor Southern history and culture. But if that’s the case, why is the Confederacy itself the beginning and end of the “culture” they’re so keen to celebrate?
You don’t understand, the Confederacy advocates plead. Our symbol — particularly the Confederate flag, prominently displayed on the Save Southern Heritage’s website — stand for so much apart from treason and slavery! It’s a little like someone flying a swastika flag on their porch, then when people object, saying “the swastika is a traditional symbol within many Eastern religions, often denoting prosperity or good fortune!” That may be true, but you don’t see Hindus and Buddhists in the U.S. flying the swastika atop their houses these days, because what it means today is Nazis.
But even this analogy gives too much credit, because the Confederate flag always stood for the Confederacy and the Confederacy always stood for slavery and white supremacy. It is not possible for an honest person to claim that symbols of the Confederacy only stand for honor and tradition, or mint juleps and debutante balls. In today’s world, you cannot fly the Confederate flag without saluting slavery and White supremacy.
If we want real unity, the first step is to put the veneration of the Confederacy behind us.
This issue is awash in inane arguments from the right, perhaps none sillier than the idea that if we take down monuments to the Confederacy, we’ll forget the past. By that logic, we should erect statues to Osama bin Laden to remember his impact on American history. We don’t do that, because these markers aren’t about remembering history, they’re about celebration and veneration. And to repeat — because apparently we have to repeat it — when you celebrate the Confederacy, you’re celebrating people who waged war against the United States of America so they could keep slavery in place.
Yet it’s still something Republican politicians feel they need to do, and not only Trump. Earlier this year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence (then still running for president) both vowed to revert Fort Liberty in North Carolina to its previous name of Fort Bragg. Neither of them bothered to explain their affection for Braxton Bragg, a slave-owning Confederate general whose cruelty toward his own troops was exceeded only by his incompetence. But in the spirit of true reconciliation, allow me to offer an alternative to those who are so keen to honor Southern culture and history. What about celebrating literally anything else? For instance, the South has a rich literary history; a quick web search will bring you lists of 50 or 100 or 1,318 great Southern novels. There’s Southern cuisine, Southern visual art and Southern influence on almost every strand of American music, from country to jazz to blues to rock to hip-hop. Millions of Americans cherish all those things — and none of those celebrations require flying a Confederate flag or saluting a monument to the wrong side of the Civil War. And as a bonus, those aspects of Southern culture can be enjoyed by all Americans, regardless of birthplace, and people all over the world. In their letter to Austin, the Confederate sympathizers in the House GOP asked him to declare the monument “a memorial to national unity.” But if we want real unity, the first step is to put the veneration of the Confederacy behind us. Only that route can bring reconciliation.
Paul Waldman is a journalist and author focused on politics and culture. 
