There is a difference between honoring George Washington and honoring the Confederate battle flag.
Trump wants a culture war fight. Democrats should take the high ground.
Yes, George Washington was a slaveholder. Thomas Jefferson had slaves, too, and one of them was a very young Sally Hemings. A few people on the left have argued that monuments to Washington and Jefferson should be removed. Mobs in the past week removed and defaced statues indiscriminately, including ones of Ulysses Grant and an abolitionist.
Trump is hoping to make them the face of the Democratic left.
Trump is hoping to make them the face of the Democratic left.
Monument vandals are a tiny fraction of people, and they are opposed by Joe Biden. Their presence sparks a national debate over monuments as part of the larger debate over racial justice. Change is underway, triggered by the George Floyd death. White Americans are confronting the idea that maybe there is a bigger race problem than they had realized.
Institutions are rethinking symbols and monuments. South Carolina had already removed the Confederate flag from their state house in the aftermath of the church shooting. This week Mississippi--even Mississippi!--decided to do the same.
The NFL announced they had been wrong, that Black lives DO matter. Then NASCAR, nearly all-White NASCAR, announced they were banning Confederate flags saying they understood it was offensive to some.
Top military at the Pentagon announced they were considering changing the names of military bases currently named after Confederate generals. The American public learned something new. Fort Bragg and Fort Hood were named after generals who took up arms against America. Really? We name military installations after enemy generals? And in the midst of all that, the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians sports teams announced they were reconsidering their names.
Donald Trump doubled down. He took the position of supporting the Confederate flag, opposing the NFL, criticizing NASCAR, keeping the names Redskin and Indians, and said he would veto any military authorization bill that changed the names of bases. Trump planted his flag. He likes the culture war and he knew what side he was on.
Trump is hurting himself now and he is realizing it. He is trying to change the battleground from Confederate flags into one on statues of Washington and Jefferson.
Democrats should not let him. Trump is on the wrong side of history. The people who wave Confederate flags are already solid Republican voters in red states. The Confederate battle flag is a gesture, a middle finger to Black Americans. Polls show a majority of people think he is encouraging racial strife and they don't like it. Trump is shrinking his base. Lindsay Graham observed that he "lived in South Carolina all my life and if you're in business, the Confederate flag is not a good way to grow your business."
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| From Fox's "The Simpsons." |
Some Democrats are timid on this issue, when they could be firm and decisive.
An example is Senator Tammy Duckworth is a potential Vice Presidential running mate for Joe Biden. She is in the try-out phase. She was asked if statues of George Washington should be removed?
Duckworth answered:
"Well, let me just say we should start off by having a national dialogue on it at some point. But right now we're in the middle of a global pandemic. And one of our countries that are opposed to us, Russia, has put a bounty on Ameircan troops' heads. What really struck me about this speech that the president gave at Mount Rushmore was that he spent more time worried about honoring dead Confederates than he did talking about the lives of our 130,000 Americans. . . ."
Stop! That is the wrong answer.
The correct answer is a short, simple, direct one. "Of course not. Washington was a great man, the founder of our country. Those monuments honor him--and Jefferson--for the things they did right. They represent our ideals as Americans. "
And then stop. Let that sink in. Short and simple.
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| Trump's voters. Not Democratic voters. |
Joe Biden is widely under-estimated, but in this case had the right instinct. He answered the question correctly:
"The idea of comparing whether or not George Washington owned slaves or Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and somebody who was in rebellion, committing treason, and trying to take down the Union to keep slavery – I think there is a distinction there."
There will be some Democrats who don't think Biden is "woke" enough. Some won't vote for him, but there is a reason Biden won the Democratic nomination. Black Americans in South Carolina trusted his instincts, not the instincts of white college town socialists.
Most Americans like George Washington and are just fine with his memorials. Democrats should claim George Washington. Donald Trump thinks Americans want to fight for the Confederate flag. They don't. They think Trump is just making trouble for political gain.
5 comments:
George Washington, the father of our country chose to not be king. Thomas Jefferson helped write the constitution. I respect what they did to found our country. I would guess only a small minority would object to statues of them. Trump just looks for dividing point that he can exploit. He enjoys the division. It is who he is.
Certain convicts in jail are that way too. They like to set up fights between other inmates and then watch the show. Some refer to it as “selling wolf tickets.”
Completely agree. This is why I answer this question: No Jefferson and Washington statues shouldn't come down. We can add context to them in the history teaching, but no the statues shouldn't come down.
"We can reject racial injustice without rejecting Washington and Jefferson."
Hmmm...you sure about that?
While quite generous to the founders, I don't think the distinction you make quite acquits them from the fundamental flaw in their work. If slaves had agitated for their rights in 1776, do you think Washington and Jefferson would have acted any differently than George Wallace?
Judging the past by the standards of the present has a name: presentism.
People who indulge themselves in this faulty thought pattern are engaged in a combination of virtue signaling, self-aggrandizement (look how wonderful I am), and putting their supposedly superior hindsight up against our forebears’ foresight. This approach fundamentally dishonors the people in our past and how they coped with the situations that they faced.
Would any of us have done better back then than they did? Will our descendants one day commit the same thought error and condemn us for things that only they, with their superior hindsight, are capable of understanding?
A primary victim of present is mare Moderate Democrats.they are criticized by people on the left for their positions--not good enough--even though they were near the front edge of liberal opinion at the time.
A twin thought error is judging a politician by the standards of what is possible in a state like Massachusetts or Vermont, or a congressional district like one that represents a Berkeley or Madison or a Bronx one like AOC represents. I got elected in Jackson County, Oregon. Let AOC come here, win a majority of the votes in a countywide race. Then she can lead a movement of purple state Americans. She is extraordinarily gifted and charismatic. But her political base was some 15897 votes to win her primary upset. It won the election for her, but it is not "proof of concept."
Peter Sage
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