. . . by Kevin D. Williamson.
Of course the Confederate flag is a symbol of Southern racism. It is a good many other things, too, none of which . . .
. . . was the cause of the massacre at Emanuel AME. It is strange and ironic that adherents of the Democratic party -- which was, for about 140 years, not only the South's but the world's leading white-supremacist organization -- should work themselves up over one flag, raised by their fellow partisans, at this late a date; but well, welcome to the party.
Yet Democratic concern about racist totems is selective. The Democrats are not going to change the name of their party, cancel the annual Jefferson-Jackson dinner,* or stop naming things after Robert Byrd, senator and Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan. Hillary Clinton is not going to be made to answer for her participation in a political campaign that featured Confederate-flag imagery.
The Confederate flag, and other rebel iconography, is a marker of Southern distinctiveness, which, like American distinctiveness, is inextricably bound up with the enslavement and oppression of black people. But only the South is irredeemable in the Left's view, and it has been so only since about 1994, when it went Republican. Which is to say, the Confederate flag is an emblem of regional distinctiveness disapproved of by 21st-centuy Democrats.
Their reinvigorated concern is awfully nice: When the South actually was a segregationist backwater that African Americans were fleeing by the million -- when Democrats were running the show -- they were ho-hum. Today the South is an economic powerhouse, dominated by Republicans, and attracting new African-American residents by the thousands. And so the Left and its creature, the Democratic party, insist that Southern identity as such must be anathematized.
The horrific crime that shocked the nation notwithstanding, black life in Charleston remains very different, in attractive ways, from black life in such Left-dominated horror shows as Cleveland and Detroit, and the state's governor is, in the parlance of identity politics, a woman of color -- but she is a Republican, too, and therefore there must be shrieking, rending of garments, and gnashing of teeth.
(Kevin D. Williamson, "We Have Officially Reached Peak Leftism," nationalreview.com, June 24 2015 (reparagraphed))
UPDATE: Well, the Dems didn't cancel Jefferson-Jackson, but they did throw Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Jackson down the memory hole. Stripped their naming rights. J&J are now unpersons. Mr. Williamson had a good point, but he misapprehended the nature progressivism, which is to destroy the past and start over from scratch. Because, well, we are just better people than the men who started this country and put it on the course to greatness. Fundamental transformation is fundamental transformation. Now back to Hamilton and the ten-dollar bill.
Purging Senator Byrd will be more problematic for Democrats. That Grand Cyclops stuff is a bit embarrassing, but -- man! -- the guy was the Pork Barreler's Pork Barreler, the Big Spender's Big Spender. You gotta honor that! Besides, kicking Byrd to the curb would tick off Democrats in West Virginia. They like the old dude. They understand his youthful indiscretions.
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