Meacham: Confederate History Month Is The ‘Right’s’ Answer To Obama

Newsweek editor and New York Times contributor Jon Meacham is partaking in the celebration of Confederate History Month by teaching Confederate history. In an extensive review of the repeated resurgence of Confederate pride, Meacham’s Times column argues that the Confederate flag has always been a symbol of white supremacy that only appears in the face of progressing civil rights, but that only the “right”– all of it– benefits from its use.

Meacham’s main argument is that the Confederate movement revolves around the sentiment that the North and its multicultural tyranny has infected the cultural purity of the South against the latter’s will. He takes the history of Confederate symbolism to those who wish to celebrate it, specifying that the majority of the Confederate flag’s history has little to do with states’ rights and everything to do with white supremacist movements. It was adopted as a symbol of “black-on-white” oppression, he argues, and thrown by the wayside by everyone who wasn’t an extremist when most of the South reestablished a hold over their former slaves:

But after the Supreme Court allowed segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, Jim Crow was basically secure. There was less need to rally the troops, and Confederate imagery became associated with the most extreme of the extreme: the Ku Klux Klan.

In the aftermath of World War II, however, the rebel flag and other Confederate symbolism resurfaced as the civil rights movement spread. In 1948, supporters of Strom Thurmond’s pro-segregation Dixiecrat ticket waved the battle flag at campaign stops.

So far so good. Confederate history is indistinguishable from Confederate symbolism history, and Virginia governor Bob McDonnell‘s attempt to celebrate only those that died in the war without acknowledging the post-war Confederate movement does not whitewash (no pun intended) neo-Confederate intentions. He goes on in this vein for some time, detailing the relationship between the advancement of Civil Rights and the continued use of the Confederate flag. Had he kept to educating Confederate sympathizers of their history, the piece would have been a sharp, necessary attack on an offensive celebration. Instead, Meacham chose to politicize the issue:

Whitewashing the war is one way for the right — alienated, anxious and angry about the president, health care reform and all manner of threats, mostly imaginary — to express its unease with the Age of Obama, disguising hate as heritage.

[…]

If the slaves are erased from the picture, then what took place between Sumter and Appomattox is not about the fate of human chattel, or a battle between good and evil. It is, instead, more of an ancestral skirmish in the Reagan revolution, a contest between big and small government. We cannot allow the story of the emancipation of a people and the expiation of America’s original sin to become fodder for conservative politicians playing to their right-wing base. That, to say the very least, is a jump backward we do not need.

Notice he does not attack the “racist right” or the “Southern right”– just the “right.” The “right” isn’t specific to Confederate loyalists or KKK members. The “right” isn’t just David Duke— it’s David Frum, Tucker Carlson, Scott Baio and Don King, among others. It’s an extreme, unfair, and probably not entirely unintended generalization to claim the “right” is expressing unease with the Obama administration through this and not a radical faction of it. Sure, Confederate sympathizers are part of the “right,” just like Stalinists are part of the “left.” No one would blame James Carville if a group of radicals chose to celebrate the Russian Revolution, nor should anyone try to splash everyone on one side of the aisle– 50% of political thinkers, by default– with the disgraceful beliefs of the few.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.