An Excerpt On "A Lesson From Robert E. Lee"

Those Vexatious Statues

Helen Andrews
The American Conservative

. . . I used to side with the people who wanted to tear down all Confederate monuments. If Southern gentility means anything, I thought, it means not causing gratuitous offense. It means being willing to accept that a statue might mean one thing to us but something different to our fellow citizens, to whom we have an obligation to be considerate. I took people at their word when they said, we don’t hate the South, we just want you to celebrate what’s best about it, not what’s worst.

That gave them too much credit. In truth, they don’t want to celebrate anything about the South, or America, or the past. Everything falls short of their Year Zero standards. Considering the absolutism of their ideology, perhaps I should have seen this coming. Others did. Either way, Confederates are in the rear-view mirror now and Washington and Jefferson are the ones up for condemnation.

The left argues that name changes and statue topplings are a way for people and institutions to demonstrate their commitment to real change. But at this point, it is not ordinary Americans who need to demonstrate their good faith to the left. It is the statue-topplers who need to convince us that they are genuinely committed to pluralism and not, as their actions would suggest, just sparing some statues temporarily while they bide their time to wait and see what they can get away with tomorrow.

So choose one. That is my proposal. The monument-destroying left should pick a statue they genuinely hate and say: leave it up.

Maybe it’s the Robert E. Lee equestrian statue on Monument Avenue in Richmond. That memorial was conceived in 1870 and not, as many other Confederate statues were, during the reassertion of white rule at the turn of the century. It really was intended to stand for reconciliation, not Southern intransigence. It’s also galling that Ralph Northam is the one who decided to get rid of it. The last person who has any business lecturing the rest of us in racial sensitivity is Governor Blackface.

But it doesn’t have to be Lee. It can be someone else. The point is for the left to demonstrate that they are capable of sharing a country with people they disagree with.If you can’t name a single statue you hate that you would leave standing, then you are a fanatic, and fanatics, even when their zeal is for a good cause, are impossible for the rest of us to coexist with.

Sometimes I wonder what Lee would think if he could see his Richmond statue now, covered in graffiti that the state won’t allow anyone to clean off, not even the obscenities. It would not touch his dignity. Lee had extensive experience with adolescent misbehavior, as a college president and before that as superintendent of West Point. He knew the virtue that young people most need to be taught, because it does not come naturally to them, is self-discipline. “You cannot be a true man until you learn to obey” was one of his favorite maxims. It would sadden him to see protesters who have apparently reached the age of thirty without ever acquiring sufficient self-mastery to wait for Governor Northam’s decision to take effect, or to express themselves without saying “Fuck.” But it would not wound him.

Self-discipline is precisely what we all need to rediscover right now. We need to relearn how to put our own emotions aside and live in peace with other people, even those whose deeply held beliefs offend us. If we don’t, the entire country will be in for a long, multi-year, possibly endless adolescent tantrum, and there won’t be a single remnant of our past left standing at the end of it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Helen Andrews is a senior editor at The American Conservative, and the author of a forthcoming book about the Baby Boomers to be published by Sentinel this fall. She has worked at the Washington Examiner and National Review, and as a think tank researcher at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, Australia. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies from Yale University. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, First Things, The Claremont Review of Books, Hedgehog Review, and many others. You can follow her on Twitter at @herandrews.

History Curiously Repeats

California Seeks Effective Secession From the Union

Life has a tendency to throw up some unexpected turn of events.  Or, as the saying has it, beware unintended consequences.  

The American Civil War was fought over the principle of States' rights.  The fundamental question was how much original authority resided in the states versus how much resided in the Federal government.  Did the Federal government hold a higher authority than the states when it came to managing their own affairs?  The signature issue at the time was slavery.  The Civil War "answered" the question: federalism triumphed over states' rights--by force of arms.

In recent years we have seen the re-emergence of the doctrine of states' rights, however.  It has come from an unexpected quarter.  Cities (and states) in the US have begun to assert a "sanctuary status" for illegal aliens, which means that they refuse to support or comply with Federal Government law on immigrants.  Leading the charge for this recrudescence of doctrines of states' rights has been California, one of the most "liberal" States in the union.

Cracks in Federalist Ideology

The Confederacy Reborn

It appears that Confederate principles are alive and well in the United States.  Not only that, they are being applied more and more at the "grass roots", municipal level.

Confederate political ideology was based upon the principle of States' Rights--that the individual states of the Union were a more fundamental political authority than the federal union of the States.  Each state had a right of withdrawal from the Union, implicit in the states deciding to join the Union in the first place.  A modern parallel might be the promised referendum in the United Kingdom (or, as held recently in Scotland) to vote on whether the UK should withdraw from the EU (or, in Scotland's case, to withdraw from the UK and become an independent, stand-alone national state).

Clearly the Brits still subscribe to the principles of States' Rights and are busy applying it to the United Kingdom.  Clearly, the political ideology of the UK and its Constitution subscribe to ideological and constitutional principles more aligned with nineteenth century American Confederate political principles, than with the one-way Federalism of the current United States of America.  Once in the Union, there is no exit door.  Or so Federalist ideology claims.

But, perversely, Confederate principles are making a huge comeback in the United States.  Only now, it's not States' Rights, but Municipal Rights--although the principles are the same.

The Vainglory of "Old Glory"

Reasonable Questions

Blog&Mablog
Douglas Wilson

. . . Now it really is reasonable to ask what an African-American Christian thinks when he sees that Confederate flag on a fellow Christian’s pick-up truck. Let me repeat that — that is a reasonable question. It should be taken into account. What would a charitable approach to this be? I don’t despise this question.

What I despise is all the special pleading and hypocrisy. So if we want our redneck brethren to learn how to remove such offensive stickers from their vehicles, we could begin by calling on all hipster Christians to show them the way by scraping their Obama/Biden stickers off. You know, Barack “God Bless Planned Parenthood” Obama.

So with rednecks confronted with a reasonable question, it is also reasonable to ask what the thirteen million African-American children who were aborted since Roe think when they see the American flag. But of course, they were never given the opportunity to think anything about it because we killed them first. They won’t ever see the American flag that flew over and authorized their “legal” slaughter. They don’t know what to think about it because we sold their brains to StemExpress.

Southern Boys

Facing Up to Good and Bad

David French has written an excellent piece on flying the Confederate Battle flag.

Don’t Tear Down the Confederate Battle Flag

By David French — June 19, 2015

National Review Online

Like many Southern boys, I grew up with two flags hanging in my room — an American flag and a Confederate battle flag. The American flag was enormous, taking up much of one wall. It was the “1776” flag, with 13 stars in a circle in the field of blue. My grandmother bought it for me on the bicentennial, and for years it was a treasured possession. The flag took on a special meaning later in life, when I learned more of a family history that included service with General Washington, suffering at Valley Forge.

The Confederate battle flag was much smaller, and it hung over my bookshelf. We bought it at the Shiloh battlefield in Tennessee, where one of my Confederate ancestors fought and where Albert Sidney Johnston died — the general that many considered the great hope of the Confederate Army in the West. My Confederate forefathers went on to fight at Vicksburg, at the battles of Franklin and Nashville, and in countless skirmishes across Tennessee and Mississippi. I grew up looking at old family pictures, including men who still wore their Confederate uniform for formal portraits — long after the war had ended.

I grew up looking at old family pictures, including men who still wore their Confederate uniform for formal portraits — long after the war had ended.

Like many Southern families’, my family’s military story didn’t end with the Civil War — it continued on to World War I, the European theater in World War II, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and then to my own recent deployment during the Surge in Iraq. The martial history of our family is inseparable from the family story, and it includes men in gray.

So I’ve followed this most recent round of debate over the Confederate battle flag with perhaps greater than normal interest.