The Politics of Confederate Statues

Alice Marshall
Aug 25, 2017 · 2 min read

Corey Stewart ran for governor of Virginia on a platform of preserving Confederate monuments. He lost. The Republican primary. So no, this is NOT a vote getter.

So blogger lambert strether is exactly wrong when he writes:

Now here we are with Democrats going all in to refight the Civil War. Well done. A glance at the electoral map shows how foolish this is. Donald Trump triumphed in 2016 by increasing Republican margins in a swath of northern counties stretching from western Pennsylvania across the Great Lakes, netting him Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and the presidency. Voters there are more likely to see this issue as a radical temper tantrum than anything affecting their daily lives. Polling gives reason for skepticism. An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll last week found that 62% of respondents thought statues honoring leaders of the Confederacy should “remain as a historical symbol.” Only 27% of those polled wanted the statues removed, and presumably they vote Democratic anyway.”

This is not an opinion poll issue. Many of us have been waiting for decades to pull down these monuments, now is our chance and we ain’t throwing it away. lambert strether lives in northern Maine, I live in DC and grew up in Virginia, so there is a different perspective.

Lt Governor Ralph Northam believes the statues need to come down. Northam is the Democratic nominee for governor. Unlike lambert strether, Northam has won a statewide election, so I expect he knows the politics of this as well as any. The Monument Avenue Commission in Richmond, Virginia is considering removing all the Confederate statues. You have to have lived in Richmond to comprehend how momentous that is.

The national response to the tragic events in Charlottesville have given us a rare opportunity to change our framing of our history and we should seize it. And this does have a direct relationship to policy changes with concrete benefits for workers. When the un-sayable becomes inevitable in one area of life, other walls, like the ones saying we can’t have single payer healthcare, also begin to tumble. That is what revolutions do, they tear down all sorts of walls.

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Alice Marshall

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Author of “The precinct captain’s guide to political victory, buy it on Amazon Kindle.

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