Alex Blumberg joins me to discuss the removal of the Confederate Flag from public display in public spaces, and why this is a good or bad thing. We also talk about why we need to get rid of Confederate statues and monuments in public places.
00:00:03.740I mean, I kind of have a lot of ambivalence about this because, you know, I can remember that statue, the actual one, because I went to school there.
00:00:19.120And I, you know, there was Lee Park in Dallas, Texas, where I grew up.
00:00:23.860And my parents and grandparents have connections in Louisiana, and I can remember these, you know, major statues in New Orleans and so on.
00:00:35.200I think some of those have been taken down as well.
00:00:37.120There was, there was, what was the one?
00:00:39.160I can't remember which, who it was, but he was like facing north.
00:00:42.980So he was like still facing off against the Yankees or something.
00:00:47.000And so I, look, I have, a lot of this did reflect power structures.
00:00:54.200There's, there's no doubt, but then a lot of it was also a little bit whimsical and nostalgic and, and so on.
00:01:03.100And so I, you know, it's, I think everyone should be a little bit ambivalent about it.
00:01:09.940There is something about the Confederate flag that is nostalgic and sentimental and even whimsical of, you know, play Freebird and, you know, the guy in the pickup truck with the Confederate flag, who's kind of a decent guy, but, you know, had some hard luck and et cetera, et cetera.
00:01:27.920Um, and it is just this, like, also like, if I were a leftist, I would almost hate this because you're getting rid of something that is just entirely sentimental and symbolic, and you're not actually changing anything about South Carolina.
00:01:45.420You know, nothing, you, you are not addressing poverty.
00:02:12.140Um, but, you know, anyway, I, I do think that there, there is a kind of like lie to those statues and I'm not against them.
00:02:22.540And I, and I have some even personal nostalgia for them, but they, they were, they were erected, many of them, if not most all of them in the late 19th and 20th century, in fact.
00:02:36.120And, you know, to some degree, they were part of that reconciliation process of, and, and you saw this.
00:02:44.240I mean, I remember Dwight Eisenhower, who of course was a, you know, general at Normandy and during the world, second world war, he said, you know, the greatest general of all time, the one I would want to learn from was Robert E. Lee or something.
00:02:56.120Which is in itself a rather, I mean, obviously he's a brilliant and fascinating guy, but it's also kind of a strange general to learn from because he presided over debacles as well as victories.
00:03:09.780Um, he was outnumbered, but you know, it is what it is, but there was this reconciliation where, you know, Lincoln was great, but then Robert E. Lee was great and Stonewall Jackson was great.
00:03:22.580And we just won't talk about Sumner's March because that was pretty brutal.
00:03:26.860And we can kind of all have our heroes, but the overriding assumption was that the South won't rise again and that you, you, you're, you're allowed.
00:03:40.600I mean, it's a very, I think an important and, and successful negotiation process, which is that you're allowed to have your heroes.
00:03:49.680We're not going to just annihilate you, but then we all know that you're going to be under a federal structure.
00:03:57.960So it's a, it's a, it's a bargain and it worked until it didn't.
00:04:03.840And it becomes outmoded and it becomes a symbol of reaction and Trump and racism, uh, et cetera, et cetera.
00:04:12.480Um, but again, like it was covering over the truth.
00:04:16.700And I think the whole lost cause myth was covering over the truth in the truth is that the civil war was entirely about slavery period end of statement.
00:04:29.820It was a, a collective freak out over a precipitating cause, which was the election of Abraham Lincoln and a notion that might very well not have been based in reality that he was going to free the slaves and they were going to run rough shot over the South.
00:04:46.240And that we need to, and that we need to get out of the system in order to maintain our peculiar institution.
00:04:54.400And Alexander Stevens in the cornerstone of the Confederacy laid it out.
00:05:01.880We are basing a society on the notion of human inequality.
00:05:06.180We are going to perpetuate this forever.
00:05:08.860Like Alexander Stevens was actually honest and he was a philosopher of, of sorts, the Hegel of the South, you could even say, but like he laid it out and made things very clear.
00:05:25.360And it wasn't about individual rights or the tariff or government, or those are all dispensable causes if they're causes at all.
00:05:36.580I think that, um, this is me being generous to her.
00:05:41.560I think that what she was saying it to someone who doesn't know a lot, it sounds like she's saying the CSA was about freedom.
00:05:51.000So it sounds like she's doing Confederate apologism to someone.
00:05:54.580But in a way, she is actually rebuking, um, George Fitzhugh, who, um, published a, uh, book saying that slavery was good and should be expanded and is superior to freedom.
00:06:10.820And he was one of the first anti-capitalist reactionaries who said that, um, it's, to free someone is one of the cruelest things you can do to send them into the world of raw competition.
00:06:27.540And she is saying, no, capitalism is better than slavery.
00:07:26.160Do these, uh, statues serve as like reconciliation or are they more like quasi inclusivity in that, you know, there's like a powerful lullaby.
00:07:36.780Um, it makes you feel like you're a part of something when you're, you're kind of not really even a part of it.
00:07:41.740Um, even if the original, it gives you a false, like, it's like a lullaby of you're a rebel, you know, you know, it, it, at the end of the day, like you're in a federal system and there, there's, there's a supremacy clause as someone mentioned earlier.
00:07:58.140But like, you can kind of, uh, you know, after work, once you crack that beer, you can be like, you know, we have rebels down here, you know, we, we don't, uh, we're not a part of that Yankee system.