15 August 2017

'You're changing culture'

The President probably had yesterday's demonstration in Durham NC, where a mob toppled a Confederate statue, as well as the weekend's carnage in Charlottesville in mind when he spoke combatively with the press today. While he had valid points to make, particularly that there was violence from what he called the "alt-left" as well as the alt-right in Charlottesville, he jumped the shark when he denounced the peaceful removal of Confederate monuments. He perceived a slippery slope taking us from the disappearing, so to speak, of Robert E. Lee to the purging of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. If Confederates must be removed from the theoretical public square because they owned slaves, Trump reasoned, won't Washington and Jefferson inevitably be taken as well? To remove Confederate monuments, he argued, somehow was to rewrite or distort history. "You're changing culture," he complained, and that brings us back to Thomas Friedman's column of last week, in which the New York Times writer advised Democrats that not all Americans with "gut" cultural concerns about immigrants, Muslims, etc. could be written off as white supremacists. Friedman's column begged the question of where the line was to be drawn; to what extent should we tolerate and address people's cultural concerns, and at what point can we criticize their suspicions as bigotry? Trump has shown us where he'd draw the line, arguing that one can revere the Confederacy, and object to its purging from public history, without being a white supremacist. The President was most likely correct to say that not everyone who protested against the Charlottesville statue's removal was a white supremacist on the odious level of the Klan or the neo-Nazis. But can there really be a value-free embrace of the Confederacy on the abstract "heritage" level, presumably meaning that you think it cool, and nothing more, that great warriors once lived where you live now? It's possible, I suppose, as long as you have no idea at all of what the Confederacy was about. Only the ignorant could fail to draw important distinctions between Founding Fathers and Secessionists -- including ignorant people on the left who may well think exactly as Trump presumes. I'd like to think that I could make even Trump understand the difference. How would he feel, and what would he do, had some crazy Californians actually carried out their post-election threat to take their state out of the Union rather than have Donald Trump as their president? I'm pretty confident that the way Trump would feel is exactly how most Americans from Abraham Lincoln to the present day feel about the Confederacy. You can cut through all the neo-Confederate sophistry regarding the relevance of slavery to secession or the subsequent war by noting that a bunch of privileged crybabies took their states out of the union, without really consulting their constituents, solely to protest an election. Many states seceded before Lincoln had a chance to do any of the supposedly unconstitutional things they feared -- before he was even inaugurated. Theirs was the #notmypresident movement of their day. Does Donald Trump really want to endorse that? Does he really think that people who fought for that cause are heroes? Is the Confederate heritage really a core part of the American culture he expects everyone to defend? It's up to the President's northern supporters to say otherwise. They should be as hostile to Confederate idolatry as an internal poison as they are to any perceived external poison. On a cynical level, I can understand why the President, no doubt contemplating reelection, can't take the lead here. But if northern Trumpists don't feel the hostility toward the Confederacy that they should as a matter of heritage, I'd like to know why.

7 comments:

hobbyfan said...

President Dum-Dum's been reading the tabloids again.

Someone really needs to sit him down and explain to him what the real world really is like in 2017, and not use supermarket tabloids as his reference points. It paints the picture that the man is el nutso.

Translated for the President: Wake up and smell the coffee!!

Samuel Wilson said...

Has the Enquirer come out in defense of Confederate monuments?

hobbyfan said...

Haven't read it, but I'd not be surprised if they at least pretended to care.

Anonymous said...

I'd have to guess hobbyfan's age at about 12? And tRump isn't completely wrong. The left is attempting to rewrite history and, in doing so, destroy American culture and replace it with a huge, steaming pile of "multi-cultural" SHIT. Diversity is NOT strength, it is a weakness. UNITY is strength. And they have become every fucking bit as racist as the right ever was with their insistence on non-white graduations, no whites allowed days, etc. Also, they put even MORE emphasis on a person's skin color than most people on the right ever have, these days. The left has been taken over by unintelligent assholes and I hope it collapses under the weight of its own stupidity.

Samuel Wilson said...

"Diversity" and "unity" are always relative terms -- or did you go to a Protestant church after all last Sunday? You didn't? Then by some Americans' standard you're practicing "diversity" and you're not contributing to "unity." You can say they're wrong, but you certainly can't say that they're the ones practicing diversity.

Anonymous said...

Unity as in "one country, one language, one set of traditions, values and customs." I didn't really think I'd have to spell it out for you. This is how every single culture began. And, historically speaking, every one of them came to an end when too many "foreigners" were allowed in. Babylon, Greece, Rome - - - they were all strong when they were unified, they all fell because of "diversity".

Samuel Wilson said...

Don't worry about spelling it out to me. Tell it to the people who insist that religion is an essential part of the "traditions, values and customs" package and won't regard you as a fully trustworthy part of their culture if you tell them you're an atheist. They may not want to kill you, if that's all you care about, but they definitely won't trust you. You might appeal to the Constitution in your defense, but by your own logic the Constitution is no safeguard against the corrosive effects of "diversity." So do you get to define for yourself (along implicitly post-religious lines) what "unity" entails or are you obliged at some point to conform to whatever the majority may demand?