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| Agreeing to remove the Confederate flag isn't courageous. It's just politics | Agreeing to remove the Confederate flag isn't courageous. It's just politics |
| (about 17 hours later) | |
| In response to a white supremacist’s massacre of nine black citizens of Charleston in a historic black church, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley on Monday finally answered the question, “Should the Confederate flag be taken down from state house grounds?” In the pantheon of gimme questions, it is one of the gimmiest, somewhat more difficult than “Should we have a do-over of the Iraq War” and only barely easier than, “Do I want to be drowned in a sack with rats?” | In response to a white supremacist’s massacre of nine black citizens of Charleston in a historic black church, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley on Monday finally answered the question, “Should the Confederate flag be taken down from state house grounds?” In the pantheon of gimme questions, it is one of the gimmiest, somewhat more difficult than “Should we have a do-over of the Iraq War” and only barely easier than, “Do I want to be drowned in a sack with rats?” |
| The suit-fillers of Beltway media passed an energetic “She said yes!” through the Twitter-madding crowd with the enthusiasm of a lummox who proposes to his girlfriend on the ballgame Jumbotron and thumbs-up at 30,000 people after she bows to the peer pressure. Chris Cilizza thinks Nikki Haley has “potential”, and whomever wrote the headline for his piece quoted the language of Hubie Brown calling the NBA draft. Someone will spend today calling her brave. It is the faintest of praise for the faintest of gestures – a politician putting her convenient brand on an issue that already threatened to be inevitable – and it is one Haley herself was happy to undermine even as she was making it. | The suit-fillers of Beltway media passed an energetic “She said yes!” through the Twitter-madding crowd with the enthusiasm of a lummox who proposes to his girlfriend on the ballgame Jumbotron and thumbs-up at 30,000 people after she bows to the peer pressure. Chris Cilizza thinks Nikki Haley has “potential”, and whomever wrote the headline for his piece quoted the language of Hubie Brown calling the NBA draft. Someone will spend today calling her brave. It is the faintest of praise for the faintest of gestures – a politician putting her convenient brand on an issue that already threatened to be inevitable – and it is one Haley herself was happy to undermine even as she was making it. |
| For all the congratulation Haley will doubtless garner, she still tooted the whistle of southern Lost Cause rhetoric loud and hard enough to send a few terriers home with burst eardrums. After meaningless puffery about South Carolina being voted “the friendliest state”, Haley said: | For all the congratulation Haley will doubtless garner, she still tooted the whistle of southern Lost Cause rhetoric loud and hard enough to send a few terriers home with burst eardrums. After meaningless puffery about South Carolina being voted “the friendliest state”, Haley said: |
| For many people in our state, the flag stands for traditions that are noble. Traditions of history, of heritage, and of ancestry. | For many people in our state, the flag stands for traditions that are noble. Traditions of history, of heritage, and of ancestry. |
| Ah, the traditions of heritage. The legacy of inheritance. The folkways of culture. | Ah, the traditions of heritage. The legacy of inheritance. The folkways of culture. |
| For a single word, “heritage” does a lot of heavy lifting with the racist crowd, since “HERITAGE NOT HATE” has been a decades-long weasel explanation for venerating a flag carried by armies that kidnapped free blacks and burned their homes while waging war against the US government, which was carried by Klansmen who bombed churches and killed civil rights volunteers to prevent blacks from exercising the franchise, and most recently was carried about town for selfies by Dylann Roof before allegedly emptying five magazines of tradition into a number of pious, African American churchgoers. | For a single word, “heritage” does a lot of heavy lifting with the racist crowd, since “HERITAGE NOT HATE” has been a decades-long weasel explanation for venerating a flag carried by armies that kidnapped free blacks and burned their homes while waging war against the US government, which was carried by Klansmen who bombed churches and killed civil rights volunteers to prevent blacks from exercising the franchise, and most recently was carried about town for selfies by Dylann Roof before allegedly emptying five magazines of tradition into a number of pious, African American churchgoers. |
| Now, it may seem petty to Fisk a speech by Nikki Haley, but whomever wrote this speech certainly was in command of conservative buzzwords, and those words matter. Especially considering the next line: | Now, it may seem petty to Fisk a speech by Nikki Haley, but whomever wrote this speech certainly was in command of conservative buzzwords, and those words matter. Especially considering the next line: |
| The hate-filled murderer who massacred our brothers and sisters of Charleston had a sick and twisted view of the flag. | The hate-filled murderer who massacred our brothers and sisters of Charleston had a sick and twisted view of the flag. |
| Yes, he did: it’s precisely the one for which that flag was created. No shortage of good writers have already explained that the Confederate flag was birthed in oppression and bathed in blood, and it was first raised atop the South Carolina state house not as part of 150 years of continuous public recognition but to celebrate the Civil War’s centennial in 1961 – and then, by law in 1962, to demonstrate opposition to the federal government and racial integration. That’s why it was still up last week: not because of heritage (because that’s bunk), but because genuflecting to racists is good politics. When Haley said that flying the Confederate flag is “a way to honor ancestors who came to the service of their state”, that’s not an idiotically ironic way of describing traitors who signed up for four years of treason at the behest of a would-be breakaway state dedicated to the preservation of slavery. She was referring to their service to the state of South Carolina; that said ancestors could heed the call of service to anything greater, that their tradition speaks to any legitimate authority outside state borders, is impossible. | |
| It doesn’t take a lot of interpretive wrangling to come up with this meaning. Later in the speech, Haley delivered what at first blush might have sounded like “you can’t fire us, we quit” or “you can’t beat us at capture the flag, we’re taking our flag and going home.” | It doesn’t take a lot of interpretive wrangling to come up with this meaning. Later in the speech, Haley delivered what at first blush might have sounded like “you can’t fire us, we quit” or “you can’t beat us at capture the flag, we’re taking our flag and going home.” |
| She said: | She said: |
| I want to make two things very clear. First, this is South Carolina’s state house. It is South Carolina’s historic moment. And this will be South Carolina’s decision. To those outside of our state, the flag may be nothing more than a symbol of the worst of America’s past. | I want to make two things very clear. First, this is South Carolina’s state house. It is South Carolina’s historic moment. And this will be South Carolina’s decision. To those outside of our state, the flag may be nothing more than a symbol of the worst of America’s past. |
| As for that last line, millions of voices cried out with “duh” and went back to exhaling tersely through their noses. As an overt policy, the statement is utter nonsense: the federal government has neither the power nor the inclination to show up and run the flag down the pole and make sure none other takes its place. No one was in danger of making this decision for South Carolina, but here Haley is refusing to let anyone do so anyway. (Let it never be said that South Carolina is inconsistent about withdrawing with its things so Washington can’t have them.) Nevertheless, it takes some real brass to celebrate taking down a Confederate symbol while simultaneously championing your state’s rights to not take it down if it doesn’t want to and trying to whitewash the sanguinary rag for the umpteenth time. | As for that last line, millions of voices cried out with “duh” and went back to exhaling tersely through their noses. As an overt policy, the statement is utter nonsense: the federal government has neither the power nor the inclination to show up and run the flag down the pole and make sure none other takes its place. No one was in danger of making this decision for South Carolina, but here Haley is refusing to let anyone do so anyway. (Let it never be said that South Carolina is inconsistent about withdrawing with its things so Washington can’t have them.) Nevertheless, it takes some real brass to celebrate taking down a Confederate symbol while simultaneously championing your state’s rights to not take it down if it doesn’t want to and trying to whitewash the sanguinary rag for the umpteenth time. |
| Those two implications to Haley’s speech would be offensive if it really were a message of healing for the black community of South Carolina, but it’s not. It’s a message of healing for the Running for President as a Republican community. Nikki Haley has announced that she wants the legislature to take down this flag, and now it will try to do that, meandering through politicking and procedure, giving the most needful of all Americans – especially those running for president as Republicans, and who once happily took the money of the racists who support flying said flag – the succor of not having to answer the question, “Would you take down the Confederate flag if you were the Governor of South Carolina?” with anything more than, “Well, I’m pleased to say I don’t have to answer that, and that issue is in the hands of the folks from South Carolina.” | Those two implications to Haley’s speech would be offensive if it really were a message of healing for the black community of South Carolina, but it’s not. It’s a message of healing for the Running for President as a Republican community. Nikki Haley has announced that she wants the legislature to take down this flag, and now it will try to do that, meandering through politicking and procedure, giving the most needful of all Americans – especially those running for president as Republicans, and who once happily took the money of the racists who support flying said flag – the succor of not having to answer the question, “Would you take down the Confederate flag if you were the Governor of South Carolina?” with anything more than, “Well, I’m pleased to say I don’t have to answer that, and that issue is in the hands of the folks from South Carolina.” |
| You could watch the tweets of relief from candidates roll in in real time. Even Hillary Clinton congratulated Haley, doubtless glad to avoid another issue that could alienate voters in more winnable southern states. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham was happy to go back on his weasel words of last week and congratulate Haley. Career coward Scott Walker’s people suggested that he wanted the flag to come down over the weekend. Sure, he did. And he lost his virginity to his girlfriend from Canada. They met at camp, near Niagara Falls. You don’t know her. | You could watch the tweets of relief from candidates roll in in real time. Even Hillary Clinton congratulated Haley, doubtless glad to avoid another issue that could alienate voters in more winnable southern states. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham was happy to go back on his weasel words of last week and congratulate Haley. Career coward Scott Walker’s people suggested that he wanted the flag to come down over the weekend. Sure, he did. And he lost his virginity to his girlfriend from Canada. They met at camp, near Niagara Falls. You don’t know her. |
| These meanest of congratulatory gestures befit a gesture this shallow. The balance of optics – the ratio of the two obvious responses to the flag – finally tipped against the Republican Party enough that something had to be done, and that is why something was done. This is neither empathy nor responsible historiography; this is math. | These meanest of congratulatory gestures befit a gesture this shallow. The balance of optics – the ratio of the two obvious responses to the flag – finally tipped against the Republican Party enough that something had to be done, and that is why something was done. This is neither empathy nor responsible historiography; this is math. |
| One symbol is gone; the statues and street names and school names and county names paying homage to the Confederacy and its slavery-defending politicians and generals remain. And in the absence of this one symbol is left everything that it spoke to, and so much of what the modern Republican Party cynically invokes, having long since wedded its small government, zero-entitlement message to the Lost Cause rhetoric of anti-Washington posturing and anti-entitlement resentment and all the wrong folks who might cash those checks. The flag doesn’t need to speak symbolically for the heritage of South Carolina when Nikki Haley and a dozen candidates’ policy platforms and defense of “heritage” will do just that. The flag can come down — has to, even, to keep up the lie that flying it was neither a defense of racism nor a way to signal, both to the racists and those who would profit politically from their support, that the “principles” for which the Civil War was fought need never permanently be discarded. | One symbol is gone; the statues and street names and school names and county names paying homage to the Confederacy and its slavery-defending politicians and generals remain. And in the absence of this one symbol is left everything that it spoke to, and so much of what the modern Republican Party cynically invokes, having long since wedded its small government, zero-entitlement message to the Lost Cause rhetoric of anti-Washington posturing and anti-entitlement resentment and all the wrong folks who might cash those checks. The flag doesn’t need to speak symbolically for the heritage of South Carolina when Nikki Haley and a dozen candidates’ policy platforms and defense of “heritage” will do just that. The flag can come down — has to, even, to keep up the lie that flying it was neither a defense of racism nor a way to signal, both to the racists and those who would profit politically from their support, that the “principles” for which the Civil War was fought need never permanently be discarded. |
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