Agreeing to remove the Confederate flag isn't courageous. It's just politics
Jeb Lund
The Guardian
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.
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.
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.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/23/nikki-haley-remove-confederate-flag-courageous-just-politics
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