Thoughts from Jonah Goldberg:
There are few subjects that ignite more casual, uninformed bigotry and condescension from elites in this nation than Dixie. “Practically the whole region has rejected nearly everything that’s good about this country and has become just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment,” the Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky wrote last year.
How then to explain the tens of thousands of South Carolinians, white and black, marching in unity across the Ravenel Bridge on Sunday night? Did the city bus in decent Northerners?
The Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins glibly asserts that “the Confederate battle flag is an American swastika, the relic of traitors and totalitarians, symbol of a brutal regime, not a republic.”
If it were left to me, I would take the flag down (for the reasons South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley laid out Monday). But this kind of cheap moral preening is galling. Is it really too much for people to muster the moral imagination that the issue isn’t nearly as simple as that?
A November poll of South Carolinians found that 61 percent of blacks wanted it down. That means nearly 4 in 10 blacks felt differently. Are they deluded? Are they the moral equivalent of self-loathing Jews, happy to live under a swastika?
Bigotry against white Christian southerners isn’t just the only acceptable one; it’s almost mandatory. And it largely comes from people who embrace and vote for the historical and traditional (and current) party of racism.
Democrats have to hate the South to show that they have changed but by hating people like this, it shows they haven’t really changed at all.
Without racial stereotypes, Democrats wouldn’t know what to think about the South.
Most Democrats loved the South just fine when they were running everything. Passing Jim Crow laws, establishing the KKK, lynching blacks, blowing up churches, George Wallace standing in the school house door, Bull Conner turning police dogs on civil rights protesters, Al Gore’s father and Bill Clinton’s mentor voting against the Civil Rights Act, KKK member Robert Byrd in the Senate, Fritz Hollings raising the Confederate flag (that’s really the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia) above the South Carolina state capital. Good times.
I guess Valerie, George Soros et al couldn’t race bait those darn republicans into looting and rioting. But since they can’t let a crisis go to waste, they have to take down the flag.