Being one of the dozen or so Republicans in the entire city of Alexandria, Va., I have been asked by liberal friends my view of the future of the Confederate flag in the wake of the horrific murders at the Emanuel AME Church of Charleston by the racist and mentally unbalanced Dylann Roof. (My minority-Republican-status claim is a slight exaggeration, but Alexandria is just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., and practically everyone in the D.C. metropolitan area works directly or indirectly for the federal government — and the Democratic Party being the “government party,” most people tend to be Democrats. D.C. is a company town and the federal government is the company.)
The flag question is prompted because many people, mostly conservative Republicans, think blaming the Confederate flag for a racist killing spree is silly. Yes, Roof took pictures of himself holding a Confederate flag, but had there been no Confederate flag flying atop the statehouse in Charleston, Roof still would have acted.
Undoubtedly so, and the vast majority of those who defend the Confederate flag are not racists, but long before Dylann Roof was even born I have wanted the Confederate flag taken down from statehouses across the South. That is because, while most flag defenders think it is a symbol of freedom and states’ rights, I see it as representing a group of former member-states of the United States of America who wanted to destroy the Union by creating a separate nation. We can argue over whether preserving slavery was the cause of this secession — I think that was the primary motivation, others disagree — but the endgame for those flying Confederate flags during the Civil War was to split America in two.
That said, I was struck by the (very conservative) columnist Charles Krauthammer’s take on the much greater support by both liberals and conservatives — South Carolina’s Republican governor, Nikki Haley, foremost among them — for removing the flag. Krauthammer thinks it’s payback for, as he writes, “the breathtaking display of nobility and spiritual generosity by the victim’s relatives.” Almost to a person those relatives decried the violence, but forgave its perpetrator because their Christian faith preaches charity and reconciliation.
“The flag was not material to the crime itself,” Krauthammer writes, “but its connection to the underlying race history behind the crime suggested that its removal from the statehouse grounds … could serve as a reciprocal gesture of reconciliation.”
“The result was a microcosm of — and a historical lesson in — the moral force of the original civil rights movement, whose genius was to understand the effect that combating evil with good, violence with grace, would have on a fundamentally decent nation.”
And so, for the best of reasons, down go the flags.
