Kevin gives a good summary of a silly rightwing claim that's actually become a standard white nationalist argument in the Trumpified Republican Party, as described by the sad, weird propagandist Dinesh D’Souza:
Historians have tended to point to a gradual realignment of African Americans from the Republican to Democratic Party beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the 1960s. In the late 1960s, early 70s the Republican Party refocused efforts on a “Southern Strategy” that sought the support of white southerners in the former states of the Confederacy. That shift helped to solidify the Democratic Party as the party of civil rights and widespread African American support. According to D’Souza this is a myth. I am not going to go into too much detail here, but what you need to know is that according to D’Souza the Democrats have always been the party of white supremacy going back to the antebellum period, through the Civil War and Reconstruction and into the twenty-first century. In short, there was no party realignment. The Republican Party has always been the true political party of civil rights and racial equality.Kevin's characterization of this political tall-tale is spot on: "Needless to say the historical rigor behind these claims is flimsy at best and easily debunked."
But this brings up the question of whether debunking actually matters. Of course, I think it does. (A recent journatlistic presentation of the debunking-doubting case is This Article Won’t Change Your Mind by Julie Beck The Atlantic 03/13/2017.)
One of the obvious problems of the D'Souza nonsense argument is that it has been mostly Democrats pushing for removal of Confederate-ideolatry monuments in recent, while Republicans have been more likely to support the pro-Confederate advocates. (Republican Nikki Haley provided an exception to Repüublican neo-Confederate sympathies in 2015: Transcript: Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina on Removing the Confederate Flag New York Times 06/22/2015)
Kevin writes, "This obsession with protecting these monuments and memorials was reinforced for me after reading Victor David Hanson’s piece earlier today at National Review." He notes in the following that it's a "poorly argued piece," although that a bit redundant, since he had already noted that the author was Victor David Hanson.
Hanson is a noted Conservative historian and author of The Case For Trump. It’s a poorly argued piece beginning with his failure to distinguish between history and memory/commemoration and his decision to equate the vandalism and removal of Confederate monuments with the destruction of religious monuments by ISIS. Nowhere does Hanson mention that in most localities public conversation has been the order of the day nor does he mention state laws preventing removal in places where monuments/memorials have been vandalized.If there were a Nobel Prize for hackery, VDH woulkd have won it long ago.
But what is truly revealing is that Hanson fails to mention other instances of monument removals that I have no doubt he supports. Perhaps the best example is the destruction of the Saddaam Hussein monument in Baghdad by the United State military. More to the point, I would love to know what Hanson’s thoughts are regarding the often violent destruction of monuments celebrating communist leaders like Lenin and Stalin in former Soviet-bloc countries at the end of the Cold War. [my emphasis]
Kevin's has written a number of times at Civil War Memory about the Confederate monument controversies.
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