The Confederate President
On Tuesday, Donald Trump tore away the cheap rubber mask of respectability and decorum he’d previously worn when addressing the civil and racial unrest in Charlottesville this past weekend to reveal, reverse Scooby Doo style, the true monster lurking underneath. During the course of his unhinged press conference, he reversed his earlier stance condemning white supremacists by blaming both sides of the conflict. What’s more, he sympathized with the position of the Confederate fetishists and assorted racists gathered in Charlottesville by questioning the decision to tear down a monument to Robert E. Lee. In that moment, Trump proved beyond all reasonable shadow of a doubt that he hasn’t inherited the Republican legacy of Abraham Lincoln but rather that of his rival, Jefferson Davis.
In case you happened to miss Trump’s remarks, here’s what he had to say about the Confederate statue issue:
“Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E Lee. This week, it is Robert E Lee and this week, Stonewall Jackson. Is it George Washington next? You have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”
Any sane, clear thinking individual recognizes the false equivalency of comparing Washington, the Father of the Country, with traitorous rebels like Lee and Jackson. But then again, Trump is anything but a sane, clear thinking individual, so for his benefit (and those who think like him) let me delineate a few key differences between Washington and those other men.
Washington fought in service of his country, while Lee and Jackson fought to tear the union asunder. Washington fought to defeat tyranny imposed upon his country by a foreign power; they fought to maintain tyranny by waging war against the federal government. To compare Washington to these men is to compare fine wine to rancid grape juice.
But don’t misunderstand me: I’m not here to praise Washington. One thing Trump did get right yesterday is that he correctly identified Washington as a slave owner. He used that fact as a pretense to berate a reporter who questioned Trump’s attempt to equate Washington with the Confederate men. In his typically noxious manner, Trump wondered aloud whether the fact that Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slaveowners would cause them to “lose [their] status.” Of course, no one has seriously suggested tearing down either the Washington Monument or Lincoln Memorial because neither Washington nor Lincoln ever threatened armed insurrection against their country. But such fine distinctions are lost on people of Trump’s ilk.
It cannot be denied that Washington and many of the Founding Fathers were slaveowners and therefore complicit in the forced subjugation of black Americans. Lincoln, for his part, hemmed and hawed about the slavery question for much of his presidency, and didn’t become a full-throated denouncer of the ills of slavery until the Emancipation Proclamation. These men did damage to a great many people during their times as Presidents and history has judged him harshly in that light (and will likely continue to do so).
But the important thing — and I can’t stress this enough — is that they weren’t part of the Confederacy. There’s a reason, after all, that we don’t have statues erected to other traitors to the nation like Benedict Arnold. And it should also be noted that Confederate war criminals like Lee were erected during the civil rights era by racist Southern politicians protesting social and political gains made by black Americans.
As someone who currently lives in the South, I’ve heard the argument (made exclusively by white men, coincidentally enough) that Confederates like Lee are part of a shared “Southern heritage.” Though they hardly realize it, such a perspective reflects poorly on their notion of heritage. I haven’t lived in the South nearly as long as they have, but I like to think I hold a higher opinion of the South than that. To my mind, Southern culture is better epitomized by the Civil Rights Memorial in Alabama and the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia; by the works of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor; by barbecue and peach cobbler. All of these things are not only Southern, they’re also American — something that the Confederacy assuredly is not.
Many right wing pundits took great pains to defend the remarks made by the Confederate President. I’d like to call special attention to the unctuous Tucker Carlson, who spent the opening segment of his Fox News program attempting to diminish the significance of American slavery by pointing out that other civilizations used slave labor as well. This is a disingenuous line of argument often employed by conservatives that’s meant to justify the continued existence of Confederate monuments. It’s difficult to tell whether he was serving as a media apologist for the Confederate President or if he sincerely believes there’s no valid difference between distinct historical moments in which slavery took place.
Either way, it’s an ahistorical view of the legacy of slavery in America that conveniently ignores the brutal process of physically and mentally subjugating a race of people, as well as robbing them of their history. Not to mention the 100 years of American apartheid in the wake of the freeing of the slaves in 1865 that stretched through the Jim Crow era to the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1965.
Just to make the distinction crystal clear to Carlson and his Confederate President: not every incidence of slavery is exactly alike, and not all statues are created equal. Only men are created equal, at least until further notice.
