How Many Confederate Statues Are There Left to Topple?
And Does Toppling Them Actually Make Room for Better?
At last count there are roughly 1900 monuments and statues throughout the southern United States commemorating the Confederacy. In 2020, 200 had been taken down, demolished, or hidden from view.
I'm no mathematician but that seems to leave us with 1700 left.
While there is certainly debate about whether this purge of commemoration is a good thing moving forward it is definitely trending toward removal. A slight majority of Americans tend to accept the idea that memorializing those men and women who fought and died to preserve slavery is something we societally should reject.
52 percent of voters said they support removing such statues, while just 44 percent oppose removing them, according to a Quinnipiac University Poll survey.
A statue of Robert E. Lee is a reminder that some folks in the south still think black Americans are somehow less. That statue says to anyone in walking distance that here stands a tribute to someone who commanded forces hellbent on keeping people enslaved. Not a great look for any part of our country should unity of purpose be a goal.
I'd argue that we should acknowledge the past but not dwell upon it—yes, there were soldiers who fought and died for the Confederacy, they lost, slavery was eradicated, the good guys won. No lionizing of the losers. Further, it seems that a majority of Americans agree with me. Given I live in Nevada and, as far as I know, there aren't any Confederate monuments in the state, this isn't really up to me in any way.
It gets a bit sticky when "Confederate Monument" becomes a metaphor for the culture at large before the other 1,700 existing and non-metaphorical statues are still standing. Toppling down a couple hundred is progress but to focus on more before the job is done smacks of both over reach and belies the fundamental rationale for the toppling in the first place.
In a recent theater round table discussion in the vaunted New York Times concerning Steven Spielberg's revision of West Side Story, the question is asked and thoroughly dissected: "Is West Side Story another Confederate Statue to be taken down?"
The idea that a musical update to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet set in NYC circa 1955 is anything like a statue of Stonewall Jackson is completely silly. Is it dated? Sure. Does it present broad stereotypes in its musical theater approach to the story? Yup. Is it as unbending and fixed as a statue of the Civil War? Gimme a beak, wilya?
Like so many terms now used by the Utopians to expand influence—racism is now systemic and without solution, gender is completely flexible, speech is also violence—the concept of other cultural landmarks being the same as Confederate memorials to be toppled and destroyed is grasping the power dynamic a bit too aggressively and is self defeating in the long run.
We've seen poll after poll indicate that the further into Progressive Utopian mania the body politic dives, the more rational voters shift toward the right side of the divide. Local elections were lost by moderate democrats because of ridiculous ideas like 'Defund the Police' and the decision to separate the white kids from the black kids in a Critical Race Theory-inspired curriculum.
The LatinX problem
As Democrats seek to reach out to Latino voters in a more gender-neutral way, they’ve increasingly begun using the word Latinx, a term that first began to get traction among academics and activists on the left.
But that very effort could be counterproductive in courting those of Latin American descent, according to a new nationwide poll of Hispanic voters.
Only 2 percent of those polled refer to themselves as Latinx, while 68 percent call themselves “Hispanic” and 21 percent favored “Latino” or “Latina” to describe their ethnic background, according to the survey from Bendixen & Amandi International, a top Democratic firm specializing in Latino outreach.
More problematic for Democrats: 40 percent said Latinx bothers or offends them to some degree and 30 percent said they would be less likely to support a politician or organization that uses the term.
Is the answer to just keep using an overwhelmingly unpopular term in order to convince those unlikely to embrace it and ultimately lose elections out of arrogance and a fealty to some misguided moral purity involving how we label people who don't want the label?
Granted that assuming millions of Latino and Hispanic voters are turning away from the Democratic Party because of Latinx is the same sort of reductive infantilization that both sides tend to do. On the other hand, with the margins of winning elections so slender and the fully stated desire to rig elections by the Traditionalists, why push the agenda of two percent and potentially turn off even a percentage of Latino and Hispanic voters with virtue signaling nonsense?
This is the crux of our problem on the left side of the playground: we aren't content to finish the project at hand (getting rid of Confederate statues) so we focus on an increased expanding of grievances by the fewest amount of people in the country. It makes us seem silly and pointless. It makes us seem like the needs of the very few outweigh the needs of the many.
The needs of the few NEVER outweigh the needs of the many.
The opinions of the few do not outweigh the opinions of the many (because, you know, majority rules in a democracy or at least it's supposed to).
Here's an idea. Instead of destroying the Confederate monuments across the country, how about we replace them with something better? Pull down a statue of Robert E. Lee but erect, in its place, a statue of John Brown or Sojourner Truth? Act as a force of enrichment rather than simple, stupid destruction? Like Spielberg did with West Side Story? Take the good and expand it rather than an expansion of the bad?
