Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham had a good op-ed in The New York Times this weekend, noting that "Confederate symbols have tended to be more about white resistance to black advances than about commemoration." Matthew Yglesias responds:
As long as national institutions are substantially controlled by white southerners, the white south is a hotbed of patriotism. But as soon as an non-southern political coalition manages to win an election—as we saw in 1860 and in 2008—then suddenly the symbols of national authority become symbols of tyranny and the constitution is construed as granting conservative areas all kinds of alleged abilities to opt out of national political decisions. Even if you think opposition to the Affordable Care Act has nothing whatsoever to do with race, the underlying political philosophy by which a George W Bush or James Buchanan is a national president but an Abraham Lincoln or a Barack Obama merely a sectional one remains incoherent and pernicious.
I'll just put it like this: The only framework in which veneration for the Confederacy becomes the highest form of patriotism is if you believe that legally enforced white racial hegemony is a defining characteristic of American society and that its absence by definition makes the federal government illegitimate. This is white nationalism, and we should have no qualms about saying so.
-- A. Serwer
