Why don’t we call racists unpatriotic?
The “Confederate flag” has become the focus of national attention in the aftermath of the nine murders at the Emanuel A.M.E. church in Charleston. The controversy centers on the fact that the terrorist killer posed in several photos with the flag, and the flag is also part of a Civil War monument located on the ground of the state capitol.
South Carolina governor Nikki Haley announced yesterday that she supports removing the flag from the capital grounds - but not before conservatives defended the flag as a part of southern history.
Why did conservatives step up to defend a flag that was flown by traitors and racists? And how can the flag’s supporters still be considered patriots?
First, it’s worth pointing out that not a single Confederate state flew the flag that we now call the “Confederate Flag.” That flag was simply the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia under Robert E. Lee’s command. And it was mostly used by Civil War re-enactors for most of the century following the Civil War.
But in 1946, Dixiecrats began flying the flag “as a symbol of Southern protest and resistance to the federal government” - in other words, against integration.
At that time, racists in the South were mostly Democrats. The Southern democrats defended slavery before the civil war, and over the next century would be the party of segregation and Jim Crow. But that all started changing in 1964 when Barry Goldwater, who had voted against the Civil Rights Act, won most of the Deep South despite losing most of the country to LBJ.
And then in 1968, Nixon ran his presidential campaign on a platform of “state’s rights” and “law and order.” He lost the Deep South to former Alabama Governor George Wallace. But that was the last time a Republican presidential candidate won an election without carrying the Deep South.
In an interview in 1981, Republican strategist Lee Atwater bluntly summed up the Republican’s “Southern Strategy.”
“You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*gger, n*gger, n*gger.” By 1968 you can’t say “n*gger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N*gger, n*gger.”
That’s a Republican strategist talking about how “states’ rights” and “economic cuts” became dogwhistles for racism. And that’s just one year after Reagan gave his infamous “states’ rights” speech to kick off his presidential campaign at the Neshoba County Fair outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi.
