Happy Treasonous White Supremacy Day to All Who Celebrate

If you're honoring the Confederacy, you hate our country. Simple as that.

Photo by Anthony Crider

Thank you for reading The Cross Section. This site has no paywall, so I depend on the generosity of readers to sustain the work I present here. If you find what you read valuable and would like it to continue, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Just a few years ago, it seemed that the debate over the vile treason known as the Confederacy was pretty much over in America, save for some pathetic dead-enders running their hands lovingly over their stars-n-bars flags and reading obscure online screeds about the dangers of race-mixing.

Unfortunately, the Lost Cause is back. And it’s important that we treat it with every ounce of contempt it deserves.

How we got here

The “national conversation” that occurred in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020 featured a heartening number of actions at the federal, state, and local level to end the glorification of the Confederacy. NASCAR banned the flying of Confederate flags at its races. Mississippi decided to finally ditch the state flag that featured a Confederate emblem; in a referendum that November, 73% of the state’s voters approved the new design. Confederate statues came down across the South. Congress even passed a provision in a defense appropriations bill requiring the military to rename the military facilities that had been named to honor Confederate figures. Donald Trump, the son of Queens turned defender of Dixie, threatened to veto the bill if that measure was included; when he followed through on his threat, Congress overrode the veto, the first and only time they did so in his presidency.

It was all so encouraging that naïve commentators wrote columns with headlines like “The right has lost the debate over the Confederacy.” That was one of mine, written in 2021 after Richmond removed its statue of Robert E. Lee.

Yet while the statues haven’t been re-erected, the Confederacy has returned, in ways both large and small. Its advocates didn’t accept defeat; they were just waiting for a moment when their bigoted, anti-American beliefs would be ascendant once again. And now that time has come. Donald Trump’s second turn in the White House is a full-spectrum white supremacist presidency, and that includes an effort to reinvigorate the Confederacy.

Back to the future

From the moment it took office, the Trump administration has been aggressively moving to banish any effort to alleviate racial prejudice or honor the contributions of non-white people to the nation; that has meant banning books, scrubbing government websites of photos and stories of notable non-white figures, transforming the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice so it de-prioritizes discrimination against anyone but white Christians, and even offering asylum to white South Africans, who are apparently the only people anywhere in the world so oppressed that they should be welcomed into our country.

Trump promised during the 2024 campaign to rename military bases to their original, treason-celebrating names. Trump probably couldn’t have told you who Braxton Bragg or Henry Benning were if his life depended on it (spoiler alert: they were viciously racist white supremacists who enslaved people), but he clearly saw support for the Confederacy as a way to send a message to his white supporters.

There was one problem: The law now actually forbids naming military bases after Confederate figures. It seems that to get around that, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth instructed someone to look through military records for somebody, anybody with the same name as the Confederates, so they could change the names back but claim the bases were now being named for these previously unknown servicemembers. Since millions of people have served in the U.S. military, it wasn’t hard; Fort Bragg, for instance, is now supposedly named for Prvt. Roland L. Bragg, a random guy who fought in World War II (I’m sure he served honorably, but he wasn’t exactly Audie Murphy). “Bragg is back,” Hegseth exulted.

Which brings us to today. April 28th is Confederate Memorial Day in Mississippi and Alabama; similar holidays are also celebrated in South Carolina and Texas, where they call it Confederate Heroes Day (Democrats in the state legislature have tried to end the holiday, to no avail). In fact, in Mississippi the entire month of April is Confederate Heritage Month. Here’s Gov. Tate Reeves a few years back:

The proper reaction to this is not “Whaddya gonna do, you know how they are.” It is outrage, disgust, contempt and condemnation. To be clear: Multiple states have holidays to honor the men who committed treason against the United States of America in order to preserve white supremacy and the ability of people to own other human beings.

This is how we should always talk about it when this subject comes up, not just these holidays but any effort by Republicans to valorize or even excuse the moral abomination that was the Confederacy. Don’t for a second allow them to get away with saying it’s just about “heritage” or “history,” some kind of value-free statement that “This is a thing that happened, and that’s all we mean.” That’s a lie, and it should never be entertained even for a second. As I have said many times, if it was just about understanding our history there would be a statue of Adolf Hitler in your town square and your kids would go to Osama bin Laden Middle School, since they were also important historical figures who made an impact on the United States.

I realize that all of us on the left are supposed to treat conservatives with respect and consideration, and we’re supposed to acknowledge that DEI trainings are sometimes silly or counterproductive, and we’re generally instructed to tiptoe around our political opponents lest their supporters find us rude or elitist. Don’t lecture them, don’t condemn them, and don’t dismiss their justifiable grievances, for if you do you will forever lose the opportunity to win them over.

But this is a topic on which there should be no ambiguity and no neutrality. All of us, conservative or liberal, ought to be able to agree that in America, we shouldn’t honor white supremacist traitors. And anyone who does should be confronted in exactly those terms — no mealy-mouthed hedging, no “I get where you’re coming from,” none of that. If you’re even willing to tolerate celebration of the Confederacy, you’re saying you’re good with slavery and treason against America.

The neo-Confederates and their Republican allies, including the president, believe this is their chance to bring their repulsive beliefs back into the mainstream. It will only happen if we let it.