Earlier in the week, McCain reiterated a position he had in 2024 concerning the Confederate battle flag (via the AP: McCain stands by rebel flag stance):
John McCain on Wednesday sharply defended his opposition eight years ago to the flying of the Confederate battle flag over the South Carolina state capitol in Columbia, brushing aside protests that dogged him at campaign events and suggesting most people in the state don’t want the issue reopened.
[…]
McCain said he “could not be more proud of the majority of the people of this state” who agreed the flag should be removed.
This has prompted a response from Mike Huckabee (via the NYT: Confederate Flag Takes Center Stage Once Again):
“You don’t like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag,” Mr. Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas, told supporters in Myrtle Beach, according to The Associated Press.
“In fact,” he said, “if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we’d tell them what to do with the pole; that’s what we’d do.”
First off, this is grade-A pandering, as there really is no reason for Huckabee to bring the matter up, as the flag matter has already been dealt with by the voters of South Carolina.
Second, the notion that flying the battle flag is simply about “heritage” is quite plainly wrong and even the degree to which it is, the heritage in question is not a proud one. As I wrote last February:
Nostalgia for the “Old South” is nothing less than romanticizing an era in which a set of human beings were held as property. How could we ever want to pretend like there is something noble about that element of our past?
Steve Bainbridge commented on this issue earlier in the week and rightly noted, amongst other things, that
the battle flag was co-opted by racists. South Carolina didn’t start flying the battle flag over its capitol until 1962, almost 100 years after the war ended. The decision was a defiant one, intended to express the state’s white majority’s disdain for desegregation and civil rights.
Pretending as if these issues have no salience is misguided and does not speak well of Huckabee.
And yes, I know that many simply view the battle flag as some sort of vague symbol of southern pride, but I would argue that they aren’t thinking the issue through if they think that such an innocent interpretation comports well with reality.
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I am appalled that Mike Huckabee would use a coarse expression (the pole and what those opposed to flying a confederate flag from outside of the State could do with it)to define the character of South Carolina’s people. I am appalled that Mike Huckabee would think to amend the Consitution of the USA. That is a sacred document designed to protect Religious Freedom and thought and not designed to explain what God wants according to the interpretation of Mike Huckabee or to Mike Huckabees interpretation of Biblical scripture. I also think Jim McCain will not have the savvy to get this Country economically solvent…and if the economy is not fixed and soon, not much else will matter…there will be no money to pay military soldiers and their families just compensation or to keep up technologically…I dont know about you, but I want to stop foriegn investers holding bank notes over our heads…do we own us now or does somebody else?
Comment by Kathy — Friday, January 18, 2024 @ 8:28 am
I know that many simply view the battle flag as some sort of vague symbol of southern pride, but I would argue that they aren’t thinking the issue through if they think that such an innocent interpretation comports well with reality.
Defenders of the confederate flag don’t REALLY think this–unless they are just complete morons.
It is pretty clear that appeals to the flag’s defense are nothing more than a wholehearted embrace of racism.
Comment by Ratoe — Friday, January 18, 2024 @ 10:13 am
Taylor on Huckabee, McCain, and the Confederate Flag
A typically thoughtful analysis from Dr Steven Taylor.
Trackback by Punditry — Friday, January 18, 2024 @ 12:15 pm
Defenders of the confederate flag don’t REALLY think this–unless they are just complete morons.
Yes, they really think it. The confederate flag is not just embraced by openly racist folks who want blacks to know their place. I think a lot of them haven’t really thought it through. A lot of it is stubbornness. A lot of the people telling them to take the flag down are by folks that don’t like the south and will continue to not like the south whether the flag flies or not, so screw them.
That’s how the thinking goes, anyway. My views are the same as Steven’s.
Comment by R. Alex — Friday, January 18, 2024 @ 1:00 pm
Oh, come on. The flag is a tribute to a proud time in southern history. No one who reveres Robert E. Lee as a hero, as many do, see him as a defender of slavery. They see their own states standing up with pride, defending themselves against a heavy-handed national government. The fact may be that the flag wasn’t flown until the civil rights movement, but “In God We Trust” wasn’t printed until the Communist Era, either. In the minds of all but staunch opponents, neither symbols are now connected with the events that prompted their appearance. The issue is a battle between history and political correctness. In my mind, it is history that makes us great.
Comment by David H. — Friday, January 18, 2024 @ 1:15 pm
The problem, David, is that how symbols are received by others is not incidental. A significant portion of the population of South Carolina (and the rest of the country) is sincerely distraught at an emblem that since the 1960’s has been used as a rallying point for people that want to hurt them, kill them, or at best relegate them to second-class citizenship.
If I have a neighbor that’s an Indian and he wants to put a big giant swastika on his house because of how the symbol relates to his heritage, I would strongly recommend that he not do that. Even though I know that it’s not about nazism, I know that it will be interpreted wrongly by at least half the people that see it.
The confederate battle flag has been polluted by racists. Maybe it’s tragic that that’s the case, but it is. It was brought into prominance in the 1960’s to guard a status quo that resulted in second-class citizenship for black people. Its origins matter. We still reject Communism so the fact that “In God We Trust” was put there against Communism doesn’t bother us, but we don’t still reject integration so the fact that the flag had its resurgence at the hand of segregationists is very pertinent to large swaths of the population.
A state flag, or a flag flying over the state capital, should not be viewed as a symbol of fear by a significant portion of its population.
Comment by R. Alex — Friday, January 18, 2024 @ 2:35 pm
Arguably, however, some are proud of the Confederate heritage for reasons completely unrelated to slavery. I think it’s a little much to assume that nostalgia for the C.S.A. = nostalgia for slavery, when, in fact, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution near the start of the war explicitly stating that the Civil War was not about slavery, but about preserving the Union. Just a thought…
Comment by E. Ko — Friday, January 18, 2024 @ 2:59 pm
The rebel flag is a symbol of hatred. Period. It is a frightening reminder that racism is alive and well in the USA. That people even argue this issue and defend such an abhorent and brazenly devisive policy of flying that thing over a state capitol that is home to both black and white is beyond discussion! Some people will never admit that the Confederate Flag is a painful reminder of a shameful, dehumanizing period in our history.
Comment by Vanessa — Friday, January 18, 2024 @ 9:16 pm
We went through this in Georgia a few years ago; Georgia used to have the battle flag as a prominent part of its state flag.
I live in rural GA and there was a great deal of opposition here to the removal of the Stars and Bars from the flag - but, at least in my experience, very little of that opposition was directly related to a desire to express racism. Most people around here were simply angry that someone was telling them what to do. In so much as the GA flag was adopoted in the 60’s as well, it clearly had the same intended purpose as that of the SC flag, but I think at some point in the interim that purpose was forgotten among a large swath of the population and replaced by ego and stubbornness.
That doesn’t make it right, and we voted just like SC did to take the thing down. It left a large minority of the population pretty angry, and it is, as Dr. Taylor noted, obviously pandering by Huckabee - pandering to that lot of people. The crudeness of his statement - crassness, maybe even - is also beyond me.
In any case, the C.S.A. is nothing to be proud of; it was never a legitimate entity recognized by any other nation (even our own), and in spite of the desire of some here in the south to rewrite history, it remains nothing more than a failed rebellion against the federal leaders who were legitimately elected according to the laws and processes of the time. Robert E. Lee and his contemporaries in the Confederate Army were not heroes, and the continued veneration of them and their cause is misguided at best. All of the military officers of the time who fought for the confederacy broke their vows to defend the constitution, an act of dishonor by any standard. Furthermore, they endeavored to destroy the very thing they swore to protect -United States of America as we know it - and had they been successful in their efforts (they did not even come as close as some would like to believe), it is not likely that either of the nations that developed in the aftermath would have been strong enough to confront the problems of the 20th century and beyond; we would have been a fractured people, likely with a militarized border, weak individual economies, and an inability to project our power and influence outside of North America because we’d be too concerned with what our neighbors to the North/South were up to. I shudder to think what the world would have looked like today without a strong, UNITED States of America intervening in the world wars, and standing up to communism in their wake.
Even having ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, it escapes me how some still romanticize ante-bellum life, venerate the leaders of the confederacy, and hold dear symbols of their (fortunate) failure such as the Confederate Battle Flag.
Huckabee appears to be one of those people - another reason he is not fit to sit in the Oval Office.
Comment by Captain D. — Saturday, January 19, 2024 @ 1:32 pm
You lost, get over it. Today we can win together, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and any were in the world. We are stonger united. The world is a better place because we are united.The Rebel flag is a flag had in my room when I was young and liked the symbolism of rebelism, but when I grew -up and thought about the hatred and backwardness it represented I removed it. I have taken our American flag to Baghdad and later this month will take it to Kabul when I deploy. In both countries it will represent freedom. Together we will bring it to the world. The flag of the U.S. is your flag. God bless the South and the North, But bless our united mission to bring freedom and a better world.
Comment by Ed McCabe — Saturday, January 19, 2024 @ 4:46 pm
Ratoe: in all honesty, there are people who think that the flag is some sort of nod to a mythical past and a finger in the eye of those who would criticize the South. I don’t think that everyone who has it on their truck or on a t-shirt are racists. Still, I think, as I said in the post, they haven’t thought through what they are doing and what the flag meant and has come to mean.
Indeed, comments like the one above by E. Ko and the one about venerating Robert E. Lee partially make my point. However, to them and to that way of thinking, I have to underscore yet again: it is impossible to separate the Civil War from slavery. Yes, the Civil War was about “states rights,” but the “right” that the states were seeking to protect was the right to hold slaves and to have that right maintained in the westward expansion. Robert E. Lee fought for that, so I see no basis for venerating him as a hero–and to do so ignores what he fought to protect.
There are too many in the South (and elsewhere) who wish to pretend that there is some way to ignore the slavery issue when discussing the Civil War. It isn’t.
And for those who do not know me, I am originally from Texas and live in Alabama (where my mother and her whole side of the family is from). So I am not predisposed to have a negative view of the South.
Comment by Dr. Steven Taylor — Saturday, January 19, 2024 @ 9:24 pm
I live in rural GA and there was a great deal of opposition here to the removal of the Stars and Bars from the flag
A point of clarification here. Georgia did not remove the Stars & Bars from its flag, it removed the emblem of the Confederate battle flag (also called “the southern cross”). These are two different flags. The S&B is the first national flag of the Confederacy and had three bars with a blue patch in the upper left hand with some stars just like the American flag. The confederate battle flag is the one with the diagonal stripes and stars that we’re talking about.
As it pertains to Georgia this distinction is important because the new flag removed the confederate emblem but looks almost exactly like the Stars & Bars.
You can see the flags here or here. You can see the Georgia flags (both the one with the southern cross and the stars & bars look-alike) here.
Comment by R. Alex — Sunday, January 20, 2024 @ 12:41 am