I’m going to probably really get it for this, but I’m going to say it anyway.
Not everyone that upholds Confederate leaders or their statues is in favor of slavery, white supremacy, or racism of any kind. I served my mission in Atlanta, GA, and there were many people who idolized the leadership of the Confederacy and minimizing the slavery aspect.
You see, I believe that a large part of people’s unwillingness to let go of that side of history is due to the very nature of the Civil War and its loss. Sociology is an interesting thing, and people often shape their self-image based on complex factors. After the loss of the Civil War, people had to reshape their thinking. It was a crushing blow to their self-image. As those states were restructuring their laws, economy, and moral outlook, people had to adopt different means of accepting the loss of the War. The South has a very distinct culture, and that loss was a threat to their own culture. Over time, many came to accept that slavery and racism were wrong, but adopted a view that the Civil War was about much bigger things than that, and that slavery was merely a secondary issue. As with any nation’s or culture’s history, a certain amount of apologetics and whitewashing go into it in order to avoid the psychological dissonance one feels of being part of something unethical. Remember, many Germans should have known that their own Third Reich was engaged in an unjust and evil war with accompanying horrors, but they turned a blind eye because they could not believe that they could engage in something so immoral.
My point to this is that there may be good qualities to many Confederate leaders. There are many good qualities of Southerners who uphold them as idols.
BUT
What they and we need to understand is that there really was an evil issue at the heart of the CSA. We need to be understanding of their cultural identity as it is so wrapped up in the good of that short-lived nation. We do need to remove those statues and flags from places of prominence. However, we must do so with respect and with accompanying education so that the people whose identities are threatened understand the true nature of the Confederate cause. This will avoid violent situations and will result in a better educated, and possibly less resentful and racist, nation. When you rip down a deeply ingrained cultural icon, sometimes all it does is validate certain misguided beliefs.
While I disagree with a few points of this*, I’d like to add more nuance to the counter-argument than you’ll typically find. The easy counter-argument is: the Germans as a whole eventually owned up to their terrible past, didn’t whitewash nearly as much as we still do, and came out of this truthful soul-searching a decent people with a strong sense of national identity in spite of their history. The nuance: more in the West than the East. You see, Nazism is on the rise in Germany as well, but it’s far more prevalent in the East. I blame the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan jump-started a period of enormous prosperity in Germany, but only in West Germany. Nazism thrives on the fabrication of a distant past golden age, and the West was simply too prosperous for many to look beyond the present. The East on the other hand jumped from hardship to hardship, and imagining that things were better in the past was an easier thing to swallow.
I’d also like to strongly agree that the South has a very distinct identity from the rest of the nation. It also extends beyond the historical boundaries of the Confederacy–I’d say the portions of the Voting Rights Act that were recently excised probably form a much more accurate boundary, sometimes going very far north indeed. The so-called melting pot bubbles a lot less in this part of the country. The idea of waves of immigrants bringing prosperity is something they read about happening elsewhere, with suspicion. The history of military victories starting with the Revolution and only failing in Vietnam was nonsense – the South has been losing battles far longer than that, what was one more defeat to add to the pile?
Taken in combination, I think the South needs a Marshall Plan. They may take it as a second Reconstruction, and I suppose in many ways it could be fairly called that. But the point is that as long as so much of the South is left out of economic prosperity, the past will keep beckoning, as it does in the former East Germany. But this is only part one – the Democrats pulled this off already once before with the upper midwest, using unions as the foothold to prosperity, which for a time overrode the inherent racism there. The problem is, like good socialists (and I include myself as a self-critical member of that group), they thought that once they solved the economic problem, the racial problem would solve itself. And that was baloney.
* Specifically, I’d say that at some point, self-delusion and denial adds up to effectively justifying slavery, white supremacy, and racism (because turning a blind eye to the past is not so much different than turning a blind eye to the present, and the motivations can be similar). And I’d add there’s more going on than self-delusion and denial in many or even most cases, such as our current Attorney General, who is a Confederate-botherer of the first order.