The traitor stands in worse case of woe

Richmond, Virginia—the former capital of the Confederate States of America—pulled down its last remaining city-owned Confederate statue yesterday, that of Ambrose Powell “A.P.” Hill. This Confederate statue was among the few in the country that I am aware of in which the decedent was interred underneath it, and the general’s remains are still waiting to be removed and relocated, but for all intents and purposes the era of C.S.A. monuments in the short-lived country’s short-lived capital is over. It is done.

There were plenty of good reasons to take the statues down; there were also actually a few good reasons for leaving them up, impolitic as it is to mention that, among them that these men even in their colossal moral and political failings could teach us valuable things about service, about loyalty, about dignity, honor, devotion, determination. The argument has long been that, while other great figures in American history did own slaves, the Confederates are the only ones who “fought to preserve it,” and so every other quality they might possess is eclipsed by that admittedly considerable sin. I have always found this argument completely unpersuasive—are we supposed to believe George Washington and Thomas Jefferson weren’t “fighting to preserve slavery” in their own pretty distinct way?—and I think this sort of thing is a great example of how a national historical narrative is ultimately much more of a political choice than an historical one. I mean, slavery is slavery, making these determinative moral distinctions between (a) the 18th century guys who owned hundreds of slaves and (b) the 19th century the guys who wanted to keep owning hundreds of slaves feels just a bit calculated. It’s all slavery, it’s all extremely bad. If you’re going to sort of conditionally forgive James Madison for being a slaveowner, what exactly is the argument for denying that to others mostly like him? Is there one?

The secondary but still vociferous argument against these statues is that they are monuments to “traitors,” a word that in its own way feels queerly childish and infantile, like two boys playing some cloak-and-dagger game on the school playground (“You’re a traitor! I’ll shoot you with my gun!”). Juvenility aside, I actually think there’s a delicate historical and legal argument to be made against describing these people as “traitors,” at least in the same way that we refer to, say, the Benedict Arnolds, or the Julius Rosenbergs; it feels like a distinctly different thing to betray your government and your people to a foreign power vs. launching a breakaway republic composed entirely of, you know, other Americans. If you tell me there’s really no difference, sorry, I won’t believe you.

But beyond that I have to say that the whole idea of the Left getting all worked up about “traitors” has always to me seemed very, very funny. I don’t mean to be rude here. I’m just saying…I mean, progressives these days as a whole tend to really kind of hate America, don’t they? I don’t mean in some sort of surface-level, talk-show, “We’re-the-only-developed-country-that-doesn’t-provide-universal-healthcare” kind of way; I mean that they regularly openly and bitterly express hostility toward the very foundations of this country itself: Its history, its institutions, its political principles, the people who founded it, the people who have sustained it for nearly 250 years, our longstanding aggressive dominance of the world stage. I mean, the U.S. is a country built on the premise of sharply restricted government, individual liberty, broadly dispersed loci of power, strong military; we have tons of private gun ownership, tons of cars, tons of religion, comparatively little regulation by modern Euro-state standards. Heck, at this point we even have a growing framework of strong abortion regulation. It’s pretty much always been this way. As bad as things have gotten here for conservatives—and I admit it’s pretty bad—still progressives really seem to hate pretty much everything about the U.S., increasingly so as time goes on.

So this whole “traitor” thing, coming from the Left, just feels more than a little performative, right? I mean, put it this way: If you hated a country as much as so many progressives seem to hate the United States, would you really care who exactly was a “traitor” to it? Would that animate you all that much? Of course not. If you truly despise something, you don’t really care all that much who abuses it; it doesn’t really factor into your thinking. This has all the ugly appearance of a political contrivance by people with relatively few compunctions about anything.

All of which is to say: If you have a point to make, make it without resorting to cheap political productions. You can easily make a strong case for, say, taking down Confederate statues; you can even base it on the fact that the men depicted by these monuments led a revolt against the United States, at least if you value the U.S. as a country. But pretending as if you’re offended by “treachery” against a country you uniformly loathe is just silly. No need to be so dramatic about it.