WaPo: “Workers in Richmond removed a statue of Confederate Gen. A.P. Hill, the last city-owned Confederate statue that had been standing, on Monday from a busy intersection. Although Confederate monuments of various types remain in many places around the South, they’re steadily being taken down, and what’s so remarkable is how quiet this once-churning debate has become.
The Lost Cause is dying with a whimper. For that, thank the committed activists who made it their mission; the hollowness of the arguments in favor of maintaining our country’s long and shameful reverence for the Confederacy, arguments that wilted in the light of day; and one Donald Trump.
Confederate statues were installed as an assertion of white supremacy, and they’ve been coming down as part of a challenge to that same toxic ideology. Yet for decades, it seemed impossible that we would purge the iconography of the Confederacy from our common spaces. They were just there, especially but by no means exclusively in the South: statues, flags, names on military bases.
…So it may prove a relief for conservatives to put the Lost Cause behind them, because the moral question at its heart is so unambiguous. They can now pose as the true victims of discrimination and the advocates of their own version of equality, fighting against caricatures they invent to claim that liberals are the Real Racists.”