RUTHFULLY YOURS

To arms! The Confederates are coming! The Confederates are coming!

Union scouts have already discovered Robert E. Lee at the gates of the city, lining up the gallant Pelham’s artillery to fire the opening round, and Stonewall Jackson and Jeb Stuart are expected to arrive on a night train from the Shenandoah Valley.

Not since First Manassas, when the Yankees fled the battlefield in blind panic, after taking a licking in the first battle of the Cruel War of Northern Aggression, has the Capital quailed in such fear and trembling.

This time it’s only an army of marble, but marble men are apparently enough against a foe of the weak and the weary of combat. Cities, counties and states across the nation have been taking down Southern statuary for days — brave Baltimore waited for the cover of night to do the deed — all in hopes of being spared the wrath of the regiments of bronze and marble regiments. Californians scoured graveyards for evidence of insurrection and finally found something in Hollywood, of all places.

These were the graves of dead Confederates exiled from formerly Confederate states from Virginia to Texas who repaired to the balm of mild and gentle California to live out their final days, only to die forgotten in an alien land. The searchers found a plaque, overgrown with moss and soil, identifying those who sleep there. The plaque, though not a trophy as valuable as statuary of Lee or Jackson, was nevertheless removed as a prize of combat with the dead. The Los Angeles Times reports that “the bodies will not be disinterred.” Well, not now, anyway. Maybe next week, when the remains can be properly flogged and assigned to the city dump.

Back among the living, you might think the Democrats would be in Hog Heaven, intoxicated with the prospect of slaying Donald Trump at last. Metaphorically speaking, of course. (We think.) But months of malaise — the French call it “ennui,” or lassitude for lack of excitement — have made havoc of Democratic fundraising.

Even with the prospect of a riveting candidate for 2020, someone like Elizabeth Warren, Maxine Waters, Bernie Sanders or even Hillary retrieved from the mothballs for a third try, Democratic fundraisers report that Democratic donors are exhausted. Throwing good money after bad, even in pursuit of Donald Trump, is not ringing bells and blowing whistles where big money dwells. The targets for next year’s congressional races look more inviting, but apparently only in Washington and other haunts of campaign consultants.

The raw numbers are enough to alarm Pollyanna and her friends. The Democratic National Committee raised $38 million in the first half of this year, and while that sounds like a lot, the Republicans raised almost twice that, with $75 million. At the end of June, the debt-free Republicans had $45 million in the bank; the Democrats have only $7 million in the bank and $3 million in debt. “We really should be kicking them in the [hindquarters],” a glum Democratic donor tells the Capitol Hill political daily The Hill.

If the Republicans are embarrassed by the stumbling Republicans in Congress and Donald Trump’s continuing struggle with foot-in-mouth disease, the Democrats can only mimic the misery of Casey Stengel as he managed the New York Mets through their inaugural year when they couldn’t win for losing, often by boxcar numbers: “Can’t anybody play this game?”

By the numbers on the money, apparently not, though the fundraising numbers don’t tell the whole story. Mitch McConnell can’t seem to find a way to keep his senators marching in cadence to the music, enabling John McCain, who dreams of becoming the pet Republican of the mainstream media again, and a couple of others from co-operating with the Democrats in recycling Harry Truman’s famous campaign label, “the do-nothing Congress,” and affixing it firmly to the party that once nominated Mr. McCain for president.

President Trump has become a Republican pinata, inviting everyone to take a whack. But he continues to draw crowds and money, both big money and small money. His approval ratings hover just below 40 percent, but it’s the most faithful 40 percent anywhere.

He collected $10 million for his re-election at a fund-raiser at his hotel in Washington this summer, and the Republican National Committee continues to outraise the Democrats among small-dollar donors — under $200 — and by a big margin.

The Democrats, with big help from not only the media but establishment Republicans who just can’t get over November, are counting now on backlash over Charlottesville to do what Robert Mueller was only yesterday counted on to do.

But killing dead Confederates won’t do it, either. Democrats tempted to fight a Lost Cause of their own should find romance somewhere else. Bernie Sanders or Pocahontas on a bronze horse won’t thrill anyone.

• Wesley Pruden is editor in chief emeritus of The Times.

‘You must love Antifa, ya cuck.”

“Will you also condemn Antifa, BLM, and radical Muslims? I’m disappointed in you.”

It’s in reading these desperate social-media messages about violent left-wing protesters that I realized the true purpose of the tiki-torch ectomorph rally in Charlottesville. The “Unite the Right” rally had little to do with “defending” Confederate memorials, or any particular reading of southern history, however misguided. The designated speakers weren’t exactly kids who grew up learning how to give a rebel yell from Paw-Paw. Two of the billed speakers were anti-Semitic podcasters from New York; another fancies himself an American version of France’s Nouvelle Droite. The Robert E. Lee statue was a MacGuffin — or, rather, he was Antifa bait, and the college town that it happened to be in was just a place where Antifa could be expected to swim. The organizers don’t want heritage, they wanted footage.

Really, what they wanted to do was to set a trap for conservatives. The explosive growth of Antifa during the 2016 campaign and since the election of Donald Trump has become a fixture in conservative media. Conservatives had warned that mainstream-media figures were summoning an awful thing into being by cheering on masked left-wingers who punched Nazis. Soon, anyone you wanted to punch would start looking like a Nazi.

Sure enough. Aggressive left-wing “direct action” started falling on conservative speakers on campus. And Antifa played the main role in shutting down speeches by Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter. Even if conservatives, of the type that wears loafers and bowties, had become used to holding Yiannopoulos and Coulter at arm’s length, the sight of left-wingers using violence and the threat of worse riots to shut them down caused some rallying effect.

The organizers of Unite the Right wanted to achieve the same thing for themselves. A spectacle would attract Antifa, who would predictably use violence. Some mainstream-media figures would endorse that violence, and some conservatives, they believed, would feel obliged to defend the ActualFascists because, hey, these left-wing mobs are attacking America’s legal and social norms of free speech. In other words, even if the assorted Jew-haters and fashy dorks can’t persuade conservatives to adopt a “no enemies to the right” posture, perhaps Antifa would.

And then one of these MAGA-fascists rammed his Dodge muscle car into peaceful protesters, killing a woman.

That fact scuttled the rally organizers’ talking point that it was Antifa or poor policing that initiated and caused all the violence. And it prevented conservatives from venturing the “both sides” argument that so swiftly blew up in President Trump’s face.

The murder of Heather Heyer was a revelation, and so too was the way that rally co-organizer Christopher Cantwell, met news of her death — by sneering, “The fact that nobody on our side died, I’d go ahead and call that points for us.” At the exact moment Richard Spencer and his friends successfully recaptured the “alt-right” label from the so-called alt-light Gamergaters and other populists, it became stained in blood.

Still, the problem Charlottesville presents for the larger “alt-light” is serious. There seemed to be a real upside to cultivating a reputation as the edgiest and most transgressive political movement going. You’re free of the pieties that come from longer-lived movements. You look authentic, even fresh. And your stock goes up. But there’s an iron law at work here: As soon as anyone identifiably on the right gets the reward of attention for being transgressive, the Neo-Nazis swiftly show up, and the value of transgressive right-wing politics returns to its true value in America, near zero.

“Trump and his advisors need to understand how pervasive the left’s racial narrative is, and anticipate it when commenting on events like the Charlottesville killing. Once he has thrown a bone to the identity politics tribunes and fearful Republicans, then he should call out the leftist thugs and demand that their Democrat enablers condemn them by name. And don’t buy into the narrative that historical crimes give the victims’ descendants, no matter how free and privileged, a perpetual weapon to use against their political enemies. That claim is not about justice or morality. It is simply an instrument of political power.”

The blood on the ground in Charlottesville hadn’t dried before the race industry was fulminating full blast, and anxious Republicans were furiously virtue-signaling. Once more we see the toxic wages of our incoherent and politicized racial discourse.

Trump’s general condemnations of the white supremacists and their rally at which a woman was run-over and killed by a loser with a Hitler fetish was insufficient for both sides. Republicans and progressives alike demanded that he call out by name the various fringe-groups that organized the rally. All were outbidding one another to display their righteous indignation and complete freedom from the slightest taint of racism. Ted Cruz’s statement is typical: “The Nazis, the KKK, and white supremacists are repulsive and evil, and all of us have a moral obligation to speak out against the lies, bigotry, anti-Semitism, and hatred that they propagate.” It doesn’t take much bravery to make a statement so obviously true and widely approved outside a tiny fringe movement.

Then followed demands to call the murder “domestic terrorism”; the opening of a DOJ investigation; three days of NeverTrump dudgeon over Trump’s gaffe; and endless progressive analyses of the alt-right and racist moles that have burrowed into Trump’s administration. Long before Charlottesville, the anti-Trump “resistance” had decided he was a crypto-racist issuing “dog whistles” to his knuckle-dragging, gap-toothed base which in Bill Clinton’s day Dems called “angry white men.”

Thus the narrative was set, and any questioning of it considered bad form or even a sign that the critic is a minion of the Imperial Wizard or Grand Cyclops. The endless Two-Minute Hate Whitey was on, and it doesn’t do to interrupt it ritual.

But conclusions should be drawn. First, the eagerness and zeal of many Republicans to put themselves on the side of the angels demonstrate once again how thoroughly they have endorsed the race-hacks’ preposterous and self-serving rules for racial discourse, no matter how incoherent or distorting they are of today’s reality.

For example, both sides agree that “white supremacism” targeted specifically at blacks is a unique evil transcending all others, including anti-Semitism, the on-going jihadist genocide against Christians in the Middle East, or the jihadist terror that slaughtered people in Boston, Orlando, and San Bernardino. Assent to this demand that racism against blacks is the supreme evil––as are all, by the way, reductions of humans to any materialist determinism––is not enough. White racism is America’s original sin from which all other sins derive. But unlike Christianity’s doctrine of the Fall, there is no possibility for redemption. The taint is forever.

No matter that the concrete manifestations of this sin have been mostly reduced to subjective “microagressions” that only the victim can perceive, or statistical “disparities” the numerous causes of which are reduced to one––racism––despite the absence of any evidence that people have consciously or even unconsciously constructed “institutional racism.” The nasty, brutal, widespread racism that once engendered night-riders, lynching, legal segregation, and casual daily violence and humiliation may be gone, but like Jimmy Carter’s adultery, every day all whites sin against blacks “in their hearts,” and enjoy the social order that perpetuates their racism and protects their “white privilege.” Questioning this assumption reveals a stiff-necked indulgence of sin, and a need for public confession and verbal self-flagellation. Hence the heated condemnations of Trump issued by the Republicans, which signaled their acceptance of the narrative and their personal righteousness.

But conservatives who accept that preposterous narrative will never be redeemed. No amount of groveling or rhetorical hair-shirts or preemptive cringing will save them from their endemic racism. They are always and forever racists, because they are ideological opponents of the political aims that the purveyors of the narrative are pursuing––more power to the left, more redistribution of wealth to its clients, more and bigger government to create more socialist cronyism of the sort on which the progressives feed.

Racial arsonist Al Sharpton is demanding the federal government shut down the historic Jefferson Memorial in the nation’s capital because the long-dead president honored by the monument owned slaves.

Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president, the man who wrote the justly revered Declaration of Independence, is also the man who penned this noble sentence: “I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Perhaps he was thinking of future Al Sharptons when he wrote it.

Boiled down, this is a case where one of the most important, heroic, inspirational, intellectually robust, accomplished, and beloved figures in American history is under assault by one of the most repulsive, cowardly, sociopathic, intellectually deficient, unaccomplished, and despised figures in American history.

It was President John F. Kennedy who said at a White House dinner honoring a cohort of Nobel Prize winners from across the Western hemisphere:

I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

“Someone once said that Thomas Jefferson was a gentleman of 32 who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, and dance the minuet,” Kennedy said April 29, 1962.

No one has ever said anything similar about the dullard Sharpton, a vicious left-wing community organizer who, through his hate-filled racist and anti-Semitic rants, has gotten people killed.

That anyone would care what a racial-hoax-generating charlatan thinks of Jefferson’s legacy is a revealing and sad commentary on the profound damage that eight long years of Barack Obama’s racial agitations inflicted on America. Sharpton himself is a living example of this ugliness and depravity; recall that President Obama made the vile so-called community leader a trusted confidant and brought his friends, the pro-cop-killer leaders of Black Lives Matter, to the White House as honored guests.

Black Lives Matter is cheerleading the destruction of the republic. In light of recent events, Black Lives Matter Chicago is effectively demanding the repeal of the First Amendment. “After WWII, Germany outlawed the Nazis, their symbols, salutes & their flags. All confederate flags & statue, & groups should be illegal,” the group tweeted.

Minutes later it added, “The fact that the Confederate flag & statues permeate the south is evidence that white supremacy was never overthrown in the United States.”

Except maybe for the abolition of slavery, Jim Crow, and the advent of civil rights laws. Oops.

But this desire to settle scores by shutting down the Jefferson Memorial is part of the Maoist-style cultural revolution unleashed by the Left in the Obama era and amplified exponentially in the Trump era. Every day or so there is a new fake, race-related outrage amplified by the dishonest mainstream media and cheered on by the resurgent left-wing fascist movement known as antifa, which has been embraced in recent days by the so-called conservatives at National Review and Weekly Standard, as well as by Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Marco Rubio. Tearing down statues has suddenly become fashionable and plenty of establishment Republicans and conservatives are apparently fine with the mayhem.

Future historians will find it ridiculous, but the response to a few hundred white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia will be the trigger for a realignment of American politics. Polite opinion, which includes Establishment political leaders, corporate CEOs, religious leaders of virtually all denominations, the universities and the press, abhor Donald Trump for his alleged moral equivalence between the Charlottesville neo-Nazis and the demonstrators who opposed them. Trump did no such thing, but he did something less pardonable altogether: He split the country along the fracture line of political correctness.

We are in terra incognita for American politics, and predictions are unreliable especially when they concern the future. Nonetheless I believe that the storm of opprobrium that broke upon Donald Trump this week will dissipate, and when the dust settles, the United States will have a different political alignment. Trump’s populism will split both the Republican and Democratic parties, with consequences we can barely begin to imagine. Waving the bloody shirt of Charlottesville will have unintended consequences. I do not know what the president was thinking, but I think his seemingly spontaneous wrangle with the press at his August 15 New York press conference was carefully gauged.

The economic and social condition of African Americans deteriorated sharply under the Obama Administration, and future prospects are grim. Black political leaders have been unable to suggest practical solutions, and instead propose symbolic ones, for example, destroying monuments to the defeated Confederacy of slave-holding states. In fact, black Americans want to keep the monuments to their old oppressors, by a margin of 44%-40% in a recent poll (white Americans want to keep them by a margin of 65%-25%). Although black leaders from the Congressional Black Caucus to the radical Black Lives Matter movement have made the Confederate monuments a wedge issue, there is no enthusiasm for Taliban tactics against relics of American history.

What Trump actually said in his contentious August 15 press conference is that a lot of “good people” wanted to preserve Confederate statues, a point he reiterated in subsequent social media statements. While he denounced the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, who numbered no more than 500 and got the worst of it from armed-and-armored counter-demonstrators, he indicated his sympathy with the citizens of Charlottesville who opposed their City Council’s decision to remove a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. In other words, Trump took a position that Americans support by a roughly two-to-one majority. Trump observed that founding fathers like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson also were slave-owners: should their monuments be toppled like Robert E. Lee’s? “Where do you stop?,” he asked the press corps.

Trump violated the Prime Directive of Political Correctness, namely, to accept the most extreme demands of aggrieved minorities as the norm, and to identify any opposition to these demands with the worst sort of extremists. Black Americans are in anguish, and their prospects are deteriorating. Seventy-three percent of black children will be raised without a father in the home, already a handicap. Although American universities admit black students at roughly the same rate as white students, only 40% of black male students graduate within four years of matriculation. The gap between black and white wages has widened from 18% in 1979 to 27% in 2015, probably because high-paying jobs available to blacks have disappeared, mainly in manufacturing. The fragile condition of black families and the low graduation rate for black male university students set a downward trajectory.

McCarthyism accusations are the last refuge of old Commies. As a dog returns to its vomit, old lefties reach for the security blanket of that ancient slur which is used to tar anyone who questions the left.

Once upon a time, Ron Radosh disavowed the left and its accusations of McCarthyism. But he now accuses a growing list of conservatives from David Horowitz to Stephen Bannon to Rich Higgins to Stephen Miller to a fellow named Daniel Greenfield of that primal sin of the left: McCarthyism.

McCarthyism is everywhere and in everyone. Except Ron Radosh, who was once accused of McCarthyism for breaking with the left, but has learned nothing from the experience.

That has always been the great irony of McCarthyism. It’s the lefties who were really guilty of the mindset that the slur represents. But it’s a particular irony now as posters pop up depicting President Trump in a Russian fur hat with a sickle and hammer. And Democrats accuse him of taking orders from Moscow. The lefties who claimed to be the victims of McCarthyism have become its perpetrators.

Rep. Ted Lieu accuses President Trump of taking orders from Vladimir Putin and walks around wearing a ‘Trump-Putin ‘16’ cap. Rep. Maxine Waters rants mindlessly about the “Kremlin Klan” on MSNBC. Rep. Quigley claimed on CNN that “when you meet with any Russians”, you’re meeting with Putin.

And Ron Radosh has nothing to say about this runaway leftist McCarthyism come to life.

Instead he has contributed to it by repeatedly trying to associate Stephen Bannon with Vladimir Lenin. Even as he accuses Trump supporters of McCarthyism, he also charges Bannon with Leninism.

There’s an illustration of Vladimir peering over Bannon’s shoulder while President Trump applauds in the article where Radosh first made the bizarre claim that Bannon, the former Breitbart boss and Trump strategist, had told him he was a Leninist. The claim was implausible and there was no evidence of it, but suddenly he was the talk of Morning Joe and showing up in the New Yorker. There were positive mentions in the New York Times. And even the Guardian and the New Statesman seemed forgiving.

It’s amazing what a little “McCarthyism” will do for your career.

That was Radosh’s first Daily Beast article. And also the last one that anyone paid attention to. In February, a desperate Radosh tried to dust off his Lenin smear by accusing Bannon of a “shout-out to a left-wing terror group”. By that he meant that Bannon had quoted Bob Dylan. “It doesn’t take a weatherman to see which way the wind blows.”

Radosh had actually created the kind of cartoonish McCarthyism that leftists imagined it to be in which quoting Dylan means that “Bannon is consciously revealing that he sees the Tea Party as the equivalent of a new revolutionary movement, that will play the same role as did the Weather Underground.”

McCarthy wept. So did Kafka and Orwell.

There’s a sad, comic absurdity in Radosh trying to stuff his old anti-Communism into Never Trumper garb and then peddle it to the media left. There’s only so many times you can accuse Bannon of being a secret Leninist. Once will get you discussed on Morning Joe. Twice is just tacky. And even a left that will swallow nearly any accusation about Trump has to roll its eyes at the Bannon-Dylan conspiracy.

Radosh’s dilemma is the classic problem of the Never Trumper. Beyond the cocktail party circuit, the only people who will listen are on the left. And his plight is especially sad. How do you sell Never Trump anti-Communism to the media left that hates Trump, but celebrates Communism?

In fewer than seven days after the Charlottesville violence last weekend, statuary and other symbols of the American Confederacy are disappearing. Others are being vandalized—someone in Washington on Tuesday, perhaps a Middlebury history major, even spray-painted an expletive on the memorial to Abraham Lincoln.

Standing at the center of this tumult is President Trump, who in a succession of statements and tweets since Saturday has tried to make himself understood on the status of Confederate statues and the people who wish to preserve them. Suffice to say, it hasn’t gone well.

The practical political lesson is that there are good reasons why U.S. Presidents and the people who work for them try to choose their words carefully when commenting on public events. Myriad political forces—some active, some dormant—sit beneath America’s political life, and what a President says can put those forces powerfully, even dangerously, in motion.

Absent Mr. Trump’s comments, it is doubtful that the counter-Confederate movement would have extended to the attempted renaming in Austin of Robert E. Lee Road or that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo would be demanding, as a “stand against intolerance and racism,” that the U.S. Army rename two streets at Fort Hamilton in southwest Brooklyn commemorating Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

In our view cities can properly decide whether they wish to take down Confederate symbols, many of which arose in the Jim Crow years of white supremacy in the early 20th Century. But erasing a nation’s history is a bad idea. Mr. Trump is being ridiculed for suggesting that George Washington or Thomas Jefferson could be next because they were slaveholders.

We’re glad to have the clarifications on the false equivalence between Confederate generals and the Founding Fathers, but we hope these clarifiers will be around when campus demonstrators or even historians start demanding that the Founders’ legacies be repudiated because they owned slaves.

“Racist” is a powerful accusation to make against anyone, but it is heard today in an ever-widening set of circumstances, not just against Confederate generals. It might be useful if more people understood the role race has played in American history, as well as that history’s effort to get past discrimination based on race.

It might begin with Jefferson and Washington, who wrote the language and built the institutions of the bedrock American belief that “all men are created equal” and possess inalienable rights. Those words planted the seeds of freedom for the slaves, an idea that advanced through the awful Civil War and, not without setbacks, for a century after, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1965.

That is a long and difficult history of progress, one that deserves to be known in its complexity, rather than not known or forgotten. Robert E. Lee spent the rest of his life after the Civil War, notably as president of what became Washington and Lee University, trying to heal the wounds between north and south.

That’s at least one legacy of Lee we can all celebrate because we can’t see much purpose beyond political symbolism in reopening the Civil War 152 years later. It won’t educate an inner-city child trapped in a rotten school, it won’t create more economic opportunity, and it won’t lead to more racial tolerance.

I’m a descendant of a soldier who served under Gen. Robert E. Lee and a resident of the Richmond metro area, where one can take very few paces without bumping into a reminder of the Confederate past. Yet I can’t work up much enthusiasm about Civil War monuments.

My lackadaisical attitude has nothing to do with race or heritage and is quite widespread. Most people are far too busy worrying about losing their house, finding a job, making payroll and wondering why their dog’s tongue is turning blue to spend much time contemplating statues of guys who lost a war 152 years ago.

Carting away Baltimore’s Lee and Jackson statues in the wee hours, Aug. 16. Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The violence in Charlottesville last weekend is deeply distressing. In this neck of the woods it’s commonly held that thugs who run down people with cars should go to the crocodile pit (after a fair trial, of course). But it’s hard not to cringe over the way a growing list of American locales are responding to the rise of the dead confederates.

In Baltimore, four monuments were purged Tuesday night in a scene reminiscent of the nocturnal vamoose of the Baltimore Colts to Indianapolis in 1984. (By contrast, three of the statues were parked at a wastewater treatment plant.) You didn’t have to be a soldier, or even a rebel, to get the hook: A statue of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the Marylander who wrote the Dred decision and served on the U.S. Supreme Court until his death in 1864, was hauled off, along with a statue dedicated to Confederate women. Lexington, Ky., plans its own official purge, while a Confederate statue in Durham, N.C., was toppled Monday and kicked by protesters after it bit the dust.

Where will it stop? President Trump was widely mocked for saying Tuesday: “I wonder is it George Washington next week, and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?” He didn’t have to wait that long. The next day, a Chicago pastor demanded the removal of a Washington statue from a city park. Last October activists gathered outside New York’s American Museum of Natural History to demand the removal of a statue of “racist” Teddy Roosevelt. The Rough Rider still stands, but Gov. Andrew Cuomo tweeted Wednesday that “Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson will be removed from the [City University] hall of great Americans because New York stands against racism.” CONTINUE AT SITE

My first job, in 1972, was with a small weekly in Richmond, Virginia. Like my fellow writer/editors, I was a proud veteran of the sixties campus wars, and our left-of-center politics were strongly represented throughout the paper; which is to say, we were far from a neat ideological fit with the deeply conservative town Richmond still was back then. I joked with my friends up north that, the morning after Richard Nixon’s landslide victory in November, I could actually see my McGovern vote in the paper. The politics weren’t all that I disliked about Richmond. It was sleepy, ghastly hot in the summer, and in general far from what I then thought of as “the action.”

But there was one thing that I loved about the place: it was steeped in history. On Clay Street, just a few blocks from our office on Broad, was the Confederate White House. Not far off loomed the magnificent, Jefferson-designed state capitol. Over on Franklin, the Jefferson Hotel boasted the staircase said to be the model for the one in Gone With the Wind. But above all there was Monument Avenue, with its imposing statues of the generals whose prowess had sustained hope in this capital of a doomed nation a century earlier: Stonewall Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart, Robert E. Lee.

As a Northerner and a lefty, I’d grown up thinking of the South as the bad guys. Nonetheless, there was an undeniable grandeur to these stone figures, and I felt it every day driving past them on my way home. They were men of surpassing courage and nobility, rightly enshrined in national myth: “There stands Jackson like a Stone Wall.” And the image of Lee, wearily arriving at Appomattox aboard Traveller, having resisted calls from diehards that he continue the fight, saving the nation from yet more bloodshed. I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. One of my colleagues, Richmond-born and recently graduated from Harvard (and now a left-wing commentator of some note), would tear up every time he heard “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”

As a Red Diaper baby, I came from a different tradition. My parents never saw Gone With the Wind—they were outside the theater, picketing. But I, too, felt the pull of that history, in all its messiness and grandeur. It was our history, as Americans.

Maybe that’s all over now. Maybe, as my colleague Kay Hymowitz once observed, for kids today American history runs from the oppression of the Indians to the oppression of blacks to the oppression of women, with nothing ennobling in between. Not long ago, talking with several people in their twenties, I was startled to learn that, until the movie came out, none of them had heard of Dunkirk. How, then, could we expect them to know about figures like Richard Kirkland, “the Angel of Marye’s Heights,” the Confederate soldier who, during the abattoir that was Fredericksburg, emerged from the safety of the commanding Southern lines to tend to dying Union soldiers on the killing field below?

Our history is rife with moral complexity. My wife and children exist only as a result of two near-misses. One ancestor, on her mother’s side, whose descendants would include several prominent abolitionists, nearly drowned after falling overboard on The Mayflower, while her great-grandfather on her father’s side, at 12, was nearly shot down from a rooftop in Fort Smith, Arkansas, by an occupying Union soldier after shouting “Long live Jeff Davis!”

All of which is a preamble to saying that, in his exchange with the churlish and ignorant press corps in the aftermath of Charlottesville, Donald Trump got it right when he said: “This week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder is it George Washington next week and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?” He may not have been the ideal messenger—with his combative style, manic egotism, and casual relationship with facts, he never is—but he laid out a case that for months has cried out to be made, and he did it so clearly that the refusal of the media and the elites of both parties, not just to credit it, but even to acknowledge it, speaks volumes. Though Trump has never quite defined what his notion of making America great again actually means, preserving that which needs no fixing—including the history that is our common legacy—is a key part of it.