People are right to praise the politicians in South Carolina who have finally come around to wanting to disown the Confederate battle flag.
It remains to be seen if the recent terrorist attack at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church Charleston, South Carolina will lead to large scale social change when it comes to racial disparities or gun control. But reactions to the presence of the Confederate battle flag being flown at a war memorial right next to the State Capitol seem to bearing a little fruit as a number of politicians that once supported flying the flag have now changed their mind.
A number of online commentators and folks on Twitter have responded to this with a lot of vehemence arguing in effect that people like Governor Nikki Haley don’t deserve praise for changing their minds on this issue at this late date. As Brian Beutler put it in The New Republic:
Haley’s change of heart wasn’t the result of a moral epiphany, or even really an admission that the people who’ve been seeking the flag’s removal for years were right all along.
It was undertaken largely as an act of damage control on behalf of Republican presidential primary candidates who were so frozen in terror at the thought of risking South Carolina’s pro-Confederacy vote that they couldn’t articulate whether they believed the flag should come down or not.
Personally I think this is totally wrong, and makes for bad politics. These sorts of late state conversions are precisely how political and social change tend to work, especially for liberal causes.
Just take the advance of marriage equality over the last few decades. It went from being considered a radical fringe position early on, to something that liberals started to support but felt was too unpopular to fully get behind, to something most Americans now support. Throughout that process a lot of people who once opposed marriage equality changed there mind and went over to the equality camp. If they had been met with scorn for having once supported something else the whole process probably would have taken a lot longer.
Matt Yglesias summed his up pretty well in his great newsletter the other day:
I say snark all you want, but recognize that this is how political change happens. Ideas capture the center and mainstream people hop on the bandwagon. South Carolina is a conservative state. Anything that happens there will happen by longtime conservative politicians changing their position. You don’t need to love this aspect of reality, but you should recognize it. Meanwhile, Jefferson Davis Highway still runs through northern Virginia.
If you want to do politics in a nation of over 300 million people, or a state of 4.8 million for that matter, you have to work in coalitions. And not a whole lot of people want to join a coalition that will still criticize you for your past sins even after you’ve seen the light and changed your mind.
The people that want to see the Confederate battle flag taken out of the public sphere and consigned to museums and history books should celebrate Governor Haley’s late conversion. This is precisely how change happens.
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Photo by Gerry Broome/AP