I was looking at Lawrence Auster's site, and found this prescient, pre-Current Year point. Reacting to an American Thinker article [The Civil War is Over. Let the Battle Flag Be, By Steven Simpson, November 24, 2011], written while Nikki Haley was still supporting the Confederate Flag, Auster wrote
I haven’t thought about the issue in a long time. It seems like such a fruitless issue. Sure, Southerners should resist liberal and black attempts to prohibit the battle flag, but if Southerners are just fighting for a symbol of a war 150 years in the past, and not fighting for the survival of our actual society, I can’t get that excited about it. What’s the good of fighting for the battle flag, if they’re going along with liberalism in every other way that counts?However, the writer at AT made a very good point that conservatives never make and I’ve been waiting for someone in the mainstream to make it for many years. If the Confederate battle flag must be banned because it is associated with slavery, then shouldn’t EVERYTHING pertaining to the U.S. during slavery—including the U.S. flag, including any favorable reference to any U.S. president during that period, including the Constitution itself—also be banned? This is the way conservatives need to argue. They need to ask, “What is liberals’ principle? What is the end that liberals seek? What is the point at which liberals will no longer have a grievance against America?” And if they ask that question, the answer will be something like this: “Liberals will only be satisfied when historic America has been eliminated.” [More]
And he was right. For example, as far as I know, every President during the period of slavery has been attacked as racist. Here, from the website African-Americans & the Presidency, is a list of all the Presidents up Abraham Lincoln. Sample headline—William Henry Harrison, who only lived nine days in office before dying of a fever: The Brief Reign of a Pro-Slavery Whig.
Of course, Washington, Jefferson and Andrew Jackson have all come in for a lot of hate recently, but so, as Auster suggested, has the American flag, the United States Constitution, and National Anthem.
