Analysis

With The Left Attacking Confederate Museums, It’s Worth Asking What Comes Next?

ANALYSIS
Virginia Gov. Northam Announces Removal Of Confederate Statues

(Photo by Zach Gibson/Getty Images)

Gage Klipper Commentary & Analysis Writer
Font Size:

The left has a new, but familiar, target in its crosshairs: Confederate museums and their associated charity organizations. It’s tempting to sigh, and think “What’s the big deal?” — especially if you’re a Yankee like me. But we can’t afford to forget the lessons of post-George Floyd America: this is just the beginning.

First, they came for the Confederate statues and monuments. Dotted across towns and cities throughout the South, these monuments reflected the region’s history and were originally permitted by a magnanimous North making a good-faith effort at Reconstruction. As Donald Trump came on the scene, the left made the spiteful removal of these statues its cause célèbre, reductively interpreting them as a simple glorification of racism in the present. In a proud collection of scalps, the Washington Post documents 140 statues removed since 2015 — a “record number.”

Often, those statues fell into the curation of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), a long-standing organization that preserves Southern artwork, sculptures, and the complicated history of the Civil War. Memorial museums built on the historic estates of Confederate generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are the public-facing portion of the UDC’s portfolio.

While its name admittedly sounds fiery, today the group mostly funds scholarships, veterans groups, and other charitable works, as even the Washington Post had to admit. However, the group is now in the crosshairs of Virginia Democrats, who introduced a bill to strip the UDC of its tax-exempt status, which could cripple the group and bring everything under its curation into the hands of the activist-left, or even shutter its exhibits all together. The bill passed in both State Houses, with some bipartisan support from Republicans, and now heads to Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s desk. If he signs it into law, then we could begin our descent down yet another slippery slope. (RELATED: ROOKE: Virginia Has A Problem Only Governor Glenn Youngkin Can Fix)

When Confederate statues first started coming down, there was ambivalence even among conservatives. The nationalist argument for removal posits that “secession was a traitorous act,” so the “South’s leaders don’t deserve to be given a place of honor.” As such, “conservatives should feel no investment in confederate monuments,” National Review argued in 2020. Besides, the optics of being seen as defending the Confederacy became a landmine for Republican politicians in the moral panic following George Floyd’s death. Americans largely shrugged.

However, some warned that Confederates were only the beginning — they’d come for the Founders next. To this, the corporate media reacted with scorn and ridicule — of course this wouldn’t happen… until it did. In the post-George Floyd haze, historic statues of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Teddy Roosevelt and dozens of Christopher Columbus have been removed — or violently torn down — from public land. The museums on the Founders’ historic estates — Jefferson’s Monticello, Madison’s Montpelier, Washington’s Mount Vernon — have all been “re-imagined,” centering their role in slavery. It’s now common for schools in progressive districts to have public struggle sessions about changing their “offensive” names.

Now that they are starting once again to go after not just statues, but Confederate museums, it’s worth considering if history is about to repeat itself. Are they coming next for New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and D.C.’s National Gallery? The left has been in control of fine art museums for quite some time. Walk through either of these galleries, and you’d be hard pressed to find an exhibit that doesn’t come with some qualifier relaying the artist’s sins to “modern audiences.” Presumably, the same could be done to any Confederate museum, transforming complex history into a lesson on the West’s legacy of sin.

However, any line drawn between Confederate estates and more traditional museums would be completely arbitrary. The classical artwork housed in America’s repositories of high culture reflects millennia of sin against progressive orthodoxy: imperialism, colonialism, racism, sexism, Christian zealotry. Should the slave-owning Greeks be celebrated? Should we condone the Dutch masters’ habit of painting minstrel-esque caricatures? Jackson Pollock was a “misogynist” after all. (RELATED: Biden’s Latest Statue Removal Is The Most Absurd One Yet)

Yet it’s highly unlikely they will go after fine art as they eventually went after the Founders. They won’t pull down Rembrandts just to “own the cons” — even if their own ideology suggests they should. To the left, glorification of the Founders represents a type of low culture for the unenlightened — a mythological propaganda consciously built into American life to placate the masses. The jingoist rube has no appreciation for the finer aspects of culture, so he finds meaning in a shallow American patriotism. The left relishes in tearing down this patriotism, a symbol of unsophisticated backwardness.

Fine art stands apart because it is imbued with the status of high culture — which the left covets, even if it won’t admit it. The woke zealot’s disdain for low culture is complimented by his belief that he is culturally superior to the average man. His enlightenment is the basis of his entire worldview — his right to lord over others — while his preferences, namely Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, are really just a movement to re-orient perceived hierarchies toward his favored groups. He might derisively call fine art bourgeois, and claim to be “reimagining” classic museums for egalitarian purposes — but deep down, he derives a profound satisfaction in appointing himself the arbiter of high culture. It reinforces his patina of enlightenment and sophistication, which he uses as a cudgel against his enemies.

Additionally, he is at core a parasite of the regime he claims to detest. The creative left — the academics, curators, historians and artists who actually operate these museums — exist only by the mercy of an elite donor class that actually funds these museum endowments. They will conform to the fad sensitivity disclaimers, but they won’t actively attempt to bite the hand that feeds them.

So the slippery slope to the repudiation of great art is unlikely to be all that steep,  if for no other reasons than the left’s hypocrisy and vanity. Rather, the left’s assault on the UDC is more likely to result in a slippery slope of tactics. If Youngkin can be bullied into signing this legislation, then the left will smell blood in the water: it will be open season on the tax-exempt status of heretical groups around the country.