Roy Cooper has called for the removal of Confederate monuments on North Carolina state property.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper says Confederate monuments “should come down” and wants the legislature to repeal a law preventing state and local governments from removing them permanently and limiting their relocation.

In a message posted Tuesday on the website Medium, Cooper said North Carolina “cannot continue to glorify a war against the United States of America fought in the defense of slavery.”

This is worth a bit of discussion.  Before the war between the states, the understanding that it was a war “against the United States of America” presupposes the outcome of the war.  Or in other words, membership is said states was seen as the right of association, and secession was seen as the exercise of that right.

Furthermore, no one I know who really understands the war between the states thinks that it was fought over slavery.  In order to understand the thinking at the time, one must understand that slavery was on its way out, would not have lasted, and was effectively obsolete given industrialization.

My now-deceased professor, Dr. C. Gregg Singer, could quote sermons from R. L. Dabney and James Henley Thornwell virtually from memory, as well as many lesser known pastors in the South.  None of the discussions at the time had to do with preserving slavery, but they all pointed to whether the states could allow a centralized government to dictate to them much of anything seen as rightfully under the control of the states.

The notion that the war between the states was fought “in defense of slavery” is nothing more than virtue-signaling by Cooper, or else he is an idiot.  Reverence to confederate monuments has to do with a philosophy of decentralized government, not slavery, smaller government, not more control, reverence for time-honored institutions, and liberty from a quarrelsome, meddlesome government and ruling class.

Roy Cooper’s project in North Carolina won’t be the last you see of this.  Stone Mountain is next, and then CNN has an entire list of monuments they think need to come down, essentially all of them.  This is a war against what America was, and what the progressives want it to become, with the skirmishes (and ultimately the larger battles to come) being so much the better because it justifies more state control for the purpose of safety, security and stability.  You can see law enforcement in the role of national stability operations as we speak, and even aiding and assisting the transition.  The police will never say there isn’t a need for greater stability.

Now, enter the fake-conservative Rich Lowry, at National Review.

… his statue is now associated with a campaign of racist violence against the picturesque town where Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia. The statue of Lee was already slated for removal by the city, but the Battle of Charlottesville should be an inflection point in the broader debate over Confederate statuary.

The monuments should go. Some of them simply should be trashed; others transmitted to museums, battlefields, and cemeteries. The heroism and losses of Confederate soldiers should be commemorated, but not in everyday public spaces where the monuments are flashpoints in poisonous racial contention, with white nationalists often mustering in their defense.

[ … ]

For supporters of the Confederate monuments, removing them from parks and avenues will be a blow against their heritage and historical memory. But the statues have often been part of an effort to whitewash the Confederacy. And it’s one thing for a statue to be merely a resting place for pigeons; it’s another for it to be a fighting cause for neo-Nazis.

I have nothing to do with neo-Nazis, and my knowledge of the culture of the South, the lead up to the war between the states, and how my brethren in the South see their station in life now far surpasses anything Lowry could muster.  He’s just virtue-signaling as well, just like Cooper.  The good news for him is that this seals his place in the Cocktail parties in the beltway.  He can continue to drink with his progressive buddies in peace and respect.

The bracing news for the rest of us is that this battle is coming our way, and no one has the stomach to tell the truth about things, certainly not the fake conservatives inside the beltway or in Northeast.  Monuments are just that, symbols.  They are important symbols to be sure, but in the end they are still just symbols.  What’s significant is that they represent the first fruits of the war against Southern and conservative culture.  The progressives won’t stop with symbols.