Democrats shouldn’t fear fight over Confederate monuments

Last Tuesday Donald Trump said that some of the people marching with neo-Nazis were “very fine people.” By Thursday, Trump shifted to talking more about monuments to the Confederacy—and so did many Democrats. And that drove a whole lot of people nuts, including several Republican anti-Trumpers who I think were quite sincere about it. Why, they wanted to know, were Democrats accommodating Trump’s preference for focusing on something that a majority of the nation supports when only a very tiny fringe is with Trump’s insistence on treating Nazis and their opponents as equals?
I understand their frustration, but the anti-monument Democrats have a better sense of the practical politics of the moment. (The question of whether removing Confederate monuments is either correct or important is a separate one that I’ll return to below.) On the one hand, Democrats could, let’s say, unite more fully with all opponents of Nazis and other extremist hate groups and against Trump. But to what purpose? No matter how awful, Trump’s comments will inevitably fade from the headlines—just as his misogynistic and bigoted remarks during the campaign did. With first-rate messaging and activist coordination, perhaps a few more weak Trump supporters could be peeled off, pulling down his approval numbers a few more percentage points. Then again: perhaps not. Is anyone in the 38 percent of Americans or so who currently approve of Trump’s performance as president persuadable on this particular point? Either way, a month from now this episode will be ancient history and there’s not very much anyone can do about it.
And at the same time, it’s not as if Democrats can wave a magic wand and prevent Trump from talking about statues of Confederate “heroes” and other memorials even if they wanted to. Even unpopular presidents retain some agenda-setting abilities, after all, and it’s not as if the question of monuments was entirely irrelevant to the events in Charlottesville or wasn’t already part of a continuing debate in many cities and states. Democrats could choose not to engage, of course, but they can’t make the question entirely disappear.
Timing, also, is everything. Perhaps I’d reach a different conclusion if this were August 2018, or especially late October 2018. But we’re 15 months away from the midterms. Sure, presidential popularity matters in the interim, but short-term fluctuations aren’t as important. Anti-monument Democrats are giving up very little by attempting to use this flare-up as an opportunity to win on the issue.
What of the polls that show their position is unpopular? Don’t they mean that a high-profile fight over Robert E. Lee would wind up empowering Trump?
I doubt that very much. Anyone who cares strongly about Robert E. Lee statues and Jefferson Davis Highways—on either side—is already almost certainly a strong supporter or opponent of Trump.
Most people don’t have strong feelings about Confederate monuments. In the short term, in fact, it’s probably just as likely that associating the Confederacy with an unpopular president could hurt the popularity of the monuments as the possibility that Trump would benefit from the issue.
Meanwhile, for those who do believe monument removal is important, the national attention amounts to a second opportunity (after the Charleston shooting in 2015) to take action—action which is already happening. It’s hard to tell those activists to pass on the chance for action in return for some vague possibility of future electoral benefits. And it’s unclear they’d listen to such pleas.

—Bloomberg