Stewart is Stereotyping Southerners

A candidate for public office wrapping themselves in the flag is a time honored tradition in American politics.  A candidate for public office wrapping themselves in the Confederate flag?  Well, that’s something different.

Leaving aside the debate over “heritage not hate,” (we already did that here at Bearing Drift, both pro and con) and looking at this from a purely political perspective, it’s hard to understand Corey Stewart’s choice of the Confederate flag as a key campaign issue.  An objective, outside observer to his campaign would think the most pressing problem facing the Commonwealth of Virginia today is the status of monuments and memorials to our Civil War icons.  Alongside his calls for stricter immigration laws, it is one of the few issues Stewart has spent significant time on.  Yet for many Virginians, since 2010 a majority of whom aren’t native born Virginians and can’t trace their ancestries back as far as someone like Shaun Kenney or I can, this issue just doesn’t resonate.  So why is it fast becoming the centerpiece of Corey Stewart’s campaign?

The answer is relatively simple, and it’s one that has appealed to demagogues throughout the ages – it pushes people’s buttons.  Few issues are as politically charged as the status of the Confederate flag in our national life, and this one issue hits every button that the Stewart campaign has been mashing for the last six months.  The siren call of the Confederate flag issue is hard to ignore – you’ve got a potent symbol tied to Virginia history.  It’s got tinges of racist overtones, but there’s enough room for a legitimate argument that the symbol itself isn’t racist, allowing you to play the victim when you’re accused of being racist yourself.  It’s got an appeal to a select group of people who care passionately about it, and who are desperately trying to find some kind of a public champion to rally behind.  Arguably, in what is likely to be a typical low-turnout primary, this is not an unsound strategy – find a group of one-issue voters and become their champion.

Yet like the call of the Sirens in the Odyssey, it ends with your ship smashed to pieces on the rocks and you and your crew dead.  Whatever the short-term political advantage may be, the Confederate flag issue is not a long-term viable winning strategy these days.  In most of the vote rich areas of Virginia – Northern Virginia, the Richmond area and Virginia Beach – this issue not only doesn’t resonate, it will cost you votes.  Stewart is banking that the appeal of the flag will play well in rural areas of the Commonwealth, areas that a Northern Virginian politician would normally not expect to carry.  And with two Northern Virginians and a Virginia Beach native on the ballot, rural Virginia is looking for a candidate to represent them in this primary, and Stewart thinks by waving a rebel flag at his rallies, he can tap into that base of support.

It’s pandering, at its worst.

Corey Stewart’s wrapping himself in the Confederate flag is, at its core, an insult to rural Virginians.  It is, essentially, treating Virginians the way your typical Yankee views us – as racist rednecks pining for the good old days of slavery and Jim Crow, when there was somebody lower down on the social ladder than all us poor white trash.  Instead of talking about issues that matter to those in rural areas – jobs, the opioid and meth crises, education, access to broadband and the like – Stewart is banking on playing on emotions, not reason.  It’s exactly the kind of attitude you’re apt to find in Northern Virginia from folks who “aren’t from around here.”  It’s exactly the kind of absurd stereotype you’d expect from a Minnesotan who graduated from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, went to law school in Minnesota, and moved to Virginia because it’s “cosmopolitan” and more conservative than Maryland.  It’s exactly the kind of thing that you’d expect from somebody who is worried about being perceived as being part of the “not from around here” crowd and is desperately trying to avoid having that argument made against him.

Regardless of your views on the Confederate flag, there is one thing that all political observers should be able to agree upon – Stewart’s embrace of the Confederate flag has made it more difficult for him to win a general election.  In a state that went for Hillary Clinton by 200,000 votes, one with a black population of almost 20%, making such a bitterly divisive symbol the cause célèbre of your campaign is a losing proposition.  Stewart apparently expects to win the GOP nomination playing this card before suddenly reinventing himself into an acceptable statewide general election candidate.  That kind of etch-a-sketch style politics doesn’t work anymore, if it ever did.  Despite the protestation that the flag is a symbol of history and heritage, for many Virginia voters – of all races – that flag is viewed a symbol of hate, and they have no qualms about punishing those who use it.  They also have no qualms about punishing those guilty by association, and it’s likely every Republican statewide candidate will be tarred with that brush.

In a campaign that has been more about personalities than policy, the focus on the Confederate flag has been both unfortunate and unnecessary.  It will likely cause longer term damage to the party and our candidates than is obvious right now.

Let’s hope that the voters in November will forgive us for it.

 

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