What America thinks of all that

Dreher: Trump Is More In Touch Than You Think

Looking at issues related to race and the Confederate monuments, the numbers are way to the right of, say, MSNBC.

• A strong majority (62 percent) of Americans favor leaving the Confederate statues standing as historical markers
• Overwhelming numbers of Republicans (86 percent) favor this, as do 61 percent of Independents
• The only group with a majority favoring removal (57 percent) are “Strong Democrats” — as opposed to “Soft Democrats,” who slightly favor keeping them (52 percent)
• When defined by political ideology, only Liberal/Very Liberal people muster a majority for taking statues down (57 percent). Among self-described Moderates, 67 percent favor leaving the statues standing. A whopping 81 percent of Conservative/Very Conservative people favor the statues staying in place
• Unsurprisingly, the Northeast is the region of the country most in favor of removing the statues — but even there, a majority (53 percent) backs leaving the statues standing
• Here’s a stunner: 44 percent of African-Americans polled believe in keeping the statues standing. Of Latinos, 65 percent believe the statues should remain
• Comfortable majorities — no less than 60 percent — in each age cohort support the statues
• This is barely an issue with white Evangelicals, 85 percent of whom back the statues. Only nine percent favor removal, with the rest unsure

And there's more.

Including some conclusions.

The news media have been seriously distorting public reaction to Trump’s handling of Charlottesville.

Whether this is a matter of only seeing what they want to see, or a matter of the talking heads being concentrated among coastal elites of both parties, is a matter of conjecture. 

True, a slight majority of Americans think Trump didn’t go far enough, but judging from the coverage and commentary, you would have thought at Charlottesville, Trump met his Waterloo. 

It didn’t happen. 

Charlottesville is not nearly a big a deal to Americans as it is to the media and coastal elites.

That seems a bit spurious.

To the extent that they editorialize - and nowadays they do that a whole lot - the media are not attempting to report but to mold public opinion.

As was surely obvious from the polarization of the media on this point, with CNN and MSNBC going with the liberal establishment while Fox and Breitbart went with talk radio and the alt.right.

And that, as it happens, made the latter coincidentally but not intentionally (though no doubt gladly) more reflective of American opinion as a whole.

Still, Dreher is right that white liberals and pretty much all white supporters of Democrats who think the monuments to the Confederacy ought to come down are unable or unwilling to answer black extremists, though they do not agree with them and are very uncomfortable with the apparent racism of their views.

That is, the views of those blacks who seem to support our republican form of government but refuse to allow honor to the whites who created it - Washington, Jefferson and so on - because of what those same whites did to their ancestors - or, anyway, people the same color as their ancestors.

(They do not notably resent the blacks of Africa whose ancestors captured and sold theirs into slavery, or those black ancestors themselves.

They may know but they don't care that pretty much everyone in the world had slaves when American whites had slaves, and that American and other whites have done more to end slavery all over the world than anyone else.)

Like whites who identify with those who committed the wrongs of the past and are unfortunately moved to celebrate them to defend their self-respect, these blacks identify with the victims and resent those wrongs as if they themselves bore the stripes of the lash, hating the very sight of those who committed them.

In the West, there are similar people who want to renew the Indian Wars, at least rhetorically.

We will hear from them.

Russians and other Europeans seem to have no problems like these with their histories of serfdom, every bit as recent as our history of slavery, or only a little less.

(Though the Tsar Liberator might face differing judgements on his reign from Russians, Poles, and Turkmen.)

Well, the serfs and their owners were the same color, and their descendants cannot be recognized as such on sight.

Lucky Europeans!