Public opinion on the Confederate flag in modern America

While the Con­fed­er­ate flag used to be more accept­ed nation­wide, the major­i­ty of pub­lic opin­ion has shift­ed away from the ban­ner. It can still be seen on patch­es, bumper stick­ers, and thou­sands of oth­er places, but pub­lic (par­tic­u­lar­ly gov­ern­ment-endorsed) dis­plays are becom­ing rarer.

A July 2020 poll by Quin­nip­i­ac Uni­ver­si­ty indi­cates that the flag—and Con­fed­er­ate iconog­ra­phy in general—is falling out of favor across the coun­try. Rel­e­vant data is illus­trat­ed here:

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The opin­ions of col­lege stu­dents are more heav­i­ly anti-Con­fed­er­ate flag. 

“It’s a ter­ri­ble sym­bol,” said Josh Crow, a 21-year-old polit­i­cal sci­ence and eco­nom­ics major at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Con­necti­cut. “Sure, at one point it was a ban­ner that stood for an idea. But that idea was ‘peo­ple should be allowed to own oth­er peo­ple as slaves’. Why you would want to pro­mote that idea is beyond me,” he added.

Crow, who has fam­i­ly in Mis­souri, acknowl­edged that peo­ple from south­ern states have a dif­fer­ent view of the flag than those with north­ern predecessors. 

“I get that some peo­ple had ances­tors who died fight­ing for the Con­fed­er­a­cy. And while I can under­stand the desire to remem­ber them, there are bet­ter ways to do that than fly­ing a racist sym­bol,” Crow said. “Peo­ple say ‘her­itage not hate’, but the her­itage of the Con­fed­er­a­cy and its ban­ners is a her­itage of slav­ery. That’s a her­itage of hate; they’re inseparable.”

UConn his­to­ry pro­fes­sor Mic­ki McElya agrees that there is a cer­tain nos­tal­gia asso­ci­at­ed with the idea of the Confederacy. 

“There’s a rea­son that Gone with the Wind is one of the most pop­u­lar movies of all time,” she said. McElya went on to say that his­to­ri­ans have stud­ied the “roman­tic” impact that the idea of lost caus­es and rebel­lions can have. 

The Lost Cause of the Con­fed­er­a­cy (the Lost Cause for short) is school of thought that believes the cause of the Con­fed­er­ate states dur­ing the Civ­il War was for state’s rights and the preser­va­tion of Amer­i­can val­ues. The Lost Cause has been described as revi­sion­ist, nega­tion­ist, pseu­do-his­tor­i­cal and even a cult.

“One of the things we’re see­ing move through this his­to­ry is val­oriz­ing the flag, and hold­ing the flag up as a kind of white, rebel iden­ti­ty,” McElya said. “I think rebel­lion is a real­ly big part of it for a lot of people.”

McElya went on to talk about how the con­cept of a “vic­to­ri­ous defeat” is also a roman­tic idea that effects how the flag is taken.

“There’s this idea that the south knew they were going to lose,” she said, “but they adhered to their prin­ci­ples so strong­ly and hon­or­ably that they fought any­way. So even in defeat, they won. That sto­ry comes to take huge pur­chase on peo­ple’s imaginations.”

The Con­fed­er­ate flag does get dis­played with reg­u­lar­i­ty at ral­lies across the coun­try, many of which are asso­ci­at­ed with right-wing pol­i­tics. The tra­di­tion­al ban­ner has even been meld­ed togeth­er with oth­er sym­bols of con­ser­vatism, includ­ing the pro-law enforce­ment “thin blue line” flag, the Gads­den “don’t tread on me” flag and images of Don­ald Trump. 

McElya described how some peo­ple and com­pa­nies in the South have tried to shift the nar­ra­tive, even describ­ing a cloth­ing com­pa­ny that remade the Con­fed­er­ate flag with Black Lib­er­a­tion col­ors. “There have been peo­ple who attempt­ed to invest it with new mean­ing… and cleanse it of its his­tor­i­cal ori­gins. But as a his­to­ri­an, I just don’t think you can do that,” she said. 

 

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