The Fight Over Virginia’s Confederate Monuments

“The central problem of democracy for nine thousand years has been controlling the passions,” he said.

Stewart, who lives in a restored plantation house in northern Virginia, recognized the power of picking up a symbol that liberals had righteously rejected. “Look,” he told me, “I can go up and down Virginia, I can talk pro-life, and every conservative Republican is going to say, ‘Yeah, I’ve heard that, been there, done that. I agree with you, but it doesn’t make you different.’ When I went around Virginia and talked about preserving the historical monuments, and the lunacy of taking them down, that generated the same amount of guttural reaction and concern that the pro-life movement generated forty years ago.” The monuments are “the new social issue of the twenty-first century,” Stewart said. “That’s where the passion is now.”