Earlier this morning, the South Carolina House of Representatives followed the state senate and voted overwhelmingly to take down the Confederate battle flag from its spot on the capitol grounds, where it flies next to a Confederate memorial. Governor Haley has indicated that she’ll sign the bill at 4:00 p.m. today, and the flag itself will come down on 10:00 a.m. tomorrow. I’ve made my position on displays of the Confederate flag (whether it’s the flag of the Army of Northern Virginia or one of the iterations of the national flag of the Confederate States of America) abundantly clear:

Flying it as a symbol of white racial supremacy is undeniably vile, and any official use of the flag for that purpose should end, immediately. Flying it over monuments to Confederate war dead is simply history. States should no more remove a Confederate battle flag from a Confederate memorial than they should chisel away the words on the granite or bulldoze the memorials themselves.

If the people of South Carolina, through their elected representatives, have determined that the flag on capitol grounds is tainted by its particular history — as the legacy of a Democratic governor’s defiant stand against civil rights and desegregation — then I have no problem with its removal. If the goal, however, is to cleanse our historic public spaces of symbols of the Confederacy — no matter their enduring significance (for good and ill) – then we are doing little more than rendering our nation more ignorant in response to a short-lived, unrepresentative, social media shame cycle. At this point, the “movement” (such as it is) has moved well beyond any good faith response to the Charleston shooting and has now entered the phase I described in my original piece on the flag:

There’s a disturbing habit on the Left of trying to find the position that renders one especially virtuous in their identity politics culture — regardless of its real-world impact — and then sneering from that high ground at all who dissent.

Where will this end? The flag is down in South Carolina, but a monument to Confederate soldiers remains on capitol grounds — a monument much larger than the flag itself. Other monuments are being vandalized, and even privately-placed flags on Confederate grave sites are now contentious. There are costs to censoring history, and we may not be aware of those costs until it is too late.