The Trump Administration has angered historians and other critics by planning to restore two Confederate statues and a painting of Robert E. Lee to places of prominence. These critics object that honoring Confederates is really celebrating noxious symbols of slavery and white supremacy.

The problems with such memorials go deeper still than that . Such statues also symbolize Southern enslavers’ distinct “rule or ruin” politics. This home-grown tradition is an essential historical precedent—every bit as salient as 20th-century fascism and authoritarianism—for explaining the politics of 2025. President Donald Trump’s defiant revival of Confederate iconography signals, implicitly at least, his affinity for enslavers’ reckless, destructive tactics, as it works to justify his own brand

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