Perhaps because they are Americans too. To many times, people forget that even though they may live in a different part of the country, the opinions, lives and traditions of people in the South are somehow inferior to yours. The left has made everything that defines our nation as racist or a "dog whistle". Michelle Obama alluded to all of this when her husband was running for President. She stated: . . .
In the opinions of many, removing statues is one way that the left is attempting to "change our history". The fact of the matter is, you can't change history but you can try to rewrite it to comport to ones own ideas. Perhaps if more people would have listened to what the left has been telling us they want to do, more people would have realized it and stood up to it before now.
Defense of Confederate memorialization with public funds on public property gets more and more disconnected from reality as time goes on.
Had the Southern secessionists succeeded in breaking away so that slavery could be perpetually enshrined, they could have considered themselves heroic rebels. But they lost, and so they were treasonous. Traitors.
If you rebel, you'd better win, because if you lose, you're a traitor. The American Revolutionists understood this. The Confederate secessionists actually understood this far better than their latter-day admirers and defenders do. They would never have believed that there would be, for example, a memorial to the defeated, defunct Confederacy at Arlington Cemetery, created as a place to bury Union dead. (Yes, I know it was built on R.E. Lee's wife's property.)
Those memorials were put up to enforce notions of white supremacy, put up at times when it seemed like black people were getting a bit uppity and needed some reminding of their status. Needed a few lynchings too, to make the same point. Here we are 155 years after the end of slavery, and black American citizens still have to see monuments to eternal slavery/white supremacy on public property, maintained at public expense. Or serve on military bases named for the same men, in an attempt to appease their descendants and admirers.
They should come down now. Not by mob actions, nor by federal edict (except in cases where the memorials are on federal property) but by the white citizens of the South having the decency to get their governments to remove them. But I see that there was some Confederate memorial in Louisiana heavily damaged by Hurricane Laura not long after the local authorities voted to keep it up, so my faith that enough white Southerners will do the right thing on this anytime soon is dwindling. (I think that most white Southerners are decent folks who have tried hard to put the wrongs of their ancestors behind them and do not want to repeat them. But it seems to me that many of them just have a block on this issue. Those statues have been there so long that they are landmarks that should stay up because of that alone. I feel that way about the church hymns of yesteryear giving way to "praise music" and about old buildings being torn down to put up new ones.)
If Donald Trump really viewed himself as the President of all the people of the United States, he would be leading on this as a way of healing centuries'old wounds. But he only views himself as leader of his tribe, and his tribe includes people who want those statues up for what they are--statements of white supremacy.
And it's not about rewriting history, whatever that means. (White supremacist history is what's being defended.) It's about no longer honoring people for their attempt to perpetuate slavery and white supremacy until the Trumpet sounds. If Lee absolutely must be honored, then honor him for his service in the United States Army during the Mexican War, when he was a genuine hero, not leading a rebel army that killed thousands of loyal citizens of the United States of America. Erect a statue of him as a younger man in his Mexican War uniform.
If these statues Trump wants to protect were going up today, would any decent person support them? I don't think so.
Yes, Obama made some of those appeals to his "tribe" too. They were wrong, and they were bad, but they weren't 1/10 as bad as what Trump has done and is doing and will continue to do. But even if they were worse than Trump's, we can't justify Trump's wrongs by citing Obama's wrongs. That's just "my tribe" vs. "your tribe." That's not patriotism or saving the country from the other side. It's just crap.
Obama could at least do a good simulation of being president of all the people. Trump not only won't make the effort, he works hard to do the opposite.
To reiterate a point I implied above, I despise mobs tearing down statues. I pretty much despise mobs doing anything. Destroying property is behind killing people in the list of things that mobs do that I despise the most, but not far behind.
