We thought he was an amiable dunce, sort of like a guy out of a Budweiser ad. Actually, turns out he’s a preppy Redneck-wanna-be, a type I’ve encountered once or twice in my life and is probably one of the creepiest personality types there is. To be a racist because you were raised in a racist family in the Deep South is one thing, racist by choice is a bit worse. ~Mark Schmitt

Via Ross Douthat

Note that this comes from someone who finds Sam Brownback “frightening” because he is a “theocrat.” This is not a very good source of analysis. Still, I don’t think I’ve ever met a preppy Redneck wanna-be. That would be quite an experience. I have met some preppy Rednecks (and, to be clear, I don’t mean either term pejoratively). In fact, I went to college with a whole slew of them, and talking about racism in relation to these sorts of people is simply stupid. Why is George Allen a racist? Why, he had a Confederate flag back when, of course! Horrors. He’s from northern Virginia–shouldn’t he know better? People from NOVA aren’t supposed to like the Confederacy! If George Allen weren’t a raving war supporter, I might even give him a serious look as a presidential candidate. It is his support for Wilsonian crusades, not his sympathy for his state’s heritage, that will drive this voter away come ’08. But most GOP primary voters don’t have my view of the war, so it is hard to see how Romney, McCain and the rest beat him.

All Bush had to do in South Carolina in 2000 to convince people he was a conservative was say that the battle flag was a state issue and let McCain run to his left; Allen has gone Bush one better by actually having owned a battle flag for many years and apparently has defended it in one way or another. If the press wants to come after him for that, they will unwittingly make him into a hero of white Republican voters, especially Southern ones, sick of being told that they cannot admire, or at least respect, their ancestors and heroes and the causes for which they fought.

Update: Liberal bloggers have remembered that George Allen also appeared in the excellent adaptation of the Jeff Shaara novel, Gods and Generals. That he co-starred with Robert Byrd and Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) does not seem to get mentioned. Also, The New Republic is hot on the trail of the flag non-story! Here is part of its report:

According to his colleagues, classmates, and published reports, Allen has either displayed the flag–on himself, his car, inside his home–or expressed his enthusiastic approval of the emblem from approximately 1967 to 2000.

Half of my classmates at Hampden-Sydney either had (and prominently displayed) or would have been perfectly glad to have a Confederate battle flag, for two very simple reasons: they are practically all Southerners (or strongly sympathetic to the best of Southern culture), and the battle flag is a the Southern flag par excellence. I have one ancestor who fought at Manassas, which ought to be enough reason to have such a flag (and, for the record, I do have one). Many of the Virginians I knew there have more substantial connections to the War than that.

If the French can continue to wave around their blood-stained tricolour, marred with the massacres of peasants (or, as Michael Burleigh even describes it in Earthly Powers, a genocide of the French by the French) and twenty years of bloodshed in Europe, Southerners can certainly take pride in their land’s old flags without batting an eye. If newcomers to the region, like Allen, wish to embrace the customs and history of their adopted home, they should be applauded, not held in suspicion.