Arguments, as Malcolm Muggeridge astutely observed, are never about what they’re about.  As when “You’re never on time anymore” turns out really to mean, “When are you going to quit sitting around and get a real job?”  And so on.

The national argument over Confederate symbols and monuments—assuming you want to call it an argument in preference to verbal assault and bluster—has next-to-nothing to do with the Confederate Battle Flag as dreaded agent of hatred and racial antagonism.  It has next-to-everything to do with inexhaustible resentment on the political and cultural left over a conservative, especially a Southern conservative, refusal to bow and scrape before the left’s current deities.

The left is conspicuously intent on popular—or, when popular fails, executive—ratification of a complex scheme for concentrating power in the media, academic, and political worlds.  Such power is to be employed in redistributing income and raising up new, multicultural elites in place of the old and very white ones who are respectful of tradition, religion, personal initiative, hard work, and freedom.

That wasn’t the way it looked in June, of course, when America, under the coaxing of the media, was coming vociferously unglued over the massacre in a Charleston church.  It seemed at that moment something akin to mass hysteria.  The Confederate Battle Flag—with its bestarred St. Andrew’s Cross against a blood-red field—required not just lowering and banishment; no, it needed trampling on, as a symbol noxious to civilized feeling.

Well, wasn’t it obvious?  Wasn’t it!  Look at that photo: Dylann Roof posed malignantly in front of a license plate with the image of the flag carried into battle by Confederate troops so many decades ago.  How many times were we to hear, in succeeding days and weeks, the catchphrase symbol of hatred?  The flag!  Who could doubt young Roof, with memories of Confederate feats of arms swimming in his brain, had set out in retributive fashion to blast as many innocent descendants of slaves as possible?

The logic employed to connect flag with massacre was wafer-thin.  Young Roof had Confederate stars in his eyes?  “Prove it!” was one obvious retort.  There was no need for proof, apparently, at the drumhead court martial before which elite opinion hauled him.  Guilt by mere association was the verdict.  Down with the flag!  And down it came, not only at the South Carolina capitol, on the urging of Republican Gov. Nikki Haley (the South’s and the country’s second elected Indian-American governor), but on the grounds of the Alabama state capitol and God knows where else.

It helped that all the accused parties—Confederates—were dead and could put up no defense.  There commenced just days after the killing what the New York Times called “an emotional, nationwide movement to strip symbols of the Confederacy from public parks and  buildings, license plates, Internet shopping sites, and retail stores.”  Hillary Clinton proclaimed that the flag “shouldn’t fly anywhere.”  Nancy Pelosi, with characteristic bombast, sought to have Mississippi’s state flag removed from the U.S. Capitol on account of the Battle Flag image in its canton.  Republican House Speaker John Boehner endeavored to get an informal bipartisan group together to talk about what to do about such reminders of the Confederacy as may be found lurking about Capitol Hill.

Everything having to do with the Confederate perspective aroused suspicion.  The University of Texas decided to dislodge a statue of Jefferson Davis from its main mall.  Some savant I read about somewhere suggested that Gone With the Wind go with the wind—somewhere, elsewhere, with its fairy-tale accounts of “a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South.”  Proposals have been floated to rename all schools bearing Confederate handles, such as Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.  Mass nincompoopery is, I suggest, the relevant phrase.

And that was before the Memphis city council voted unanimously to remove the remains of home boy Nathan Bedford Forrest from beneath his equestrian statue in the local Health Science Park.  And do what with the remains, not to mention the statue?  No one could be sure.  That wasn’t the point.  The point was showing righteous contempt for the late Confederacy—its works, its heritage, the whole schmear.  Oh, if the city council could just get its collective hands around Jeff Davis’s neck!

Let us try to think our way through this political-cultural foofaraw.  A lot of the blame can be ascribed to good old human nature and the tendency to get up lynch parties as one way of expressing moral indignation—sentence first, verdict afterward, in the formulation of Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts.

Anger, horror, and indignation over the Charleston massacre were and are, it seems to me, a human duty.  Yet consider the cast of characters in this raucous display—major players in the long-running drama known as Stick It to the Conservatives.

I want to acknowledge that no small number of self-denominated conservatives joined the anti-Battle Flag chorus to one degree or another.  Victor Davis Hanson took the opportunity to censure, in addition to Battle Flag display, the symbols of the left, like La Raza.  Max Boot went off the deep end over the whole matter, with no good word to say about anybody who hung around with Jeff Davis.

Naturally, the apologia arose: This is all about slavery, whose defense was the Confederacy’s whole rationale.  Well, not entirely; there was additionally the matter of local rights, as guaranteed supposedly by the Constitution, and few Confederate foot soldiers in any case were slaveown ers.  There is still a larger point: The war ended precisely 150 years ago.  What purpose, in 2015, is there in refighting it, except—aha!—trying to hang the whole enterprise, like the Ancient Mariner’s albatross, around the neck of the conservative cause?

Yes, much likelier: the Confederacy as stand-in, as surrogate for conservative resistance to the egalitarianizing of the whole United States; for resistance to programs meant to wipe out, through federal action, purely artificial distinctions between black and white, rich and poor, male and female, straight and gay.  It helps naturally that the South predominantly supports conservative policies and viewpoints, and separated, until half a century ago, in occasionally brutal and regularly callous fashion, the blacks and whites who lived there.

Dissing the Confederacy is about much more than paying the South back for the trouble the North went to in freeing the slaves (at a currently estimated cost of 750,000 lives, Northern and Southern).  Dissing the Confederacy is about tightening the already impressive grip of the left on American thought and action.  You discern this in the sheer (whether assumed or not) outrage directed at the dead of the Old South.  No quarter! is the watchword.  Ride ’em down!  Don’t bother inquiring whether Confederates acted on uniform assumptions or whether—save the mark—some might have harbored conscientious reasons for secession and resistance to the Northern agenda; and whether many might have behaved with something like gentlemanly care, before the war and afterward, toward the black population.

The finger of elite liberal opinion points scornfully, balefully at the conservative South, 1861-2015.  The remarkable lack of discernment this attitude displays is not so remarkable when considered as political—or, more accurately, ideological—strategy.

I think it is past time that conservatives began using ideology in its proper sense, not as a synonym for philosophy but as a name for from-the-top eradication of obstacles to a plan in the mind of The One—or The Ones—with all the answers.  “Who, whom?” was Lenin’s pointed query: Who sticks it to whom, tells whom where to get off and when, and then what to do?  The left does it, you bet.  It does so by way of advancing ideology—the “idea” as supreme over all competing considerations, such as historical perspective and the complexity of human arrangements, obligations, duties, etc.  The idea alone counts.

In the present case, what idea?  That should be obvious: the idea that white-European America and its ideals—don’t forget those—are an encumbrance, blocking the new perspectives toward which we rightly aspire.  We need to acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness—in the national, not the personal, sense.  We’re guilty—and remain so, in spite of expiatory measures and the passage of time.

You could call this the Ta-Nehisi Coates School of Thought, reflecting the conviction of that slavishly—excuse me, I meant sedulously—admired writer for The Atlantic that (as Coates says in a new book), “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.”  After all, “the country I know . . . acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery.”  Naturally, the gentleman demands reparations.  Stick it to ’em, baby—stick it to the Man: a moral formulation that reminds one of the 1960’s, when Unreason and Passion ran riot over civilized impulses that found themselves suddenly unfashionable.

Black Power—a 60’s phenomenon—took a holiday in the 70’s, but now seems returned in glory: an adjunct of the newly rambunctious American left and its projects.  If we’re going to take down white heterosexist-colonialist America, what better target to aim at than the dead, fallen Confederacy, its sins ostensibly unatoned for after all these years!  Indeed, they are multiplied by the South’s refusal to see the evil of naming public schools after Robert E. Lee—the venerated, the beloved Marse Robert.  I wouldn’t say we’re back yet, or ever will be, to Black Power’s “Get Whitey” phase.  That could be in part because so many anxious whiteys acquiesce in these varied attempts to humiliate and degrade the late Confederacy.

You find otherwise decent people enlisted in this fundamentally indecent cause as a result of the working out of inner guilt.  Guilt comes easily when commentators in the media and politics tell you guilt is what you should feel over the massacre of innocent African-American Christians in a Christian setting—a church.  And over shootings of blacks by white cops.  And over the numerical predominance of blacks in American prisons and jails.

As the scholar Shelby Steele says in Shame, “In the culture the Left has made the Right into a stand-in for America’s past evils.  And it is hard to fight against a cultural perception so entrenched as to be conventional wisdom.”  The left’s current mission, it would seem, is to shame the country as a whole for dragging its feet in the cause of outlawing doubts as to the superior morality of William Lloyd Garrison.

It works.  I read recently in the Dallas Morning News (founded, I suppose embarrassingly, by a Confederate colonel) a large story concerning the moral turmoil into which a Midland, Texas, high-school classmate of Laura Bush’s has fallen since the Charleston shootings.  Viewing the Confederate Battle Flag on his Lee High School class ring, he feels the pricks of conscience.  He thinks he may just put away the ring, which he hasn’t worn in 50 years anyhow.  He confesses, “We’ve got a collective responsibility here to try to change some things.”

Some things?  Like the learning and earning gaps between whites and blacks?  That would be a good idea, surely.  What has it to do nevertheless with the flag of a defeated army?  Or with the constitutional sensibilities that contributed to the war that brought defeat to that flag?

Nothing, of course.  And, in another sense, everything.  Everything, in that to cram racial guilt down throats eager or at least willing to receive it is to glide past the problem without examination.  To glide past the problem is to ignore remedial measures certainly more effective, and less divisive, than dancing on the graves of dead Confederates.

At the same time, grave-dancing isn’t mere psychological tonic for the dancers; it advances a politico-cultural agenda aimed at ousting from effective power the custodians of customs and truths alleged to undergird Oppression.  It fails to stop even there.  American culture itself becomes available for pillorying as defective, if not out-and-out false.  You know—slavery, segregation, discrimination, cops who don’t think blacks lives matter; the whole George Washington, Andy Jackson, John Wayne imperialist corps.

Whereupon—if I read the game plan rightly—a new necessity arises, one more fundamental than the hauling down and banishment of Confederate Battle Flags.  That necessity is to reinvent America according to the conceptions of the left, to impose on the minds of her people, and on their forms of government, new concepts of justice, freedom, equality, and personal fulfillment.  A new nation for a new day!  New heroes, a new history, new standards by which to measure ourselves.

In such a nation, who needs Robert E. Lee?  Who wants him, for that matter?