A demonstrator holds a gun during a rally organized by The Virginia Citizens Defense League on Capitol Square near the state capitol building on January 20, 2020 in Richmond, Virginia.
Why Virginia gun-rights rally didn't end like Charlottesville
18:53 - Source: CNN

Editor’s Note: Nicole Hemmer is an associate research scholar at Columbia University with the Obama Presidency Oral History project and the author of “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.” She hosts the history podcast “Past Present” and created the podcast “A12.” The views expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author. View more opinion articles on CNN.

CNN  — 

The Virginia legislature voted last week to do away with Lee-Jackson Day, a 130-year-old state holiday named after two Confederate generals, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. The Democrat-dominated legislature also voted to give Virginians a day off on Election Day, a decision that both celebrates the right to vote and gives more people time to do so.

Nicole Hemmer

These moves represent one part of a broad progressive agenda that Virginia Democrats, who control the state legislature and the governor’s seat, have pledged to pursue. They have voted to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, institute new gun regulations, and protect LGBTQ people from discrimination. The backlash from conservative Virginians has involved an armed march on the state capitol, and even schemes for counties to secede from the state.

West Virginia is advancing two bills to bring over Virginia counties; Virginia lawmakers have dismissed them, and since the transfer would require consent of the Virginia legislature, it’s being described as everything from “a remote possibility” to “preposterous.”

These so-called “Vexit” efforts may seem hyperbolic at first glance, 160 years after West Virginia seceded from Virginia, but these more recent attempts to move counties from one state to another – where they might be more ideologically aligned – reflect a broader story about Virginia and its role in America’s shifting political identity.

Which is why the decision to scrap Jackson-Lee Day is so fitting. The holiday, first marked in 1889, was part of a century-long effort to remake both men into champions of states’ rights and freedom, rather than traitors who led a rebellion against the United States in order to preserve slavery. As Democrats move to promote democracy and secure equal rights, they are also revealing the lie behind the politics of states’ rights: it’s not about principle, but power.

States’ rights politics has been a powerful force in American history from the start of the republic. But in the fight over slavery and then Reconstruction, states’ rights became a rallying cry for white Southerners seeking to thwart a federal government newly interested in protecting the rights of black people.

During the 1940s and 1950s, as the black freedom struggle began winning support from the Democratic Party and, increasingly, the federal government, states’ rights rhetoric flourished in states like Virginia. The anodyne language of states’ rights slowly replaced overt calls for white rule, parading around as a benign political principle rather than a racist power grab.

What is so clarifying about the current moment is that the state now has a progressive government, and those who once flew the flag of states’ rights are searching for alternate ways to secure their power. In Virginia, for all the talk of local control, the state has long forbidden local governments from making decisions on things like, say, removal of Confederate statues.

Nor is Virginia the only southern state that restricts local government from acting. Five years ago in North Carolina, the Republican-led government restricted the right of localities to pass laws allowing transgender people to use the restroom corresponding to their gender, as well as laws raising the minimum wage.

Conservatives have also cheered on efforts by the federal government to override state laws. Last September, the Trump administration revoked California’s right to set emission standards stricter than the national standards. And just this week the administration instigated new legal battles to prevent states from implementing sanctuary policies, in an effort to force them to work with federal immigration authorities.

All of this is part of a national narrative. The right used to assert a set of principles to explain its politics – explanations that have been abandoned in the past few years. To wit, Republicans used to tout the GOP as the party of small government, fiscal responsibility, and family values. They happily traded those values for power, as the party’s unshakable support for Donald Trump shows. In the process, they revealed that those principles were only ever held for political purposes.

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    Virginia politics are American politics in miniature. The progressive government is passing popular programs opposed by a minority of Virginians – a minority that, having lost recent elections, is looking for any other way to continue to wield power.

    For now, though, they have little recourse. Under united Democratic control, Virginia will continue to implement new legislation that not only works to increase equality and opportunity in the state, but also dismantles the markers of white-power politics in the state, a dismantling that is long overdue.