Conservatives finally agree that the Confederate flag is horribly racist. What's next?

In the wake of the Charleston shooting, a very strange thing has happened: positive change. It started as a chorus of liberals demanding for the zillionth time that the Confederate battle flag flying on the statehouse grounds in South Carolina be taken down, then became a sudden conservative sprint away from Confederate paraphernalia of any kind.

The scramble began with South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, seemingly the only Republican politician with any guts, who demanded that the flag be removed and even threatened to keep the legislature in session until it did. That broke the dam, and almost every nationally prominent Republican promptly called for its removal. They are even demanding that it be taken off the state flag in Mississippi.

It's a jarring political development. Liberals have been ineffectually grousing about that rotten flag since it went up half a century ago as a big middle finger to the Civil Rights Movement. Now total victory is here — and in a way that throws a big wrench in conservatives' revisionist history of the civil rights era.

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Just why elite conservatives gave up on the flag is an interesting question. Ta-Nehisi Coates, probably the nation's most respected writer on race, was right out of the gate with an eloquent case for the flag's removal, as well as incontrovertible proof that the Confederacy was founded on chattel slavery. He surely deserves some credit for setting the media's sights on this particular symbol of racial hatred. The fact that the victims and their families were extraordinarily sympathetic likely also played a role in galvanizing politicians to action. And as Josh Marshall notes, there could be a generational effect as well. Most of the die-hard conservative segregationists of the civil rights days are dead or out of power. The new generation seemed to be asking itself, "Wait, why do we have this thing?" — and coming up short.

The online history of the suspected killer Dylann Roof, however, likely played a more significant part. As photos emerged of him boasting Confederate plates on his car and holding the flag (not to mention burning the U.S. one), it became dramatically harder to argue that the flag is "just about heritage." Roof's reported desire to spark a race war thus backfired, since conservatives were forced to admit that the flag is and always has been the symbol of white supremacy.

It now seems just a matter of time before most Confederate apologia is expunged from government buildings in the South. Good news! Maybe next we can get an official Reconstruction memorial.

(The eager corporations jumping on the anti-Confederate bandwagon strike me as more cynical and more troubling. Will Amazon — where you can still buy a swastika-emblazoned pocketknife — now police all its sales for unapproved ideology?)

Unfortunately, there has been markedly less progress on the historiography front. For several years now, the blowhards on Fox News and talk radio and writers like Kevin Williamson have been engaged in a hilariously fumble-fingered attempt to paint today's Democrats as The Real Racists, and today's Republicans as consistent devotees of civil rights. The fact that over 90 percent of African-Americans vote Democratic is the result of devious racist trickery from Lyndon Johnson (i.e., he signed into law the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Act).

The mass backpedaling from Confederate imagery raises some serious difficulties for this goofy account. Republicans, outside of a few majority-black districts here and there, have had a near-total lock on southern political office since about the mid-1980s. If the new consensus is that the symbols of the Confederacy are actually the slogans of racist terrorism, what were these supposed civil rights paragons doing leaving them plastered on half the government buildings across the South?

Williamson hasn't gotten around to this question yet, instead stringing together a bunch of disconnected gripes in a post about how "peak Leftism" has everyone running scared. But the reality is that this is a change driven almost entirely by conservatives. And that, in turn, might be a sign that they are finally ready to start dealing with the persistent scars of a racist past. Only time will tell.