After Trump's Charlottesville failure, the only choices aren't racism or liberalism

President Trump missed an opportunity to bring the country together around the racially charged issue that most unites us: the unequivocal rejection of obvious hate groups. How then will he, and the wider public, fare when discussing matters where we are much more divided?

We are not off to a good start. Just as Trump said some of the right things in the aftermath of Charlottesville only to undermine them in search of "very fine people" at a white supremacist rally, he has gone on to raise some legitimate issues in the most ham-fisted way possible.

This is unfortunate, because these are important questions. How do we deal with historical figures who were flawed men and women? How do we balance honoring the virtues of our country with recognition of its original sin, racism? How should the public square contend with symbols of our past that divide the American people in the present?

The answers aren't as easy as they first appear. Before Nikki Haley was Trump's ambassador to the United Nations, she was governor of South Carolina. She grappled with the fact a flag flew on state capitol grounds that meant very different things to do different groups of South Carolinians — both of whom paid taxes, sacrificed in our wars and in many cases were descended from people who bled either as Confederate soldiers in the Civil War or as slaves in the antebellum South.

Haley made the decision to take the flag down. While Trump worries that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson will be next, the logic for stopping with symbols of the Confederacy rather than proceeding to those of the Founding Fathers seems sound: we celebrate Washington and Jefferson in spite of slavery; slavery was an important part of why Confederate generals fought in the first place.