There are few subjects that ignite more casual, uninformed bigotry and condescension from elites in this nation than Dixie. “Practically the whole region has rejected nearly everything that’s good about this country and has become just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment,” the Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky wrote last year.

How then to explain the tens of thousands of South Carolinians, white and black, marching in unity across the Ravenel Bridge on Sunday night? Did the city bus in decent Northerners?

The Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins glibly asserts that “the Confederate battle flag is an American swastika, the relic of traitors and totalitarians, symbol of a brutal regime, not a republic.”

If it were left to me, I would take the flag down (for the reasons South Carolina governor Nikki Haley laid out Monday). But this kind of cheap moral preening is galling.