My thoughts on movement strategy, politics, and the fight ahead.
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A statue of Christopher Columbus was recently reinstalled in front of the White House. That Columbus never set foot on the land that became the United States is besides the point. The statue isn't really about Columbus the man (or Italian Americans as a group). When the Right in America puts up a monument, be it this one or Confederate generals outside courthouses, it's a deliberate act that goes beyond decoration and celebration. They're breaking and remaking boundaries. They're shifting the norms of what's acceptable and granting themselves permission to do more—and worse. They're redefining the public interest—and who qualifies as being part of the American public.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, always remarkably insightful and willing to call a thing what it is, recently connected the Columbus reinstallation to the period after Reconstruction when white conservatives erected Confederate monuments across the South to declare that the old racial order was being restored. Symbols matter for creating compelling narratives, of course. But this is about more than that. It's about how the act of erecting a statue demonstrates the relationship between symbols and the rules.
Sometimes a monument breaks ground; it's the shovel in the dirt, the thing that opens up space for what gets built next. Sometimes a monument celebrates what's been built: it's the ribbon-cutting ceremony for new rules that have already been written, a victory lap on policies won. And sometimes it plays an interim role, part of a construction process that's still underway.
The replica Columbus statue placement is clearly a celebration of how much MAGA achieved following Trump's anti-history and anti-DEI executive orders. It's also a ground-breaking for what comes next in their strategy: a symbol that serves as a tool for their supporters to rationalize and normalize the policy changes they are making.
What I'd call this is a dialectic between monuments to vision and monuments to results. The former represents a dream, a demand, what a given constituency of people wants. It helps organize them. The latter is a reward for what those people achieved together, or enabled their leaders to achieve for them. The Right understands both uses of symbols, and they move fluidly between them. A monument goes up, and behind it or alongside it or before it comes legislation, court appointments, executive orders, institutional pressure.
And as effective strategy often does, this all comes back to infrastructure. There's an entire infrastructure of meaning-making at work. By that I mean — there are systems, structures, staffing, and funding that create both communicative signals and deeply meaningful significance out of these symbols, making them useful tools. Just think about the discipline required to keep a symbol resonant. It requires the discipline and resources to color within the lines repeatedly so that it carries consistent meaning across years. The Right invests in that work and they connect it to the policy infrastructure that, in whichever direction, turns cultural permission into written rules.
I'm incredibly proud of the work that I and others did to take down confederate monuments. Those monuments were active instruments of a political project designed to determine who was part of the “public” that public space had been built for, and taking them down was as powerful as putting them up had been. We weren't just removing the cultural power they projected, we were establishing a cultural power of our own. Removing them changed what felt normal in those spaces.
Symbols shape what people believe is possible and what they're willing to accept. When institutions like the Mellon Foundation invest in placing new kinds of art and installations in public spaces—work by artists like Hank Willis Thomas, Simone Leigh, and Lauren Halsey—I'd argue that's more than just art. It's political in a similar way as a campaign, a contest over what our shared spaces communicate about our shared values.
But too often, there was a sense that removing the symbol was the conclusion of the fight rather than a stage of it. We didn't always build the infrastructure needed to change the written and unwritten rules that actually govern people's lives. We won the visible battle and moved on. But the other side didn't move on. They never do.
When we treat symbols as destinations — and when the rules underneath don't change — the forces that put those monuments up in the first place regroup. That's what we're watching happen every day now.
We do the meaning-making well on our side. But we don't always connect it to the equally powerful work of building monuments to results. The cultural momentum and sense of possibility that symbols generate has to be channeled into sustained, organized pressure that changes the rules.
As we head into an election cycle where people will be waving flags, wearing symbols, showing up to express what they believe in, we have to be clear about what it takes to convert visible energy into structural change.
Every statue we pulled down can be replaced if the rules don't change. Every monument they put up can be followed by legislation if we don't have the capacity to stop it. The Right treats every symbol as part of a larger campaign. We need to do the same, understanding our symbolic wins as openings for deeper, more durable work. The work of changing the rules and building the kind of power that holds even when no one is watching.
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