Conservatives have an investment in history, because that’s where our truth lies. It may be good, it may be bad, but it’s real.
Most of the so-called “Confederate” monuments are pretty innocuous commemorations of the Southern dead (remember, the Civil War was fought entirely in the South), and even the later ones from the 1920s result from the fact that, during Reconstruction, families were not even allowed to commemorate their dead. The lost cause? Yes, but they admit it was lost, and even if they were racists, the monuments are mostly innocuous.
Build on this moment. The reason President Eisenhower in 1951 permitted the VA to provide markers for members of the CSA is that he wanted reconciliation.
Nobody - black or white - gains a thing by having a monument taken down. And of course, the net has widened, so virtually anybody who ever lived prior to 1980 or so is guilty of some infraction and must be erased. Naturally, including the founders of our country...the most evil place in the world, apparently, where black and non-white people have the highest standard of living in the world.
But it is imperative on all of us that we maintain our collective real history, good or bad, and I think this is the job of conservatives.
Very much like the "dough boy" statues of WWI soldiers who died overseas. There's one of them on a small village green in Picton, Ontario, Canada inscribed with the names of the boys from the area who died, one of which is my great-uncle who was killed in France two months before the Armistice. Those statues are all over the place.