This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 24th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

History doesn't need to be on a pedestal.

It's often brutal and ugly, and the participants in those struggles

past are flawed, conflicted people whose motives are rarely pure. In the fight over

what to do with monuments featuring prominent members of the Confederacy, Cato's Walter Olson offers his perspective.

All right, Walter, you got two choices. Leave all the statues up, as is, as markers of history,

or tear them all down as horrible racist white supremacist

ideologues.

Go.

Can we please rethink the dichotomy because this has been the problem over the last week as America has debated this.

We have the end positions used to scare each other basically and it's possible to find people who are in both the end positions.

You know, the vice writer who wanted to tear down Mount Rushmore, the people who believe

that nothing should be touched no matter what we know or have forgotten

about why they were ever put up.

But in fact, nearly all people, including libertarians, should end up somewhere in between

there.

Now, was it the Southern Poverty Law Center put out a chart sort of detailing when these monuments

went up and pegging them to like specific moments in time?

And Phil Magnus on Facebook was saying well these these bursts of putting

up these monuments also coincided with a with a burst of putting up Union monuments because they marked the 50th and 100th

anniversaries of the Civil War.

...