The winners don’t always write history. To this day, the neo-Confederate interpretation of the Civil War and its aftermath has significantly shaped how Americans understand their past, as John Kelly’s controversial remarks on Monday show. “I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man,” the White House chief of staff told Laura Ingraham on Fox News. “He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first, back in those days. Now it’s different today. But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.”

These comments are yet another example of the Trump administration’s appeasement of white nationalists; six weeks ago, President Donald Trump blamed “both sides” for the racist protests to preserve a Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia. Yet the view of history Kelly articulated doesn’t originate on the far right; it was the mainstream interpretation that dominated American history, both on an elite and popular level, for much of the twentieth century.

In a press briefing yesterday, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders defended Kelly’s remarks by citing influential figures whose interpretation of the past squares with Kelly’s. “Many historians, including Shelby Foote, in Ken Burns’ famous Civil War documentary, agreed that a failure to compromise was a cause of the Civil War,” Sanders said. “I’m not going to get up here and relitigate the Civil War.” Sanders is right that there’s a school of thought that believes the war could have been avoided with a compromise between the North and South, but this interpretation is generally rejected by most contemporary scholars.

Sanders was disingenuous in saying she doesn’t want to relitigate the Civil War. By citing Foote’s highly controversial position, she is deliberately taking sides. Moreover, the party she belongs to has made re-fighting the Civil War a major plank in their political agenda. President Donald Trump has no reason to take a strong position on Confederate memorials, most of which are on state or municipal property and hence not federal issues; as president, Barack Obama continued the tradition of sending a wreath to the Confederate monument in Arlington National Cemetery. But Trump has gone out of his way to affirm his desire to preserve monuments to the Confederacy. Nor is Trump alone in this. In the Virginia gubernatorial race, Republican nominee Ed Gillespie has played up his commitment to defend confederate statues, even cutting a TV ad saying “the statues should stay.” Trump tweeted in support of this sentiment: