The error some of you 'defenders of democracy' are making is that once a decision is made sometimes it cannot be undone, in spite of the will of the people. We had something similar with "one-room" school houses here in Nebraska a number of years ago. The Unicameral, in their all-knowing representative status, decided to pass a law that allowed those schools be to taken over by a closer K-12 district, which then could decide to close them and bring students into their existing facility. The population of the state overwhelmingly voted (I think it was in the mid 70%) it down on a ballot initiative in the next general election. Problem was the damage had already been done. That is why there need to be protections against decisions like this so a small group cannot exceed the will of the constituents.
Not an error at all. That's exactly the slippery slope of a a democratic republic and freedom we were talking about. There will always be a counter cost to allowing forms of freedom and democratic input. Just like there's a cost of allowing non-democratic processes, it cuts both ways and like anything it's pretty much impossible to have a perfect balance though we try to get closer to it all the time.
The non-democratic or less democratic processes in our systems (national, state, or local) are in fact established through our democratic republic processes. That's the freedom of the US system. We allow a lot of localities to determine the things they want via the process they want.
This means Madison can have a process where their democratic representatives have control over a cemetery monument while other places like
@John Winn is talking about might have total control via a commission (obviously that total control was established at some point through the democratic representation and could in fact be reversed with enough support via the specifics of the context).
Madison didn't feel the need to put this same protection in. That's the same as how States within the Union have the rights and power to do things differently according to their own cultures and evolved processes. I mean that's States rights and then even further locality rights.
At one point slavery was a States right, each State had the right to make it illegal but the federal government couldn't. We decided (with much strife) that we though this wasn't a right a State or locality should have, that slavery should be regarded the same everywhere, we went through the amendment process which required much support and did so.
Clearly many people in support of Confederate monuments are strong supporters of having such freedoms at the State and local level, arguably more than those on the other end. This is the cost of that freedom. Madison can in fact put in protections if they so choose, maybe they will now if a large enough of the population supports so. If they don't then clearly not enough people supported it or just don't care enough to do so. Likewise if you or others think every place in the Nation shouldn't have control over such local processes, that all monuments (or all monuments in cemeteries) require this extra process then you can push for national legislation to do so, or a collective set of State legislation to do so.
No one is saying that various democratic republic processes don't have downsides. They do. There always will be. As a Nation we chose more freedom for States and localities compared to many other forms of government (like a dictatorship) since we felt that cost and those downsides were better than the alternative downsides.
There is in fact a process in place for the people of Madison to change this and even in the case you refer to yes the damage might be done (though is not reversible), such a group might fix things for the future in that case. That's how all of this has always worked. Slavery and the damage it caused was a price we paid until we felt we needed to fix that and prevent it. Segegration is another example, preventing the women vote. So people have paid steeper costs for our freedoms than possibly losing a monument in a cemetery. Sorry not going to feel that much sympathy, I strongly feel the response should fit the scale of the problem. So yes though I think it should remain, if it's lost it's not that big of a deal and Madison could in fact still ensure something like that doesn't happen again (at least without fitting a process).
Now there's a flip side to all of this. If you make monuments harder to remove then you make them harder to remove. That means maybe a group in Georgia say gets enough support from a specific set of people to raise some Sherman statues, maybe some John Brown statues. Maybe a couple decades down the road the people in the locality change their views (or different people move in) and they want to get rid of it and those historical commissions say no. There's a flip side for moving a process further away from democratic input. It's always an imperfect balance, we all get it just fine. Some of us just express our opinions rathe than rally against the overall system or advocate those that don't like the process get the process changed.