8/24/2017 - Victor Davis Hanson Townhall.com
Much of the country has
demanded the elimination of references to, and images of, people of the past --
from Christopher Columbus to Robert E. Lee -- who do not meet our evolving
standards of probity.
In some cases, such
damnation may be understandable if done calmly and peacefully -- and
democratically, by a majority vote of elected representatives.
Few probably wish to
see a statue in a public park honoring Confederate general Nathan Bedford
Forrest, one of the founding members of the Ku Klux Klan, or Supreme Court
Justice Roger B. Taney, who wrote the majority opinion in the racist Dred Scott
decision that set the stage for the Civil War four years later.
But cleansing the past
is a dangerous business. The wide liberal search for more enemies of the past
may soon take progressives down hypocritical pathways they would prefer not to
walk.
In the present climate
of auditing the past, it is inevitable that Margaret Sanger's Planned
Parenthood will have to be disassociated from its founder. Sanger was an
unapologetic racist and eugenicist who pushed abortion to reduce the non-white
population.
Should we ask that Ruth
Bader Ginsburg resign from the Supreme Court? Even with the benefit of
21st-century moral sensitivity, Ginsburg still managed to echo Sanger in a
racist reference to abortion ("growth in populations that we don't want to
have too many of").
Why did we ever mint a
Susan B. Anthony dollar? The progressive suffragist once said, "I will cut
off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the
Negro and not the woman."
Liberal icon and
Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren pushed for the internment of
Japanese-Americans during World War II while he was California's attorney
general.
President Woodrow
Wilson ensured that the Armed Forces were not integrated. He also segregated
civil service agencies. Why, then, does Princeton University still cling to its
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs? To honor a
progressive who did a great deal of harm to African-American causes?
Wilson's progressive
racism, dressed up in pseudo-scientific theories, was perhaps more pernicious
than that of the old tribal racists of the South, given that it was not
regionally centered and was professed to be fact-based and ecumenical, with the
power of the presidency behind it.
In the current logic,
Klan membership certainly should be a disqualifier of public commemoration. Why
are there public buildings and roads still dedicated to the late Democratic
Senator Robert Byrd, former "exalted cyclops" of his local Klan
affiliate, who reportedly never shook his disgusting lifelong habit of using
the N-word?
Why is 20th century
Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, once a Klansman, still honored as a
progressive hero?
So, what are the proper
rules of exemption for progressives when waging war against the dead?
Do they tally up the
dead's good and bad behaviors to see if someone makes the 51 percent "good
progressive" cutoff that exempts him? Or do some reactionary sins cancel
out all the progressive good -- at least in the eyes of self-styled moral
superiors to those hapless Neanderthals who came before us?
Are the supposedly
oppressed exempt from charges of oppression?
Farm-labor icon Cesar
Chavez once sent union thugs to the border to physically bar U.S. entry to
undocumented Mexican immigrants, whom he derided as "wetbacks" in a
fashion that would today surely earn Chavez progressive ostracism as a
xenophobe.
Kendrick Lamar, one of
the favorite rappers of former President Barack Obama, had an album cover
featuring a presumably dead white judge with both of his eyes X'd out, surrounded
by black men celebrating on the White House lawn. Should such a divisive
racialist have been honored with a White House invitation?
What is the ultimate
purpose of progressives condemning the past?
Does toppling the
statue of a Confederate general -- without a referendum or a majority vote of
an elected council -- improve racial relations? Does renaming a bridge or
building reduce unemployment in the inner city?
Do progressives have
their own logical set of selective rules and extenuating circumstances that
damn or exempt particular historical figures? If so, what are they?
Does selectively
warring against the illiberal past make us feel better about doing something
symbolic when we cannot do something substantive? Or is it a sign of raw power
and ego when activists force authorities to cave to their threats and remove
images and names in the dead of night?
Does damning the dead
send a flashy signal of our superior virtue?
And will toppling
statues and erasing names only cease when modern progressives are forced to
blot out the memories of racist progressive heroes?
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