The War over America’s Past Is Really about Its Future
In an effort to scrub American History of anything that is not considered politically correct by today's snowflake brigade, the leftists are systematically destroying our nation's foundation and collective memory. The leftist narrative states that America is a racist, no-good, misogynist, paternalistic, capitalist wasteland founded by crooks and scoundrels. Instead, the leftists offer Americans the hope of a new socialist utopia. In destroying our past, the leftists are dooming America to repeating the mistakes of previous socialist/totalitarian "utopias" that are now on the trash heap of history. It was George Santayana (1863-1952), who stated, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."Victor Davis Hanson takes aim at the atrocities being committed by leftists revisionists:
In their radical progressive view — shared by billionaires from Silicon Valley, recent immigrants, and the new Democratic party — America was flawed, perhaps fatally, at its origins. Things have not gotten much better in the country’s subsequent 243 years, nor will they get any better — at least not until America as we know it is dismantled and replaced by a new nation predicated on race, class, and gender identity-politics agendas.In this view, an “okay” America is no better than other countries. As Barack Obama once bluntly put it, America is exceptional only in relative terms, given that citizens of Greece and the United Kingdom believe that their own countries are just as exceptional. In other words, there is no absolute standard by which to judge a nation’s excellence.About half the country disagrees. It insists that America’s sins, past and present, are those of mankind. But only in America were human failings constantly critiqued and addressed.America does not have be perfect to be good. As the world’s wealthiest democracy, it certainly has given people from all over the world greater security and affluence than any other nation in history — with the largest economy, largest military, greatest energy production, and most top-ranked universities in the world.The traditionalists see American history as a unique effort to overcome human weakness, bias, and sin. That effort is unmatched by other cultures and nations, and it explains why millions of foreign nationals swarm into the United States, both legally and illegally.These arguments over our past are really over the present — and especially the future.If progressives and socialists can at last convince the American public that their country was always hopelessly flawed, they can gain power to remake it based on their own interests. These elites see Americans not as unique individuals but as race, class, and gender collectives, with shared grievances from the past that must be paid out in the present and the future.We’ve seen something like this fight before, in 1861 — and it didn’t end well.