"The wide liberal search for more enemies of the past may soon take progressives down hypocritical pathways they would prefer not to walk."

Victor Davis Hanson writes at Town Hall,

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.

...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?

...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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