Opinion | Why is the party with a strong chance of winning playing a reckless game with... - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...rong-its-politically-negligent
history monument American idea culture politics racism
shared by Javier E on 20 Jul 20
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In the United States, we don’t raise up statues as shrines to be worshiped, or as instruments of oppression.
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But the cultural left has a more declarative recasting of our history in mind, one that leaves no room for nuance. There’s lately been a movement, for instance, to tear down the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, which depicts Abraham Lincoln and a kneeling freed slave. At its unveiling ceremony in 1876, Frederick Douglass delivered one of the greatest and most nuanced speeches in American history.
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Memorials are sedimentary layers of the American bedrock, there to be excavated and reexamined by every succeeding generation.
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The presumptive Democratic nominee drew a wise distinction between statues of Confederate heroes who tried to destroy the Union, which should be removed from public plazas, and those of imperfect Americans who tried mightily to improve it.
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We tend to erect them as markers of our progress, reminders that even flawed men and women can leave the nation less flawed than they found it.
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If activists can’t acknowledge the intellectual perversion in going after statues of American statesmen, then they should at least consider the breathtaking political negligence.
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Carlson offered a preview of that strategy in his diatribe this week, when he vowed to “preserve our nation and our heritage and our culture” from leftists who think America is “horrible.” The preview was good enough that Trump himself promptly tweeted a link.
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If you’re the Democrats, why on earth would you go out of your way to make this cultural indictment seem even halfway plausible?