On Memory

In the 1983 Broadway musical "Cats," written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Trevor Nunn - and based on a work by T.S. Eliot - one of the iconic songs, "Memory," sung by Elaine Paige, contains this line, "Memory, all alone in the moonlight. I can dream of the old days, life was beautiful then. I remember, the time I knew what happiness was. Let the memory live again."

Memory is a funny thing. Chances are, many people still remember clearly what President Trump said in 2017, after violent clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia between white supremacists rallying around a statue of Robert E. Lee, and left-leaning counter protesters, who sought its removal. At a news conference on August 15, 2017, Trump said, "You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides." Almost three years on, anyone who tries to deny that Trump is a racist is apt to have those words flung back in their face.

We recall those remarks, but most of us have slowly forgotten what else Trump said, although it was almost as controversial at the time: "So this week it's Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really have to ask yourself, where does it stop?"

This came in for much derision. In Washington Post, Princeton historian David Bell declared that the distinction between slavery-defending Vice President John C. Calhoun and George Washington is "not difficult to make." Jim Grossman, executive director of American Historical Association, called the attempt to equate Confederates with Founding Fathers "absurd" and "unacceptable for the president of the United States," while Douglas Blackmon of University of Virginia said, "the most kind explanation of that can only be ignorance, and I don't say that to insult the president."

Three years later...can it be? Trump looks prescient and his critics perhaps a touch naive. The iconoclasts, having largely defeated the rebel army, are turning on the Founding Fathers. It was supposed to be trivially easy to articulate those distinctions, yet I have not seen a flurry of commentary from historians eager to educate the protesters as they schooled Trump.

Even George Washington University, whose very name constitutes an endorsement of our first president, seems to have quietly removed a bust of Washington for safekeeping after it was toppled from its pedestal, rather than loudly condemn an attack on the father of our country.

In private, many of my friends say that Washington should stay. They do not play down the moral catastrophe of his slave ownership, but they weigh that, as Bell advised three years ago, "against his role as a heroic commander in chief, as an immensely popular political leader who resisted the temptation to become anything more than a republican chief executive, and who brought the country together around the new Constitution." And they conclude that Washington deserves to stay in the canon of our country's heroes - deeply flawed, as most heroes are, but still worthy of admiration for the good he did.

They would just prefer not to say it out loud.

Trump is no great moral theorist, but he does have a certain cunning about human behavior, enough, possibly to foresee that the Great Statucide would proceed by what conservative writer Rod Dreher has dubbed "The Law of Merited Impossibility": Conservatives warning about the dire consequences of some social change are dismissed as hysterical cranks - and then, when exactly what they predicted eventually comes to pass, denounced as bigots for opposing the new order. Implicit in Dreher's law is an intermediate phase in which a large number of people sit uncomfortably silent as the radicals take the moderate majority's well-intentioned efforts further than they ever dreamed. Especially as the statue removal goes beyond Civil War heroes to those representing everything from Colonial expansionism to the very founders of our republic.

In Colorado Springs, there is a statue of the town's founder in a very prominent intersection downtown - despite the fact that he, too, was a slave-holding general of the Civil War - that has remained unscathed during the entire debate. Kind of shows where political loyalties lie, I suppose, especially in a town famous for its connection to the Ku Klux Klan.

It is also easy to forget that Mount Rushmore was once a sacred mountain to Native tribes, who view the monument as theft by the United States government. I am not arguing for the removal of Mount Rushmore, by any means, or even the destruction of the Lincoln Memorial or the Washington Monument. I believe we should honor their memory.

What Trump understood - and his critics perhaps did not - was that you cannot credibly declare that some revolution in social affairs has a stopping point unless you personally commit to stopping it when it goes too far. It is not enough to say that very clear distinctions can be drawn between the father of our country and the traitor who led a rebel army in defense of slavocracy. When the moment arrives, you have to actually draw them.

If you do not, you will cede issue after issue to the radicals. And if you make these tacit concessions again and again and again, then, however privately you may rue it, you will nonetheless end up with something very different from your idealistic vision. Something that looks like...well, like the Republicans who quietly ceded their party and their conscience to Trump, one outrage at a time.