The Cancel Culture
In the new Cancel Culture, the progressives continually attempt to cancel our basic American culture of personal freedom, equality under the law, and free market capitalism in favor of big government authoritarian elitism. It is not just the icons and symbols (think destruction and tearing down of long standing statues) of our American heritage that they are out to destroy, but the very principles and practices of American Exceptionalism. This includes the concept that power and rights come from the people, not from a top-down regulatory government run by a permanent class of establishment bureaucrats and officials. But this is not anything new. The left has been wiping out the heritages of “we the people” for generations as a matter of standard operating procedure. It has been done in the name of political correctness and identity politics – two of the most threatening philosophies to our cultural.
According to the Democratic Party’s philosophies of political correctness and identity politics, there are only two meaningful demographic groups in America today – people of color and white people. And, according to the left, they are engaged in an existing (or as they like to say these days – existential) battle for cultural superiority. The left provokes a politically concocted racial battle between alleged white privilege juxtaposed to a perception of pandemic minority victimization.
Columnist Walter Williams wondered, “I would like someone to explain how tearing down statues of Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson and Confederate generals help the black cause. Destruction of symbols of American history might help relieve the frustrations of all those white college students and their professors frustrated by the 2016 election of President Donald Trump. Problems black people face give white leftists cover for their anti-American agenda.” As Victor Davis Hanson wrote, “Destroying history will not make you feel good about the present. Studying and learning from it might.”
In fact, despite what the liberal media would have you believe, many African Americans have bitterly fought the narrative that Blacks are eternally constrained by the attitudes and structures of racism. Black History Month usually marks an occasion when African Americans celebrate the many victories they have achieved during their struggle for equality, the genius of Black leaders, artists, statesman and scholars. It has become a celebration of Black excellence not of Black subjugation.
But tracing all of America’s institutions back to slavery misses that mark. Slaves being brought to American shores, and settlers fighting wars of expansion against Native American groups, are almost beside the point. Neither slavery nor conquest are unique to the American experiment. Indeed, those practices existed on the African continent; the very place from where slaves arrived. And slavery was present among the indigenous people of America as well. What sets America apart, what makes it a unique place among the community of nations, is certain ideals incorporated into a framework of laws and freedoms centered around the fact that the individual has much greater importance than the state.
To be sure, a major fault in the formation of the new American state was the conflicting institution of slavery. But, even at the time, slavery was considered deeply problematic among America’s founders. They fully recognized that slavery was incompatible with the ideals of freedom, but they understood that unifying the colonies in opposition to the British monarchy necessitated a compromise on slavery, which was, by that time, a central part of the economies of the five southernmost colonies. If not for that compromise we would have possibly never had the exceptional nation that eventually allowed all Americans equality. Thus, viewing the catalyst of America’s foundational ideals as solely a product of slavery lacks any historical perspective.
Notably, nowhere in the American Constitution is slavery endorsed as a fundamental right or ideal.
Benjamin Franklin thought that slavery was “an atrocious debasement of human nature” and “a source of serious evils.” John Adams, a lifelong opponent of slavery, declared it a “foul contagion in the human character” and “an evil of colossal magnitude.” James Madison called it “the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.”
Less than a century after our nation’s founding, Americans threw off the wretched institution at the cost of much blood and treasure. More than 100,000 Union soldiers died in a war to free the slaves and unify the country. Freedom, then, was no mere afterthought, but an earnestly sought ideal shared by Whites and Blacks alike.